what I’m reading

Joel Dailey: New Details Emerge (New Books, 2023) The marriage of the quotidian with the unbelievable was never better done by anyone:

My awareness is expanding/ Does it make me look fat?

Jim Feast: Karl Marx, Private Eye, a novel (PM Press, 2023) Embedded in this Victorian noir like a razor blade in a Snickers bar is Karl Marx, PI dialectically activated to the task. Reminds us of Hegel in Queneau

John Kruth: Bed Crumbs (Jackalope Press, 1986), The Perfumed Firecracker (jackalope Press, 1988) Poems and stories fresh like a peach from a great musician:

MISS AMERICA: standing in line/at the supermarket/i noticed a herd of bison/grazing in your hair

Embodied Unconscious: the feminine space of sexuality, surrealism, and experimentation in literature, an anthology from the Naropa archive, Edited with an introduction by C.M.Chaddy (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023)

A rich compendium of lectures on female poets transcribed from the rich archives of Naropa University. Each lecture is introduced with an essay by a graduate scholar of this unique institution. Collected here are lectures on Mina Loy, Loraine Niedecker, Gertrude Stein and other poets, delivered in the 1980s and 90s by Joanne Kyger, Jane Augustine and other faculty. This is an interesting direction in the poetics of Naropa’s Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where the mainstream teaching is the Beat and New York School. Feminism and surrealism are natural allies of that mainstream, but it’s refreshing to see them accorded focused attention. The immense Naropa Archives will birth other important critical and creative perspectives in the future: stay tuned

Poesis International 31, 2023, edited by Claudiu Komartin. Romania’s foremost poetry magazine. Translations from Czeslaw Milosz and Aleksander Wat, poetry by upcoming lyric lions, essays on poetry by Radu Vancu and Ruxandra Cesereanu, and sophisticated notes and interviews about the international poetry scene. Worth learning Romanian for

Valery Oisteanu, Cât ai clipi din al treilea ochi, (Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2023) The renowned basso profundo of Lower East Side surrealism takes its depth charges to the language he was born in. With his own collages

Thich Nhat Hahn, no death, no fear (Riverhead Books) My friend Marie Cox gifts me books of poetry and wisdom now and then. This is one of them. I ask, “What’s up for me this week?” open to pg 61 and read: “Taking New Forms: When we lose someone we love, we should remember that the person has not become nothing. ‘Something’ cannot become ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing’ cannot become ‘something’ … matter cannot be destroyed — it can become energy.” Horrible oracle, hopefully wrong, but of course true. One of the things people you love become is guardian angels that zoom around your head to keep you moving. That’s the palliative “something.” Good for you. Then there is the “something” the missing become: that’s more H. Bosch, depending on what and how much you had to do with the missing “someone.” If your conscience is clear (i.e, you didn’t kill them) then they can be any “something” your better nature craves. But if you had even a smidgeon of responsibility for their missing, they grow a claw and a horn for every measure: a gram=one claw + horn, ten grams= claw + horn+ fur. For every added gram the “something” graduates its horror, it catches fire at one kg. Don’t mean to scare you, but it’s not all Hegel. Depends on how much you miss them, and how much you miss them depends on how much you did to make them go missing. Sophie’s Choice was Sophie’s, no matter how many nazis stood over her. She could have chosen to go missing herself, but then she’d have created two loved ones who missed her. That everyone will eventually go missing is no consolation to the “somethings” looking for what they were.

NB: I will check up later on these oracular readings to see how right or wrong they were

FOUND ON THE STEPS

Readers in my neighborhood put books they’ve read on the steps outside their homes to be taken by anyone interested — some of these books are so new they are still in their plastic wrappers, while others are swollen with marginalia (or rain and snow if weather is quicker than me.) I have built a separate shelf for the library I call FOUND ON THE STEPS, not because I want these books to live together in rejected (or philantropic) harmony, but because the majority of them are books I felt that I should have read at the time of their publication, but didn’t, and was thrilled when they disappeared from the news because then I didn’t have to read them. In other words, all the books on this shelf are an ongoing archive of my (slight) guilt at not having kept up with certain contemporary writers en vogue for the five minutes writers are allowed to be in vogue — these books are my repressed bon-ton obligation to keep up. This would be but a venal sin if the books on the steps were only new writing, but there are classics there too, in new translations or, worse, boxed old ones, like Oscar Wilde and Turgenev, who are the holes in my education that like holes in my shoes should never be seen by the beau monde. Picking free books off my neighbors’ steps is a furtive activity because of this field of hole-riddled ignorance: what if the ex-owners of these books are looking through a fold in their curtains at me, and gauge my level of cultural imposture in order to gloat at parties. “He’s a writer? He hasn’t even read Wilde? Not to speak of Karl Ove Knausgård!” Ok, then. This section, FOUND ON THE STEPS, is intended to survey books I picked up from your steps, my neighbors, briefly reviewed in retrospect, with mea culpas in the holes they are missing from, or self congratulatory notes to my holes for remaining correctly unfilled. There is nothing random and little escapes foresight. You force me to be au courant in the past, and I will try to see if I was right not to read them. The books themselves are either from the aforementioned shelf or from future plunder

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Vintage, 1968) Quote from Freud: “The command to sleep in hypnosis means nothing more nor less than order to withdraw all interest from the world and to concentrate it upon the person of the hypnotist” (pg 122) Freud is relevant in the age of Trump and dictators employing the screens that are their eyes. Written at a time when dictators didn’t have the myriad of eyes they have now (to gaze into their subjects) this is one for Ziggy. How about Norman? “Intercourse is what goes on in the sentence. In every sentence the word ‘is’ is the copula, the penis or the bridge; in every sentence magically, with a word, making the two one flesh.” Oh, Norman O. Brown, you dick! What word in the sentence is the vagina? One dick a two does not make. I was right not to read you then. Freud 1, Brown 0.