Congratulations to Heather McHugh on her ‘Genius’ grant!

Heather McHugh first published her poetry in BR in our April 1986 issue. In that first poem, The Night, she explores the dependent relationships of language and proffers a paradox.

Just think of it,
and you surround it with

its opposite. Take here
and now, for instance. Do we see

a line where there is none? We draw
up sides, forgetting how

in cells, division
made things whole. To me

I’m complete,
but I’m partial to you.

Here, McHugh’s form compliments her content, as when she aptly uses a comma and enjambment to divide the line “in cells, division/made things whole.” The surprising confluence of these divisive words into a coherent union is juxtaposed with the breakdown of the “complete” self into a Read the rest of this entry »

Boston Review: now worth 50 points!

BR recently got a shout-out from poet Steven D. Schroeder of St. Louis on his blog, Sturgeon’s Law.

Schroeder has decided that the best way to stay optimistic about the poetry business is

to regard it as a big game

and has set up a preliminary scoring system so that poets can keep track of “who’s winning.”

Apparently, winning the Discovery/Boston Review prize is worth 50 points!

That score puts us on par with The National Poetry Series, with getting a book published by a major university press or respected independent press, with inclusion in a Norton anthology or Best American Poetry, with having a poem published in The New Yorker, and with getting tenure as a professor in a top-tier program.

Thanks for the love, Steve. Good luck in the po-biz.

P.S. If you’re interested in getting those 50 points for yourself, make sure to late a look at the guidelines for the Discovery/Boston Review poetry contest – the deadline is January 15, 2010. Also, definitely check out last year’s winning poems:

• Briget Lowe’s “The Wild Boy of Aveyron Stands Up During a Dinner Arranged by the Doctor”
• Jynne Dilling Martin’s “Repercussions of the Current Import/Export Ratio”
• Jeffrey Schultz’s “J. Steals from the Rich and Uses the Money to Get Drunk Again”
• Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo’s “Bright Burial”

Sophie Robinson, a, and Francesca Woodman

Sophie Robinson
a, 70 pp.
Les Figues Press, 2009
Los Angeles

In Sophie Robinson’s a, the newest book out from Les Figues Press (a young press based in Los Angeles), she includes a small note taken out of the notebook of the young photographer, Francesca Woodman:

I wish Stein was here to shake me and kiss me.

I note the reference to Woodman because, in the past ten years, there has been an upsurge of interest in Woodman’s work (initiated with the 1986 retrospective at Hunter College, curated by Rosalind Krauss and Ann Gabhart). Woodman, for those unfamiliar with her work, was a prodigy who passed away before she was twenty-three.

She studied photography in high school, went to RISD to continue her work; her photos almost always focus on the body, as she often used her own as the subject of her photos. Her black, white images are luminously surreal, and she was nicknamed the “magician” for her uncanny use of lighting (even more remarkable because she did not have programs like Photoshop to retool images). Almost every one of her images blurs boundaries between body and environment, and there are rarely photos where individuals can clearly be identified (the face is usually distorted, hidden, or masked. In that sense, her intimate photographs emphasize a collective female identity through one body, rather than focusing on a particular person/identity/name).

At the age of twenty-two, Woodman committed suicide by jumping out of the window of her loft in New York. We then have the troubling legacy of her death to deal with when we view her images, this hyperbolic romanticism we attach to someone — and someone with so much talent –  who passes away well before her time.

In Robinson’s a, then, the inclusion of Woodman’s note (appropriately, if the poet is influenced by Woodman, Woodman shows her creative tie to the great American modernist poet, Gertrude Stein) is understandable within the framework of Robinson’s project. The book is dedicated to  “Aerin Davidson, 1985-2007. . . . XXX,” a young woman who, like Woodman, died when she was twenty-two. Robinson’s dedication also instructs one to read the book as a broken elegy, a collection of fragmented sentences and words, collages, expressing how one might try to express grief and pain verbally, without trivializing experiences that are, in the end, perhaps impossible to articulate in language.

None of Woodman’s photographs appear in the book. The photographs and collages in the collection (a is a multimedia book) are by Ken Elrich, the artist and writer based in Los Angeles. The single reference to Woodman is the short epigraph that introduces the third part of the book, “Disorder” (as well as in the introduction by Caroline Bergvall), which is enough for the reader to recall the hyperbolic romance surrounding the tragedy of Woodman’s death, within a book that was written in the/as an aftermath of a friend’s death.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the reference to Woodman, because in some ways, the short reference does so much work, and acts as a problematic parallel.  Even if the epigraph is short, and part of a‘s larger collaging efforts, the Woodman reference evokes a public’s/viewer’s voyeuristic romanticism of an artist’s early death, and then associates that public voyeurism with a more private experience of death.

The inclusion of Woodman’s epigraph feels relevant, but it also makes me squirmish. It’s like writing an essay about personal grief – an experience that is so difficult to verbally express – then connecting that grief with a reference to another writer, artist whose death (or more specifically, suicide) has been scrutinized under the public eye. Diane Arbus, Sylvia Plath. Despite good intentions, the parallel feels askewed, even, misused.

But is this more telling of what an elegy does, is? That is, why do we poets write elegies?  It’s not for the person who has passed. It’s the writer’s experience with grief that’s being rendered to an audience, and that personal grief – once it becomes expressed through an aesthetic project — becomes separate and distinct from the person to whom the elegy is addressing.

With a, I understand the intentions, the relevance, even the “inspiration” (for lack of a better word) created by Woodman’s legacy and images. At the same time, something that might be urgently important during the process of writing might need to be re-approached differently by the writer when rendering it into the published product.

Nicole Brossard’s FENCES IN BREATHING

Coach House Books, 2009. 114 pp.
ISBN 9781552452134

Translation by Susanne de Lotbinire-Harwood

*

A poetry-break-post!

*

Initally published as La Capture du sombre by Lemeac Editeur, 2007

*

There are several worthwhile topics to discuss in Brossard’s newest from Coach House, Fences in Breathing. There are the real-life social implications to the imaginary war that ends the novella, the importance of pleasure (Jennifer Moxley described pleasure as “the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard’s poetry”), and the associations between language, body, and desire. Yet it is the idea of translation that most fascinates me when thinking about Fences, as well as Brossard’s other works.

In an introduction to one of her readings, Charles Bernstein acknowledged that Brossard was the only native French-speaking poet anthologized in On The Other Side of the Century, a well-known poetry anthology put out by Sun & Moon Press (now Green Integer), and that perhaps the reason for the inclusion of Brossard’s poems was because her works seem to “flourish in English.”

In taking a look at her publications as listed by EPC (SUNY Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center), all of Brossard’s initial publications were published in French. Less than half of the listed publications have been translated into English, and most of the English translations are of her novels, not of her poetry. And unlike many poets and fiction writers, Brossard has not consistently worked with one translator. This raises interesting questions for any reader of Brossard’s work: how does each translation/translator render Brossard’s work differently? If there’s consistency of language in each translation of her works (which is rarely true of translations of an author’s works by different translators), does Brossard’s French (as implied by Bernstein) somehow lead to more “successful” English translations?

Translation plays a role in the novella, not only because the book is a literal translation, but as subject matter. Anne, the main character, is a writer who chooses to render her novel in a “language other than [her] own,” which for Anne is “[a] way of avoiding short circuits in [her] mother tongue.” Translation conflates body as language, where one — language or the physical body — represents the other, so when Brossard writes about a “[s]tory of words,” these typographical bodies are associated with “salt,” “origin,” and “delights.”

Interestingly, Brossard’s associations between translation, language, and body recall the works of other French (or French-speaking) writers/authors. In their works, Jacques Derrida and Abdelkebir Khatibi often conflate the physical body for the typographical letter. For both Derrida and Khatibi, translation equals destruction, which also equals transformation. This state of destruction/transformation/translation occurs on the “tongue” (i.e. one’s sense of being through language and speech), as well as the physical body.

What I admire most about Fences in Breathing it that although it is easy (and right) to read the text as “fiction theory” (which is how Brossard once described her work), theoretical interests in language are expressed through simple, elegant language. One has a strong visual reaction to the text: throughout my reading, I could actually visualize a loose version of a film being created from the language of the book. A prime example of Brossard’s skilled interweaving of language experimentation and description is expressed in the following passage, which describes the work space of Charlie, one of the minor characters in the novella:

He says tools but somebody will mention the cutting edges of things and will see billhook, scythe, fauchard, debris, wood chips and sketches all entangled like words in summertime, when crickets and corn, lives and vines, sunflowers and stormy hours touch and quench one another.

This passage is a simple statement that expresses the relativity of language, language as definition and sign. At the same time, the passage strays away from being merely a cerebral, dry exercise: a definition flourishes; a tool does not remain just a tool, but becomes a “billhook, scythe, fauchard, debris… .” As the passage expands, these objects become entangled with the smell of “woodchips” and sounds of “crickets” and “stormy hours.” There are bursts of colors, the “vines” and “sunflowers.” So much can be remembered from Fences that is concrete, vivid, and visual, so that this “fiction theory” also translates as accessible images.

My own, somewhat unrealistic conclusion is that as a fan of Fences in Breathing, the best way to read and understand the novella is to read both the French and de Lotbinire-Harwood’s English translation. In a sense, reading both the original and its English translation may be the most thorough way in understanding Brossard’s feverish explorations with language. Like Anne, I might conclude with the thought where by reading, struggling with the text in a language that I am not as readily familiar with, I will somehow “find a solution to the questions of meaning that do not come up in my language.”

*

Walcott v. Padel: Media Coverage of the Oxford Poetry Professer Saga

By now most of our readers will have come across one or another story about the controversy surrounding this year’s election of the Oxford professor of poetry. One of the top picks for the prestigious award, Derek Walcott, withdrew his name from the running after Oxford academics were bombarded with e-mails about Walcott’s alleged sexual harassment of students. Walcott had been favored to win the award, but after he stepped out of the running, the honor was given to Ruth Padel, the first woman to ever receive it. Within a matter of days, though, news outlets were reporting that Padel herself had been involved in the campaign to spread the word about the allegations against Walcott; though she disavowed involvement in the campaign to notify Oxford academics, Padel admitted that she had tipped off two journalists to the matter over e-mail. She has since resigned as Oxford professor of poetry.

Most of the media coverage has focused on Padel’s actions, and on whether the two e-mails she sent to journalists notifying them of accusations against Walcott constituted reason for her to step down from the position. Reading articles in The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and the Times Online, what sticks out to me is a question unasked by any of the major news outlets covering this story: should the allegations against Walcott have factored into the committee’s decision-making process, and, if so, was there reason for Padel to suspect that without her action the committee might not take those charges into account?
Read the rest of this entry »