Jorie Graham, Sea Change

Ariel: Full fadom fiue thy Father lies,
Of his bones are Corrall made:
Those are pearles that were his eies,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich, & strange:
Sea-Nimphs hourly ring his knell.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest (First Folio, from Project Gutenberg)

Pulitzer Prize-winner. Successor to Seamus Heaney at Harvard. Regarded as hermetic, even mantic, Jorie Graham is a difficult poet to review. Investigating the "sea-change" of global ecological devastation (resulting, in turn, from "sea-changed" carbon) and the political sea-change after 9/11 in the US, Graham speaks with a voice of quiet assurance and devastating (literally, laying waste to vistas in her incredible feel for detail) observation that - echoing Shakespeare and the Psalms (and, in its cadences, the New York Times) - has an almost devotional quality. It's a difficult poetry to answer back. It's a poetry that pushes itself further through the repeated gesture of "& how," an exploratory -- even axcavatory -- development that draws the reader deeper into the mysteries.

Graham creates chinks in the poems with her frequent tactic of an assertion followed by "no", yet these confound the reader into further dumb awe y enhancing -- even staging -- her control of specificity. I found myself writing out phrases and stanzas in a rapture (not easy considering the intense length of her lines -- so long that Carcanet had to produce an unusually square book to accommodate them), reading poems three or four times, sometimes backwards. Some -- particularly in the middle section -- are legible and lovely lyrics about ageing, seasons, and intimacy. But the breadth and density of her poetry is like that of the oceans. Rather than leading me to coherence, to an essay, her poetry makes me want to revel in it, to swim and dive and splash.

So here are some watermarks from my reading -- partial and scattered. I imagine reading this book again and again -- and feel almost shy of asserting to cohesive a reading. I want to hold onto the white space that striates the pages.

How does Graham's book concern itself with The Tempest? It's poetry as oceanography. It pairs the sea and death, counterpointing the constancy of death with the sea's mutability. It's concerned with the magic of making -- especially the late magic of Prospero's final speech -- and "this inch of finishing." But Prospero is also "the torturer" (and the poet Ariel) in "This," which speaks of "the sound of / servants not being / set free". And the torturer is Bush -- especially in the extraordinarily angry "Guantánamo" and in the spine-tingling "Full Fathom":

those were houses that are his eyes— those were lives that

are his

eyes—those are families those are privacies, those are details—those are reparation

agreements, summary

judgements, those are multiplications

on the face of the earth that are—those are the forests, the coal seams, the

carbon sinks that are his—

as they turn into carbon sources—his—

. Those "eyes" are also Graham's interrogation of the lyric I (and the personal I that is attacked, and dismantled, by torture), equalled by her savage and direct invocation of Bush, the torturer, as "you" in "Guantánamo."

Sea Change recognises very directly, in the stretch and elasticity of its long-line poetics, that Guantánamo, climate change and the credit crunch come from the same monolithic (and monotheistic) neo-conservative mindset. "Futures" and "Loan" use the poetic economy of repetition to essay/assay the way in which the "this / message 'I'", money and water all depend on circulation (and are eroded by exploitation). The book is predicated on a moment of crisis that is personal (ageing), political (the US' loss of credibility under Bush), ecological -- and linguistic, concerned with the redaction and devaluation of language under the Bush government and in the era of texting. Sample from "Futures":

I your speck tremble remembering money

where "speck" suggests "speculation" -- the act of imagination itself reduced to mean monetary mind-games -- and further to a mote in the eye/I that produces the tears that flow through the poem:

wind which the eye loves so deeply it
would spill itself out and liquefy
to pay for it

"Just Before" torques speculation further (or in reverse) to present a speculative poetry: "a pool. Of / stillness" opens out into a science-fiction in which

... there was no standing army anywhere,
& the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all
the cities of
what was then
just planet earth
were lifted up out of their sleeping
bags, & they walked
away, & the sensation of empire blew off the link
like pollen—just like that

The words are short, simple, plangent but the vision they offer is expansive, utterly original. This is science fiction that is "far from un- / earthly, it was full of earth." Immanence is one of the big themes of the book, delinking the maker from any grand Maker. And on the subject of making, Graham is constantly pressing and examining the act of writing and the status of poetic language.

In "Loan," thinking about how poetry uses the world, she writes: "all this taking is not our taking", asserting that poetry is exactly the work of circulation, of giving and returning, rather than keeping (or more, accruing) meaning. Similarly, "Loan" reminds us that

irrigation returns only as history, a thing made of text,
& yet, listen,
there was
rain, then the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness
of brimming,

Despite the long lines and the many vocabularies, this is a poetry that seems to aspire towards something beyond words, or at least beyond their accumulative nature and economics of meaning. In "Day Off", Graham foresees

the day of
days, where all you have named is finally shunted aside, the whole material man-
ifestation of so-called definitions, imagine
that, the path of least resistance wherein I grab onto the immaterial and christen it
thus and thus &
something over our shoulders says it is good, yes, go on, go on, and we did.

There's the echo of Molly Bloom's soliloquy and of Beckett in that final line that takes up the play on "day of/f judgement" to suggest an ending as release from meaning rather than entry into it.

That turn is encoded from the first poem of the book "Sea Change," which exhibits two of the recurring tropes in the book: Graham's hyphenation of and caesura on "in-" and her exact use of the ampersand. The former allows her to invent words such as "in-clingings" and query words such as "in- / dispensable," asking what the inwardness -- or inversion -- of each might be, and how internality and refusal/reversal might be related. The ampersand is curioser, littering the page like a Celtic loveknot, at once less and more than the word "and": it opens up the word that links "rich and strange" to suggest we might, culturally, delink them. It asks us to sea-change its knotted notation into and out of language.

Abi Curtis, Unexpected Weather

Abi Curtis' debut collection, Unexpected Weather, sounds like a quintessentially British divertissement, opening as it does with "Lady Jane Grey" and closing with a "Bean." But Curtis gets wryly and slyly to the Gothic heart of the English country house/garden, revealing its passionate heart and eccentric imagination, particularly in several poems about English inventors such as George Gabriel Stokes.

Stokes is one of several figures who stand at the edge of cliffs (see also "Poem at the Edge of a Cliff") both literally and metaphorically looking across the chasm that separates Britain from the rest of the world. Curtis' poems are often avowedly archipelagic, looking with a loving eye at the flora and fauna (especially the lovely "Mole") of the British Isles, but they also explore -- and expand beyond -- the seductions of our island mentality. "I was a gwailo," begins "Hong Kong", a prose poem dense with the shock of encountering the textures of another island ("the rot of blue eggs boiled behind doorways" gives you a sense of her command of alliteration and rhythmic patterning) that Curtis weaves into a history of empire -- or rather empires, with the island as a fault-line between the tectonic shifts of British and Chinese history.

"Hong Kong" is also a love poem, an account of an intimate meeting (encoded in its dedication, "For Simon") and love is the book's most consistent unexpected weather. While only the first few poems are explicitly I/you lyrics that intimate a confessional voice, they create a prevailing atmosphere skying over a terrain created by the meeting of two people, the shifting and uncertain borderland of love somewhere between one and two. This unexpected weather leaks into the love poems, shifting easy presumptions about the confessional voice, especially as the reader encounters skillful dramatic monologues that expand the whether of the confessional first person.

The most striking group of monologues, spread across the book, concerns circus performance ("Trapeze Artist", "Lion-Tamer", "Bareback Rider"), tales of daring feats, of balance and violence, that curiously echo the circusification of pop music on the one hand, and the Gothicisation of circus (I'm thinking Cirque du Soleil and post) on the other. Family entertainment turns bloody in the lion-tamer's "ache to be reopened" by the lion and the bareback rider "picturing how a simple slip / might be enough to free us." The poem subtly invokes not only the sexual connotations of barebacking, but the reasons for its transition to sexual slang.

Horses, like moles and beans, become desiring strangers rather than comforting signifiers of Englishness: like the lover -- or the Wizard behind the curtain in "Oz" -- these are figures that become stranger to read the closer we get to them, "ignis fatuus" (to take one of Curtis' section titles) that misleads us through familiarity and -- like the unexpected weather that scuppers Antonio's ship at the start of The Tempest -- brings us out somewhere rich and strange.

Claire Crowther, The Clockwork Gift

Maybe it's something about getting sucked into watching Wimbledon -- the way the regular thwack-and-forth of the ball somehow eats up the minutes and hours, the way that Centre Court acts like a giant sundial with that L-shaped shadow eating up the late afternoon -- but I want to write tonight about time as (a) present in Claire Crowther's The Clockwork Gift.

Not one to maunder about wearing a purple hat, Crowther turns a weather eye on women and ageing in her second collection. In poems that are at once metronomic in their deft rhythms and syncopated in their tripwire vocabulary and image-making, Crowther presents a paradoxical vision of the clockwork gift: that the passage of time brings with it both repetition and entropy, with seasonal cyclicity as the balance between.

The poems bloom not with polite garden flowers, but ruins, rust and inflorescence -- all treated lovingly, disinterestedly, rather than as an Iain Sinclair-esque baroque of disintegration. The book's various careful, and often witty, approaches to age remind me of Agnès Varda's wonderful documentary about what's thrown away and the people who retrieve it, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse. The lucite clock without hands that Varda keeps on her mantelpiece, and which she cuts to after a shot of her ageing hands, might stand as talisman for Crowther's recovery of the discarded, the way that she sets decay back into the natural cycle.



That's a radical move against our current cultural fear and exclusion of that which ages. She finds in age exactly the glow produced by late blooming, the fire of energies that have been banked and are flaring up. Of her grandmother she writes:

She would have been in her element, arc-lit

in gold water, being filmed on stage
reading poems about sun, flanked by flowers,
her face a gleam of all her profiles projected
at once...

No skull but a newly-coined queen.

That which is devalued is "newly-coined" in a luminous account of memory and inheritance. It's a triumphant conclusion to the poem "The Herebefore," a title that suggests some of Crowther's subtle play with time, memory and age as cultural -- and specifically narrative -- constructions. This is most acute in a startling central sequence, "St. Anne's Apocrypha" that brings St. Anne and St. Joachim into the twenty-first century, with Joachim coaching a team of elementary particles and Mary having acupuncture, hinting at contemporary tales of older mothers conceiving by IVF and (in Joachim's Kaons and Pions) the scientific redefinition of the miraculous.

More playfully but equally astute, "Unexpected Goal" finds "St George / overlooking a grey-haired woman striker playing / with a boy among bikes left where they fell, mid-roar." The overlooked (in its dual sense) among the abandoned, the striker and the roaring -- it's a juxtaposition that gets at the uncanny fear and fascination of another game invoked in "Street Football," that of Grandmother Wolf. Crowther is and isn't the wolf in grandmother's clothing: hungry for language and its scenes, she essays an appetitive poetry that is inspiring in its openness, its generosity in giving time -- and its effects -- to the reader.

Lisa Jarnot, Ring of Fire

or... I wish we all could be California girls.

Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles: the sun-cities of the sea-edge recur through Lisa Jarnot's collection Ring of Fire, her first full-length collection to be published in the UK (although it contains a suite of poems, Heliopolis, that appeared as a chapbook from the late-lamented rem press). Jarnot was born in Buffalo, experimental poetry capital of the East, and the East/West tension between avant-gardes (as weather systems, and vice versa) plays lightly through her book.

Heliopolis includes a) a poem called "Suddenly, Last Summer," which turns the sunny-side down in its invocation of the 1959 movie (Elizabeth Taylor's finest moment?) and b) a poem called "O Razorback Clams" dedicated to Daniel Kane, author of the new book We Saw the Light, which concludes with a conversation between Jarnot and New York-based filmmaker Jennifer Reeves, in whose film The Time We Killed starred Jarnot as an agoraphobic lesbian erotic writer.

Kane's book is a conversational history of the (all-male) connections between avant-garde poetry and film in 1950s and 1960s America, and the Reeves/Jarnot conversation seems to underscore his argument about the radical interconnections between the Beat scene and the New York underground -- but it also detourns it and queers it: not only are they the only women featured in the book, but the only pair who actually made a film together. I'd like to write more about the conversation they have, but I can't get the e-book copy Iowa sent me to download. So it's all speculation based on my hallucinatory memories of the wonderful The Time We Killed.

It's interesting that Jarnot and Reeves combined forces in NY given that film's sear(ch)ing light appears as part of the Californication of Jarnot's poetry: its desiring, devouring brightness. Hers is, after all, a book about things on fire (particularly cars: the American dream goes up in smoke spectacularly in "What In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?"). But then the Reeves/Jarnot New York is neo-noir, a chiaroscuoro (high) contrast to the helter-skelter heliopolis of Ring of Fire's "specific incendiaries of springtime." There are foreshadows in "The Bridge" and "The Specific Incendiaries..." of Reeves' most recent film, When It Was Blue, which shares with Jarnot's poems a paratactic approach to the catalogue and a situated take on the lyric.

"The Bridge" positions the lyric voice as both conditional and as a logic problem -- "that I write about myself" -- the grammatical (and rhetorical) construction requiring a completion that never comes. The "I" is a thesis for which there is evidence, both eyewitness and anecdotal -- the speaker of the poem, prefiguring Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours, is Thucydides -- not a fact. Similarly, the poet's position (job?) is rung through its changes in "Tell Me Poem," where the narrative imperative is transfigured: this is an impulse that reappears in "Autobiography," where the poem first proposes a sexual algebra, then geological parallels, and finally an anti-lyric moment.

One of the poems (why can't I remember which or refind the resonance?) in "The Book of Providence" reminded me of Maya Deren's iconic avant-garde film Meshes of the Afternoon, with its shifting scale of the intimate and the tectonic. Deren, the quintessential New York avant-gardist, made her most significant films in Los Angeles; Jarnot returns from her Californian dreamscape to New York (as marker of distance and strangeness: "terrific, living / on the Hudson, inside the months of spring, an / underwater crossing for the cows in dreams") in "Poem Beginning with a Line by Frank Lima" -- which in its turn has become an animated short film:

Three Poets: Esther Raab, Denise Levertov, Larissa Miller

And what connects them? Of different generations and divergent experiences, all three are, by descent, Russian Jews (although Levertov was raised Christian, something that inflects her recent work increasingly overwhelmingly).

In grouping together three poets linked only by their choice of lyric poetry and their ethnic background (claimed or dis-), I could essay a naïve comparison that would get entangled in issues of "national", gendered and Jewish voice. Instead, I imagine the three poets as alters created as a single historical life (that of the Russian Jewish woman in the twentieth century) took its different diasporic turns: to Palestine, to England and then America, and staying put through Communism and glasnost. Loosely, I imagine the three poets I'm annotating here as split-off personas along the line of the multiple protagonist of Sherri S. Tepper's novel The Margarets. As an advocate of diaspora, a believer in syncretic, nomadic formations, I present the poets in chronological order of their birth, which also appears to reverse the supposed narrative of that 20th century Jew: rather than going from Russia to Europe/the US to Israel, I work backwards from aliyah to Russia, asking how the poets' lyric attention to landscape, to memory and to voice is involved - deliberately or not - with larger political questions of home and land.

Esther Raab is canonised as the first "native-born" Israeli woman poet. Living in Palestine, Egypt and Israel between 1894 and 1981, her long writing life is entwined with -- and contributed to -- Israel's mythopoeic "birth of a nation" narrative. As her translator Harold Schimmel writes in his introduction to Thistles, the Selected Poems published by Peter Cole's very fine Ibis Editions, in Raab's work "Topography of the land becomes a human topography. The one merges into the other." All well and good, perhaps, if you are Emily Dickinson (one of Raab's major influences) in the United States (and not so innocent then, as Janet Holmes' The ms of my kin shows so eerily in its erasive take on Dickinson's Civil War-era poems) -- but harder to maintain as apolitical in Israel. Schimmel hints that Raab became an increasingly hardline Zionist as time went on, but it's hard not to hear the construction of a nationalist ideology through lyric tropes even in her early work:

"My heart, homeland, is with your dews,
at night on fields of bramble,
and to the cypress' scent, and moist thistle,
I will extend a hidden wing."

The poem argues that its speaker will "move forever" -- it's hard not to hear, and has moved forever -- over the land, which is minutely described in terms of its flora but as (if) uninhabited. In this, Raab comes close(r) to the American pioneer poets who wrote Manifest Destiny over the landscapes of Turtle Island, erasing the humanscapes. When figures do appear, they are Orientalism-as-background-colour/threat, as in "Return," where Cairo is onomatopoeically presented as "Tarbooshes, tarbooshes / Berbers, blacks, / beat, tarrarum, trilli!" like the drums in the dark of colonial horrors such as I Walked With a Zombie. The final poem in the book, "A Landscape Not of this Place," written only days before her death, imagines: "Me and him - just / the two of us - and a world entirely empty." Of course it's unfair to ask poetry for a two-state solution (is it?) but such an imagining, even as a dream of the edge of death, strikes a deeply wrong note in me. It's hard (again, for me) to take Raab's "concealed hand extended: / mercy of tender bindweed", when the bindweed is "dangling by a thread on the fence" that marks out the colonisation of Palestine. These poems, in their minute attention to flora, have a myopia that Dickinson's work never falls into, and -- when they speak of eternity and other imagined places -- an imprecision by which Akhmatova (another key influence) is never seduced.

I was sad to discover that Levertov, a poet whose 1950s and 1960s work I discovered as a teenager in crumbling second-hand American editions, has also fallen into imprecision. Her work, for me, always combined a crispness of observation with a limitlessness of vision, a Blakean ability to step from the leaf to eternity. But A Door in the Hive / Evening Train, the first of her work to be published in the UK by Bloodaxe, slides into sententiousness that her orotund yet accessible diction cannot carry over, or through. I'm still in love with her "o" sounds (in the patterning, for example, of "I had lost you long before, and mourned you, / and put you away like a folded cloth / put away in a drawer. But today I woke" in "To R.D., March 4th 1988", where the varied "o" do the work of mourning) but her need to elongate inelegantly, to explain it to the back row McKee-style is onerous. In A Door the sententiousness is partially attributable to her choice of model: Rilke, perhaps the modern master of the Blakean aevum, its lift and awful majesty. It's not because it's her childhood Essex that "For Instance"'s "gleam of East Anglian light" seems not to equate to the poem's closing line "Erde, du liebe...", not the place that's pedestrian but the insistence on exposition. Her forms lack Rilke's musicality, even when she styles a poem as psalm, threnody or chorus: and she cannot quite conjure the inner-yet-impersonal speakers of these modes.

Perhaps it's such a lack of sense of the reader/writer relationship as continuum or community (located in the exclusivity of Christian prayer?) that informs her lack of trust in the reader's intelligence. Yet the poems' frequent conclusory dying falls seem odd, given her modulation and management of complex syntactical and narrative structures to open the poems. She is utterly, wonderfully confident at directing the reader's eye and ear as in the opening deflections and returns of "A Sound":

An unexplained sound, today,
in the early sunlight
and no wing stirring the leaves,
of something breathing
surrounds the house

. "A Sound" is part of the finest group of poems in the double collection, Part III of "A Door," which also includes the Dickinsonian "Complicity," with its complex Penelopeian doing and undoing of visibility. These lovely poems, with their focused attention on the remarkable paradoxes of the natural world, culminate (for me) in "Flying High" in which Levertov contrasts herself with the "Cloud poets, metaphysicians, essayists, / fabulists of the troposphere": it's true that she's earthier, and unfazed by air travel's optical illusions, but she still gives in to a conjuration -- in the final line -- of "epic epiphanies." Likewise, "The Life of Art" steps from the brilliantly-conjured edgy "borderland" of impasto

striate, gleaming - swathes and windrows
of carnal paint -
or, canvas barely stained

to the flabby suggestion that "one almost sees / what lies beyond the window, past the frame, beyond..." Could there be anything lazier than that ellipsis directing the reader towards a vague, homogenous horizon? For me, this is where Levertov's idealistic politics fall down: despite (and even in) her choral ode on behalf of the murdered of El Salvador, she seems to lack trust in the agency of her readers (and subjects). She tells rather than shows, closing the poem out to ambiguity and readerly effort. It's a didactic practice, one that suggests a less liberal politics (or classically nanny-state liberal politics) informs her activism for social justice. This direction culminates in poem titles such as "Witnessing from Afar the New Escalation of Savage Power." Maybe I'm of a generation that codes all its grand récits in layers of irony, but I want something more thought-provoking, less easy, than "the world's raw gash" (from "Witnessing").

Larissa Miller's Guests of Eternity was a punt, based on a review in the Guardian (rare, as I find British newspaper reviews of poetry to be a lot like lassooing clouds, and don't make reading decisions based on a puff of air) and a lot of respect for Arc. I hadn't come across their Visible Poets translation project previously, and I'm looking forward to discovering further contemporary poets through their facing-page editions. From the dedication to Arseny Tarkovsky (poet father of the better-known filmmaker), I was intrigued by the edition's ability to set Miller in an historical and aesthetic context (with an excellent introduction by Sasha Dugdale) while creating while space in which her plangent, alert poems can be read (more space would be even better: two poems per page can get rather crowded). Her poems are mouth-sized, thought-sized, a poem that could be carried (and honed) through a working, surveilled day to be noted down on a scrap, a flyleaf. Mostly untitled, with rare epigraphs from the span of world literature (with an emphasis on outsiders from Villon to Lewis Carroll), Miller's poems have a humility that is also a breathtaking confidence in their own precision. Setting out a narrow remit for herself -- "And instead of grace - a hint at grace" -- she leaps "even over the abyss."

Like Raab's, Miller's work is enriched by the language of the psalms -- grasses and shepherds, cliffs and reeds -- but, contrastingly, they are lifted out of a landscape (the landscape of Canaan) into a soulscape that shimmers with the tropes of fairy-tales and folk songs ("the smile of the mother / blossoms over the light cradle") that work in specific contrast to nationalist ideologies. By reclaiming at once the varied and mighty landscapes of Mother Russia, and the idealised Soviet myth of motherhood, Miller's seemingly timeless poems have a gently astringent effect on the monumentality of sanctioned Soviet art. At once modest and ironic -- "What do you pay to stay here" one poem asks, answering "'It's all for free... / whatever you give it will always be too little'" -- her poetry immerses itself in the personal not as an antidote to the political, but as a remaking of it back to the scale of the individual who is at once part of a community (not a nation, not a schoolroom):

Where are you from?
Like everybody from Mama,
from darkness, from the old drama,
from happiness shared with disaster

Dugdale notes in her introduction that Miller's poetry is particularly rich and flexible in its use of rhyme ("Each backstreet," notes her most explicit poetics statement of a poem, prefaced by an epigraph from Mandelstam, "is full / of the torment of the soul and yearning / for feminine and masculine rhymes"), and Richard McKane's translation never forces English, relatively impoverished in full rhyme, to echo the Russian. The singsong effect of Mama/drama fits with the riddling nature of the poem. Such gestures of discrepancy do make the translation "visible" as the series hopes, inculcating -- for me -- a curiosity about the relationship of form and prosody in Russian. It made perfect, intuitive sense when I discovered that Miller's website has a lovely page where you can listen to delicate musical settings of her five of her more recent poems: her work has something of the anonymous folk song as expression of collectivity, with its invocations of elemental constants in conversation with human emotion and history. She has the lyricist's gift of great and immediate precision combined with universality: in "English Lesson" the "English verb in the infinitive" is "bored and thirsts for transformation." That is what Miller brings to the units of poetry - words, tropes, rhymes, phrases, relations - through her humble eye and sense of presentness. As a guest of eternity, she hangs by small words onto now, not preserving it or mourning it, but setting it in motion:

I teach the word that is flying,
and the tenses, that eternally confuse past and future.

Elizabeth Treadwell, wardolly

or, when is poetry like a doll like a war?

Elizabeth Treadwell's fifth full-length collection, wardolly (chax, 2008), comes on like the Ritalin-addicted younger sister of Juliana Spahr's thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs. "Very unfair, lady butchery —" might be Treadwell's response to that -- and indeed, the poems defy easy quotation and analysis. Engaged with the randomness of information in the hyper-density of contemporary media and urban space, her poetry takes a buffalo stance amped up by femme-inist electroclash ("A Thousand Virgins Shout Fuck Off" -- note to Christina Aguilera/Le Tigre: this is the first single for your album!).

It's doll-poetry the way Hans Bellmer's work is doll-art - twisted deep play with the structures of bodies, minds and sentences that undoes, by doing, the fucked-up twists of the military-political complex. Dolls, like poems, are miniaturisations, representations perfectly rendered, at once sweet and sinister (that extra -y on wardolly recalling Nabokov's economic Lolly as well as the dolly used to move the cameras now embedded with troops). Dolls are not your brother's war toys, GI Joe excepted -- frilly and pink, Treadwell's dollies are unashamedly female, laying out la ville in haphazard urban blazons wherein Central Park is seen (critically) as New York's "Hooch." Her flanerie, with its disavowals ("she did not know the parts of the city") and coinages ("witcharms from the wastelands", both from "Mars & Orchard") suggest Abigail Child cutting-up Frank O'Hara.

Like Bellmer, Treadwell is fascinated by parts and what hinges them together/takes them apart. Rather than the conjunctive and conservative forces of traditional lyric and narrative, Treadwell takes up urban connections: using lists and indices, the poems in Vespers are at once the phone book and Lombroso's criminal catalogues. But there are no hierarchies here, and no moral judgements: in her generative language of the mundane and the surreal, Treadwell undoes the eugenics of description by which lyric values one moment, object or word over another. The city and the list fall over each other as sites of repetition and the uncanny in "(The city of horror)", a terrifying illustration of the capitalist war machine's reductio ad absurdum; the titular parentheses at once suggest the aversion of eyes and our compulsion to look as the phrase is repeated ten times, at the start of ten lines.

That determination to look - and look widely, with the fixed and seemingly flat eyes of the wardolly - acts to re-mean "Animation" as life-force, not corporate product: this is poetry that wants "more than gritty blobs." That liveliness is underlined by a poem that isn't a poem, the "Notes to several of the poems," which collates and recalls quotations from across the text. Elisabeth of Schonau, Anita Loos, Kim TallBear, Francoise Barret-Ducrocq, Aphra Behn, Etel Adnan, Eileen Myles, Camille Roy, Gertrude Stein and others join the doll army Treadwell is marshalling.

The Tethers, Carrie Etter

Over the next few weeks, I'm planning to write something (not reviews per se, but reading notes, ditherings, connections, fascinating facts) about some of the magnificent poetry that has accumulated in Delirium's Library, including a pile of Just One Book books from the Save Salt campaign. After reading (and proofing) lots of prose non-fiction, it's amazing to be reading poetry again -- like climbing a glacier! Difficult sometimes, but the view (and the delicious fresh air) is so worth it.

First up is actually the newest, bought only last night at its London launch: Carrie Etter's The Tethers (Seren, 2009). With its teasing and tangential glimpses of London, it was the perfect read for the Tube-stricken bus ride home. Etter's poems - short, dense, unfurling - remind me of Virginia Woolf's love of the crystalline and curious moment in which we catch ourselves thinking (and feeling) ourselves into being. Familiar objects, locations, shades of sky act exactly as "tethers" for the speaker, in poems that often drift upwards like a crane shot -- as in "Crowd of One," from the cracked egg to the ceiling.

"Over the Thames," one of my favourite poems from Etter's reading set, is precisely about this mood of suspension (which can hover, as in Woolf, over a crowd and create minutely- and generously-observed social comedy, as in "The Review" and "Indian Summer"):

there is no universal
for what keeps us aloft, but O
I cherish it.

Cherishing in turn buttresses the suspended eye as it takes in everything. In its attentive and wily work with language, such cherishing also creates the details that "tether" the (this) reader, poetic interpellations that are partial and blushingly private: words like "Cassandraic" ("Citizenship"); the reference to Hungerford Bridge (my favourite Thames crossing) in the wonderfully Roni Horn-esque "Collecting the Ridges" (no accident: Horn's Thames photo series collects poetic "ridges" from Eliot, Conrad, Poe, Dickinson and others).

Despite the book's titular reference to rooting and binding, these poems are full of water and its flux: not only the Thames, but the paper boats of "The Daughters of Prospero." In remarking the constancy of water, Etter overturns Catullus' cliché: that the words of women should be written on water, because both are untethered and trustless. Like "Millais' Ophelia" (another fine observational poem), Etter knows the weight of water, its bound composition. In "The Bonds", where the poem's title resonates through multiple discourses from chemistry to "the -ologies of more elusive chemistries", water reflects back history's constancy in mutability, coded through language's adaptable clarity, words like water's surface revealing hidden treasures in their depths. Findings rich and strange arrive with each re-reading.

The Winter Vault

In a sense, this is a DL book because it has been imaginatively on my shelf since I finished Fugitive Pieces -- I have imagined it each time I re-read Michaels' earlier work. Its presence became more anxious when I saw a sung performance of her libretto for The Passion of Lavinia Andronicus, which made me feel ill in its replication of violence against women as high art. Anyway, I'd much rather be writing about why orphans have become the hot new thing in film and fiction (more on that soon): for now, my review of Winter Vault because I have to get it off my chest and I'm sick of listening to all the simpering about how wonderful the book is because it dares to tackle important topics using poetic language.

*

@Caroline McElwee mentions her commonplace book when reviewing this novel: I have to say that The Winter Vault read like a commonplace book to me: beautifully turned phrases (and some that are gramatically opaque: why does Michaels have such a problem using parts of the verb 'to be') are beautiful to the exclusion of all else. Often, I felt that the narrative had been shaped to hinge around these insights rather than their emerging from the characters.

I have nothing against aphoristic fiction, but I feel that this patina of linguistic elegance detracts from the moral seriousness that the novel wishes to convey in its catalogue of displacements: in fact, these aphorisms are one more displacement, in this case for action, relation, engagement, life. The characters are languid indeed: almost doll-like in their perverse unreeling of memories, spoken in highly stylised paragraphs.

Sorry: amendment. The male characters. Michaels appears to have taken as fact John Berger's bizarre and essentialist belief that women function ONLY to salve men's wounds by being receptive (or receptacles). Women are the wound, for Berger, and this openness makes them the healing ear/cunt that men need. Which is absolute bullshit -- and as the narrative principle in The Winter Vault, it's not only false but squeamishly so. I started to wonder if Jean's mother had died to get away from the endless drone of her husband's voice -- which pursues her even in her grave. By the end I was so sick of the sound of the Avery's and Lucjan's voices I wished they would disappear instead of all the people whose disappearances they mourn (yet do nothing about).

Ah yes: the disappeared. Michaels writes with statistical precision about the displacement of Nubians from the area that is now covered by Lake Nasser, and the similar removal of villages along the St. Lawrence Seaway. She writes with more emotive drama about the emptying of Warsaw, which echoes material in Fugitive Pieces. Perhaps it's that she's on less confident ground with the material in the first section, but it is frequently distributed in paragraphs with no narrative anchor - no voice or point-of-view implied or stated - and so feels like chunks of regurgitated textbook. Like the aphorisms, it lacks roots in the characters.

I wonder if this is because the author is, in some way, aware that her chosen displacements are themselves narrative displacements, choices that (struggle to) conceal two other historical mass movements and destructions beneath them: in the case of the Nubians, I constantly felt the (unaddressed) echo of the Nakba at the other end of the Nile; in the case of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the much more massive and total displacement of the areas' First Nations, whom Michaels mentions in a glancing aside.

She asserts that they were themselves interlopers of recent vintage, having walked across the landbridge twenty thousand years ago (disproved by far older fossil records discovered recently) -- as if that makes the colonial displacement and genocide more acceptable, making way for a) the sentimental apprehension of the villages that are washed away, few of which could be more than 100 years old and b) the all-too-familiar gesture by which the white settlers become "indigenous" (doubled by the parallel of the Nubians and the white Canadians) and holders of native knowledge, perpetrated through Jean's collection of her mother's seeds.

I did feel in two minds about this novel for a while, partially out of loyalty to Michaels' earlier work -- I have read Fugitive Pieces and The Weight of Oranges many, many times -- and partially out of a respect and hunger for serious, eloquent, involved and attentive writing. But the torch has passed: while Michaels was almost alone as an Ondaatje female impersonator in 1997, we now have writers of the calibre of Kamila Shamsie, whose recent Burnt Shadows makes as explicit use of The English Patient as Michaels made of In the Skin of a Lion in Fugitive Pieces. Moreover, Shamsie critiques the ethical violence of Ondaatje's poetic style when she extends the story beyond the suspended ending of The English Patient to imagine that which Ondaatje leaves out (marriage, childbirth, postcolonial life, dailiness, the present, women as actual characters) in his fastidious ellipses and allusive phrasemaking.

Loyalty, as Jean discovers, is not enough: you listen and listen and the speaker kicks you out when he's used you up. It's too extreme to say that I feel dispossessed by The Winter Vault, because I doubted it could reach the heights - the exactness, the incendiary images, the perceptive characters - of Fugitive Pieces. Without those qualities, this is collection of beautiful words: a vault of dried seeds with no ground to stand on.

Sensitive Modernism, Part II (sort of): Lost Girls

in which I don't really talk about modernism, but do continue to talk about girl heroines -- not least because I'm re-reading Jane Eyre.

Which is not my favourite Charlotte Brontë novel. Like Adrienne Rich, I love Villette, and I've recently started to wonder if that's because it's set in a school -- and also features far less romantic swooning. My favourite bit of Jane Eyre covers Jane's early years at Lowood and I'm always strangely disappointed when they're over and it's off to Thornfield. Villette is the school novel plus (or ne plus ultra), because the heroine, Lucy Snowe, is young enough to be a student (almost) and yet has the independence of being a teacher (sort of). It's hovery and liminal and all about how learning to write essays in German makes you sexy.

Which is not to say that academic smarts are the only kind of good I look for in a feisty protagonist. Lucy's brains are combined with a wily and resilient ability to stand up for herself while appearing meek and mild: in the end, like the Mounties, she (almost) gets her man, and - more importantly to me - certainly gets a room of her own. She's also, unusually for the female protagonist of a Victorian novel, a traveller, even if she only gets as far as Brussels.

That wildness and mobility is rarely given to female protagonists before the twentieth century, and even now in books, girls tend to stay at home while boys roam; in fact, all five books on this year's Carnegie list are about wandering lads. That's why I was so struck by three YA books that I read recently: Siobhan O'Dowd's gorgeous Solace of the Road (reviewed by Bookwitch), The Beguilers by Kate Thompson, and Celia Rees' gripping The Stone Testament.

Last first: I picked up The Stone Testament because I was charmed and compelled by Rees' previous novels - Witch, Sorceress and The Wish House - for their bold protagonists whose voices remain etched on my mind. The Stone Testament is different because it has multiple protagonists (sometimes inhabiting different personae) whose voices criss-cross, which is something that I generally enjoy in a novel -- but I felt lost here, not least because I missed the strength and credibility that the single narrator gave to her earlier books (OK, Sorceress has two, but one is a frame narrative and the other a continuation from Witch, so it seems more balanced and coherent).

That's one of the strengths of Kate Thompson's writing as well, and I liked Rilka, the defiantly different heroine of The Beguilers. The pre-technological culture that Thompson imagines reminded me of Ursula Le Guin's current Annals of the Western Shore series and of Lois Lowry's Giver trilogy: it is deceptively attractive in its simplicity, but socially rigid. So Rilka, who knows her own mind and doesn't fit in, would win the sympathy of any reader even if she didn't set herself an impossible task. The gorgeous fable-like feel of the story gets a bit lost in detail when Rilka's quest reaches its climax, and the ending seemed pretty short shrift to me -- perhaps if the idea had been able to expand into a series, like Lowry's or Le Guin's, its emotional richness could have been played out. And I would have returned to hear more of Rilka's voice as she addressed herself to solving problems by looking from the outside in.

Rees' young protagonists are in the same position, and I did like them exactly for their wits. They were rebels with a cause; Rees cleverly shows how Kris's street smarts -- his knowledge of how to navigate his estate both socially and geographically, for example -- become essential in saving the world. Like Will in His Dark Materials, Adam, Zillah and Kris are all young people with experience beyond their years, gained from lives that seem like fictional inventions but represent the experiences of thousands of adolescents: all of them have lost their parents, all of them navigate dangerous worlds where no-one cares for them. Kris and Zillah have both lived on the streets; Zillah has survived a war in another country and become an illegal immigrant in the UK. These are lives that fascinate me, and I felt that Zillah's story was lost amidst the epic world-saveage.

Not so Holly Hogan's in Solace of the Road. Holly -- who becomes Solace when she puts on a wig stolen from her foster-mother -- is girl after J.T. Leroy's (or Kathy Acker's) heart, an adolescent Genet pickpocketing her way across England and Wales to catch the ferry home to Ireland. Possessed of an immense imagination and a skin so thick it's cracking, Holly is a magnificent creation whom O'Dowd coolly parallels with that other courageous orphan, Jane Eyre. Holly's reading the novel in school (well, when she goes to school) and doesn't think much of the wimpy heroine. Holly would have married Rochester for the money, and never would have left her jewels on the train. But the further she travels, the more like Jane she becomes.

Holly also crosses paths with Pullman's Lyra Silvertongue; like Lyra, Holly spends her day in Oxford visiting a museum (which, she concludes, is full of dead things) and at the cinema, as well as lying and charming her way around the city. She is as much out of the world of colleges and students as Lyra is out of place amidst the hot dogs and buses. Like Lyra, she finds that lying extravagantly about her parents and her past carries her a long way on her quest -- but only so far. When facing death (like Lyra in The Amber Spyglass), she finds the courage to tell the truth from her heart, and is released.

There's a delicate and fascinating conversation going on between Solace and HDM (Oxford is also where David Fickling, editor to both Pullman and O'Dowd, has his office), about fantasy and reality, but also fantasy and realism. Like Lyra, Holly finds that God exists only in people -- but her journey is entirely in the world as we know it. Or rather: the world that she lives in, of foster homes and care-babes, is one that we might read about in the newspaper and tut-tut over, but most readers are more likely to visit Svalbard than come into contact with it. So it's equally distant, and yet it's right here. Holly Hogan doesn't kill God, or catch a Beguiler or save the world; she doesn't even marry Mr. Rochester. She just gets her own shit together. It's as hard as all the other tasks combined, and it's exciting and page-turning in the telling. She's a classic Lost Girl, a wanderer and speaker in tongues, a ducker and diver, a thinker and thriver.

It's unbearably sad that there will be no more tales of Holly Horgan: not because the novel's a stand-alone, but because of Siobhan O'Dowd's untimely death in 2007. As well as being a compassionate, resilient and intelligent writer, she brought these qualities to her work with English PEN, particularly as founder of the Readers and Writers programme, which reaches out to readers in every corner of society -- bringing Jane Eyre to today's Lost Girls and listening to the stories they have to tell in return.

Sensitive Modernism

Frost in May by Antonia White, Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien, Saraband by Eliot Bliss (a nom-de-plume; although oddly it's the "Eliot" that's adopted, not the Bliss) ... Forgotten Modernist classics (all republished by Virago) connected by teenage girls' hearts aflame with Catholic school and lesbian desire. But these are no L-Word meets the Chalet School. Along with novels by Elizabeth Bowen and Rose Macaulay (especially the wonderful The World My Wilderness), these novels approach adolescent girls' desire in a totally unique way.

While James Joyce's heady Portrait of Stephen Dedalus' becoming is widely-read and highly regarded, these novels fell out of favour despite being popular (incredibly so, in the cases of Frost and Bowen) when originally published. It's the old double standard, of course, where an account of masculinity is supposedly of universal interest, whereas an account of femininity has limited itself to a niche.

But these books offer an incredible portrait of what could be called sensitivity or sensibility, something finer, harder, clearer, rangier, fierier, more elemental than the word "sentimental" with which Suzanne Clark tags them. "Sentimental" suggests heaving bosoms and fluttering hankies, a show of attentuated emotion (it's hard to really cry when you're wearing a corset) that conforms to the "angel in the house." The young women in these novels are defiantly unsentimental; they look balefully on their mothers, resist all attempts at femininity like dresses or good behaviour, and have little time for young men. They are artists, musicians, writers, all caught in a moment of potential.

White, O'Brien and Bliss all use the sensations of listening to classical music (a space where the sacred and profane edge into each other) to describe and analogise the flood of feeling each of their protagonists experiences as she comes to consciousness of herself -- in each case, through a nascent desire for a schoolfriend, slightly older, somewhat exotic (tempestuous Spanish girls in both Frost in May and O'Brien's Of Music and Splendour). Homoerotic desire, the rapture of music, and the sense of oneself as an artist are all bound up for these young women.

They are -- and are mocked by adults for being -- exquisitely sensitive. But that's what makes these books so wonderful, as descriptions of their own writers' deep and broad sensitivities to the world, both internal and external. The books are all-involving reading experiences, but also stilling. Unlike most contemporary fiction, they are not driven by incident, but rather feeling as an internal narrative pacing. Their language is sensuous but never indulgent, attuned to adolescent excess of sensation in each fresh encounter with the world. And their expressions of desire are deeply felt without being blunt. Through their layered evocations of the rarefied world of Catholic schooling, they catch the dense and infolded nature of first love, a secret that each protagonist can barely admit to herself -- even as she feels it suffusing her whole being.

Awkward and graceful, knowing and naive, investigative and inward, these are the first teenagers in the literary canon and - inarticulate and fiercely expressive -- they have so much to say to us about how desire enmeshes us not just with one person, but through that person with the sensate world.

Adrian Mitchell: A Bit of Heart

It's not much, what with Gaza and Zimbabwe and Darfur and every failing heart or mindless terror wherever it may be, but Jackie Ashley makes a brilliant case for the buoyant, enlarging, healing and ever-expanding effects of Adrian Mitchell's poetry in the Guardian today. Writing about the almost co-incident deaths of three leading lights of leftist writing -- Harold Pinter, Adrian Mitchell, and Bernard Crick -- she concludes:

in terms of spreading good values, getting people to laugh and feel angry for the right reasons, it may be that Mitchell mattered most. Across the country there are people who have been influenced by Mitchell's socialist, pacifist and kindly values. We have plenty of cleverness. We need a bit of heart.

Mitchell's work overspills even a broad definition of heart: generosity, romantic and erotic play, passion, sturdiness, the great beating engine (of rhyme or blood) that keeps things going, that speeds up with excitement. Like a heart, he worked tirelessly to give and to spread, to move the lifeblood of language and song around the body. But because

he was a street poet, and one who loved writing for children [...and h]is poems are full of fantasy and simplicity

he was never mentioned in the same breath as the Nobel Prize. But for the thousands of children whose early, or earliest, theatrical experience was a school trip to his fine version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (with its emphasis on generosity and co-operation), or the teenagers reached by "Puppies" or "The Killing Ground" whose thrum and precision make the link between boring old poetry read in school and soaring new lyrics heard on the radio, Mitchell is *in* their blood. He may not have had an adjective coined after his pauses, but his pacifist and passionate words are as deeply grooved into the British mind as the lyrics of the Beatles. We need him now. Bloodaxe -- a press that has never doubted the power of street poetry -- is publishing his last book next year, Tell Me Lies, with a "remix" of his famous "Tell Me Lies about Vietnam" as its title poem.


Adrian Mitchell from Neil Astley on Vimeo.

Music: Not So Much the Food of Love, as Fuel of History [i.m. Odetta]

Congratulations to Alex Ross, passionate blogger, and winner of the Guardian First Book Award (among other accolades) for The Rest Is Noise, a history of the twentieth century in music. Yes, not a history of twentieth-century music, but a vast landscape of (well, primarily Euro-American) history through the compositions, lives and thoughts of the many men (and, like, two women) who reinvented classical music and the way that we hear.

The book thumped into my hands from the postman in April, a birthday gift from a music-loving friend delayed by - unbelievably - Amazon being continuously out of stock. Classical music is one of my great lacunae (I mean, like a Great Lake-una) despite having studied with Linda Hutcheon, one of the foremost opera theorists. I'm a tone-deaf, word-loving, visually-stimulated fidget and really *listening* is not something that comes naturally to me. All the classical music that I know is directly attributable to its use in films: Pergolesi's Stabat Mater in Jésus de Montréal; Astor Piazzolla's tangos in The Tango Lesson; the Gymnopédies in just about everything.

So, I expected the book to be a huge challenge, although I'd enjoyed reading performance reviews on Ross' blog. But it was exhilarating (although time-consuming because I had to read the paragraphs about diminished eighths several times) -- I'm not sure how to hear some of the musical twiddles that he discusses so ably, but I have a strong sense of what they might mean, not only as bird-flipping to the history of music (and its stuffier critics), but as agonised or ecstatic autobiographical and/or political expression, especially in his painstaking study of Shostakovich's relationship to the Revolution.

What's so exciting about Ross' book -- and frankly, so Guardian-y -- is that he puts politics, and personal politics, back into music, with a particular emphasis on (and love for?) composers on the left (not the party, partisan Left), and with a subtextual thread running through the book about homosexuality and 20th century music, which he writes about most affectingly when discussing Benjamin Britten and John Cage (not together). It's not an all-out "queering" of modernist music, but there is a subtle argument (I think) about the suppression of identity, both personal and political, that canon-making demands.

It makes for great history as well: the sweeping chapter on music-making and the Alphabet Agencies, and about African-American composers before the war, left a deep impression on me (see my previous post about contemporaneous labour poet Genevieve Taggard), although Ross is clear about the project's ultimate failure. And the history of Weimar unfolded thrillingly differently when read through the swirling schools of competing German (and German-Jewish) composers. (Once the book hits the Cold War and its stochastic sounds, it lost its impact a little for me, although I enjoyed the description's of Cage at work).

Considering twentieth-century music demands something more than musicology, and Ross starts the book with the need to understand Wagner and his unique place in music and history, opening up the question of the ways in which music can shape national identity and can be used as propaganda (see above re: Shostakovich), but also an international language of exchange and co-operation.

And also protest: although Ross treats lightly the place of popular music in political and cultural history, (although he does end the book with a shout-out to Bjork), his account of the various musical agencies put together by FDR presages (and gives a historical context to) both Alan Lomax's work (which he does discuss, briefly) recording American folk, and the folk revival of the 60s and 70s, as music and the civil rights movement entwined. By a fluke of history, Ross' win co-incides with the death of a singer whose career exemplifies the undercurrent of music in American popular history, Odetta.

It's a shame that Ross didn't cast his net a little wider, into contexts where women musicians, and musicians of colour, were making the waves (although the success of recent books like Hand Me My Travellin' Shoes and In Search of the Blues, as well as PBS' series on the blues, suggests a burgeoning interest, and a refusal to let these histories disappear -- all three depend -- and thrive -- on oral history). The real threat of that loss is flagged up by a story in caustic style by today's Guardian diary:

More evidence of year zero at the BBC arises from discussions with Bewick Films, the Northumbrian independent, which saw significance in the 70th anniversary of Billie Holliday first singing the classic Strange Fruit, with its images of slavery, and the inauguration of America's first African American president. They suggested a documentary examining the role of the song in the civil rights struggle, which was considerable. Some believe it was a better anthem than "We Shall Overcome". Wasn't this, they said, a perfect idea for BBC4's musically themed Friday nights? Err, no, for "unfortunately the channel feels that there is insufficient appetite" for a Holliday documentary. Moreover, "His career is well served within the BBC archive." Still, for real fans, Billie's legacy endures. We miss him.

Blood on the leaves, blood at the roots: a history that need writing and writing again.

Which Side Are You On?

It's not often that you discover a poet right beneath your feet, but that's what happened to me in Berkeley. Given, it's more likely there given the Berkeley Poetry Walk just off Shattuck Avenue, the main street. It's an amazing thing to trip lightly over Sappho, Shakespeare, Ohlone songs, Ursula Le Guin, Ntozake Shange... and then, an unfamiliar name: Genevieve Taggard.

Born in Hawai'i and moving across the country from California to New York, Taggard's early twentieth century trajectory weirdly mirrors that of President-Elect Barack Obama. And as a poet who combined love lyrics and political shout-outs, she certainly would make provocative bedside reading for the world's next leader.

Taggard eschewed her missionary upbringing to join communes (this is in the 1920s, not the 1960s), walk picket lines and correspond with the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Her work appeared in small magazines and chapbooks that were produced by the leftist community, but was also published (and sold widely) by Knopf.

Although she's been recuperated as a labour poet, a maker of modern ballads like Florence Reece, who wrote the lyrics to Which Side Are You On? during the 1930s strike in Harlan County, Kentucky (you can see her sing the song during the 1970s strike documented by Barbara Kopple in Harlan County, USA), it's an early and ecstatic love poem, written while she lived in California, that shines up in gold letters from the Berkeley sidewalk. She takes her place among better-known radical poets of place like Jack Spicer, whose works encompass picket lines, chorus lines, die-ins, sexual ecstasies, detention camps, weatherboard houses, bookstores, the wind...

While in California, I read a lot (a lot!) of poetry, including celebrations of place, love and politics in C.S. Giscombe's mysterious and wonderful Prairie Style and Luci Tapahonso's lyrical unfolding of family and roots in Saaníi Dahataal/The Women Are Singing. But I also read Howard Zinn's A Power Governments Cannot Suppress and several Ursula K. Le Guin novels, and all this reading from the left made me wonder: where is the literary history of this thread in American literature (taking in Emma Goldman, Theodor Dreiser, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and others)? Where is the literary history of work and workers?

And while I wondered that, I thought: as publishers, film studios and record labels confront the internet era, a recession, and what seems like a dwindling appetite for diverse, serious culture, could community organising and the historical Alphabet Agencies point a way ahead -- and are there artists who would, like Taggard, take up the banner and link poetic lines to picket lines? Where are Grace Paley's street-corner heirs? Who will follow Dreiser, and join WalMart or hotel employees as they strike? And could Obama, deep in biographies of FDR, see a way to incorporate the energy of radical artists in his plans for change in America?

Bookwitch/Fantasy

A magical blog about children's books (chapter and picture) and fantasy literature -- all the posts have a sparkling sense of adventure, a deep love of reading, and a spirit of play. Essential reading in gloomy times!

The SF/fantasy shelf of Delirium's Library has received a good dust-off recently, as I decided to read my way through Ursula K. Le Guin, having revelled in Malafrena and Orsinian Tales, two of her less-known books. While travelling in the US (that most invented of all countries), I read the first three Hainish novels, collected in one volume as World of Exile and Illusion by Orb Books, as well as Fisherman of the Inland Sea (whose title story is one of the most haunting and resonant stories I have ever encountered). Any Hainish stories, which are about travelling across interstellar distances, are the perfect narrative and philosophical accompaniment to transcontinental jet lag!

I also read her odd YA novel called The Beginning Place, which I found secondhand at the incredible Moe's Books in Berkeley, which combines an eclectic range of new books with an astonishing secondhand SF section. _Worlds_ came from the equally amazing Borderlands, a live and kicking SF specialist store in the Mission in San Fran, where I discovered that Le Guin's incredible essay collection Dancing at the Edge of the World has been brought back into print by kick-ass Grove Press, who also revived a lot of Kathy Acker's novels.

I also enjoyed a long browse (and time with some feral kittens) at The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley, rediscovering writers whose worlds I'd inhabited vividly but whose names had slipped from the tip of my tongue, like Jane Yolen, O.R. Melling, Terry Windling, and James Tiptree Jr. (the balance on the 'to-be-read' shelves has been restored by the addition of Julie Phillps' necessary biography of Tiptree/Alice B. Sheldon, to whom I was introducted by Le Guin's series of essays on the 'is s/he, isn't s/he' question that are included in long o/o/p The Language of Night).

The very helpful clerk at Borderlands also introduced me to Emma Bull's _The War of the Oaks_, as I was on a quest to find urban fantasy/SF for a friend with a serious Stephanie Meyer addiction. The quest led me (back) to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, both of whom have been waving their gothic lace-gloved hands from the 'to-be-read' shelf. I'm excited about entering some lurid, graceful, sexy, dreamlike, bitter, funny imaginative worlds. Any further suggestions welcomed!

A Teapot on Pluto

Hyperlinked science fiction from the brilliant Julie Bertagna -- including the best chat-up line/excuse for being late you've ever heard.

Smoking the Bible

When Bobby Sands smokes a fag rolled in a page of Revelations in Steve McQueen's Camera d'Or-winning film Hunger, it's a profound and blackly humorous act, a gesture that compactly communicates a whole series of ideas about faith, religiosity, the Word, the body, hunger, narcosis, desire, addiction, pleasure... Such a telling gesture, original and pitch-perfect.

And then it cropped up again, in another film at the Toronto Film Festival: Maria Govan's Rain, a less austere film, but equally as much about bodies finding new configurations of pleasure and self-expression onscreen. Set and shot in Nassau, is no cultural tourist checklist of Bahamian culture - but the film wouldn't be complete without a sensi-smoking scene, here in the safe hands of Magdaline, who invites Rain to smoke up with her under an outrageous and beautiful painting of a black Jesus. Naturally, her skin of choice is Revelations.

Twice is a co-incidence. But thrice is a meme: today's Guardian Review helpfully (because the book sounds like laboured Fischer-by-numbers) reveals that a DJ-ing monkey with a sidearm rolls itself a Bible-skinned spliff.

Which makes me wonder, as Hickling writes of the monkey, is smoking the Bible now "a comic device that has so outlived its useful purpose you want to borrow [the monkey's] gun and shoot it"

Headline Poetry

I am loving this poetry blog from small and perfectly-formed poetry press Wave Books: check out PoetryPolitic, 50 American poets (showing how truly diverse an identity is encompassed by that national designation) offer thoughts, in poem form, through the 50 days leading up to the election. They are profound, personal, political, playful -- and available as downloadable MP3s, to be enjoyed and meditated on. Plato thought poets should stay out of his Republic (because they enchant readers/listeners with their attempts to encapsulate the ideal forms of things in words), while Shelley called poets "unacknowledged legislators." On this blog they are in neither camp (or both): deeply engaged with the intimate daily and earthy, and the myriad ways in which politics is interwoven into our dailiness and our dreams -- pointing up the ways that politics as practiced has come to neglect the personal (except where it interferes for religious reasons) and the real 'popular,' the concerns of the people. The same has been said of lyric poetry -- particularly the experimental stuff -- but these poems show different. More immediate than CNN's newstrack and more vibrant and resonant than the Huffington Post: these poems are news that stays news. Thanks to Susan Schultz for posting it on Facebook!

Ni Putes Ni Soumises Ni Sphinx: Arab Women Writers Speak Out

Today's Daily Star has a great article on women writers from the Middle East. Alice Fordham notes the "anglophone appetite of late for female authors from the Middle East," and investigates why that appetite tends to depictions of honour killings and repression, on the one hand, or what could be seen as updated versions of the Arabian Nights harem fantasy on the other. French junior minister Fadela Amara started a group for Arab and North African women in France, whose name aptly sums up the Orientalist imaginings these writers have to fight with: Ni Putes Ni Soumises: Neither Whores Nor Submissives.

To which, in a talk, Joumana Haddad added, neither veiled dancers nor Sphinxes. Surely part of the point about reading is to break down illusions and deeply-held beliefs, not have them confirmed (er, for me, anyway). But publishers have to do what sells - even poetry publishers, as Chris Hamilton-Emery writes in his Salt publishing blog - so it's repression or wild abandon.

The dubious infamy of Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh as a Saudi Sex and the City ignores the facts that a) it's a pretty clever email newsletter novel that's very deliberately playing games with identity and storytelling and b) under the shoes and cellphones froth is a pretty hardcore, depressing picture of double standards (across gender and class) in Saudi society. Alsanea disguises her pin-sharp analysis under a chick-lit dress -- you can't say that for Freya North.

But what's more depressing still (for readers) is that while Girls of Riyadh is available in every airport and megachain bookstore, where are the books by Naguib Mahfouz prizewinners like Nabila al-Zubair, Alia Mamdouh, or Hoda Barakat?

Perhaps the popularity of Alsanea's novel, and a growing interest in the region (even if it's the queasy Dubya 'feminism' that saw (as reported in Harper's) a group of Texan women airlift vibrators to Iraqi women after the 'liberation' -- it should be pointed out that it's supposedly illegal to purchase or own sex toys in Texas...) will lead English-language publishing to reflect the diversity of women's voices across the region -- and booksellers to take stock of what already available through presses like Saqi and the American University in Cairo Press.

Two new online initiatives are also designed to apprise English-language publishers and readers of the depth and diversity of publishing in the Middle East: the British Council has a focus on Arab literature this year, including the New Arab Books list. Most exciting is the English PEN Online Atlas, a handy world literature wiki-type site that is also focusing on Arabic-language writing at the outset. The site was soft-launched at the London Book Fair earlier this year, and there's already hundreds of books and authors listed, and not a houri or moustachioed sheikh in sight...

Good Medicine

Free stories online by leading Canadian Aboriginal authors at The Medicine Project -- including a brand-new story by the deliriously wonderful Richard Van Camp whose short stories Angel Wing Splash Pattern and novel The Lesser Blessed rocked my world one hot, sweaty Toronto summer. So enjoy the free taster at the Medicine Project...

Representative Poetry

Hats off to the Library of Congress for selecting Kay Ryan as the next Poet Laureate. Not only is she a spare, elegant poet in these wordy times, but she is also a) female and b) an out lesbian.

No such luck here in the UK, where Carol Ann Duffy was mooted as Poet Laureate in 1998, but cast aside due to the unsavoury fact of her high profile lesbian relationship with another writer. Articles earlier this year (no, I can't be bothered to dig them out) implied that she might be in the running post-Motion, now that the relationship is over.

It's not often these days that the US pulls ahead of the UK in terms of rights & representation (perhaps not since Auden and Thom Gunn emigrated in search of pastures queer) -- it's about time the UK started celebrating (or at least recognising) the amazing contribution that lesbian, gay, bi and trans writers have made and are making to our literature.