Natalie Helberg Archives

There, Gaping: Review of Liz Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent — Natalie Helberg

Aug 032015

Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent
Liz Howard
McClelland & Stewart
98 pages, Paperback $18.95 CAD
ISBN: 978-0-7710-3836-5

LIZ HOWARD”S DEBUT COLLECTION of poems, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, is astonishingly capacious: It is an extended metaphor for the mind. It is a fiery, radiant rollick through language. It is a meditation on Indigenous lineage and muted origins. It is the type of hard, crystalline speech which illuminates the social-scape from its gutters, a song gifted by an absolute Other, eerily coalescing at the junction of race, class, and gender. The poems which make it up celebrate the natural world while simultaneously attuning themselves to the toxicity of its rivers.

The collection could be described as a supernatural invocation. It could be described as a science of Wonder, a discourse on Wonder with a neuro-scientific diction. It channels scientific language as if it were part and parcel of its mother tongue. It speaks Anishinaabemowin also. It is an appropriation of various giants: Plath and Wittgenstein, many others. It is a neural riot. It is emotionally prodigious. Like the infinite citizen it is named for, the text, too, is startled by some big thing which rattles its stars; it, too, stands with a gaping maw, gobsmacked and in love, reaching beyond itself, fearlessly.

The Shaking Tent rite, in various Indigenous traditions, is carried out by a spiritual healer for the sake of procuring knowledge from the great abyss of the beyond. The healer, the shaman, is enclosed in a tent, whose quaking movements, observed from without, signal the presence of supernatural entities presumed to assist with the mediumistic enterprise. The shaking tent, in the context of this collection, is a metaphor which rebuffs the figure of the solipsistic, self-made self: Howard’s speaker proclaims that her guiding desire is “to not be / inside my own head perpetually / not simply Wittgenstein’s girl / but an infinite citizen in a shaking tent.” Within the metaphorical tent, she is thus positioned so as to be open to a variety of ‘others’: A temporal other in the form of events which have not yet occurred (hence she can “receive / the call that comes / down the barrel / of the future”) and a human Other (an Autrui): “I know myself to be a guest / in your mind a grand lodge / of everything I long to know and hold / within this potlatch we call / the present / moment.”

These others are, of course, not quite amenable to being grasped. If they are grasped at all, they are never grasped fully. The speaker’s desire for knowledge is, as the title of the collection suggests, infinite: inexhaustible, but also asymptotic (“this is my delta my neural asymptote”). That is, the speaker approaches, verges on, that which she reveres and longs for, but never reaches it. Only desire which is asymptotic can be, along with the pleasure which accompanies desire, indefinitely sustained. Only desire which is asymptotic, moreover, is compatible with wonder: it is an active curiosity which cannot conquer, and which is thus at the same time a non-violent ‘leaving be.’ The beyond, the remainder which is never colonized but which touches these poems, at times lends the collection something like a religious quality: The text nods its head to something sacred and inhuman, almost god-like (“What auspice will lend me a sacred belt?”), and possibly imperilling (“What little there is beyond impermanence / conspires with half a mind on the original / to sew us closed”).

The poems are riddled with references to time, to standard time, to time ephemeral (“the time zone of some desperate hour”) and to time unending (“O creek, bleeding hills, census inveterate / let me sleep five more minutes just five / minutes more before we default on / eternity”). How these references fit together, or fit into their respective poems, is occasionally mysterious. This is because Howard’s lines at times defy conventional sense: “I have as much stake / in speaking this / as the water / which also / discloses futurity / in a little black dress.” Lines carve out logics which exceed those of everyday communication. Many (not all) of Howard’s poems run on semantic discontinuity, on the imaginative leap: “I remove my belt / and snap it / at the stakeholders of the commonplace / at a crucifix / at the tariff of longing / at the dawn / at my own name.”

The experimental poet Charles Bernstein has observed that sense is irreducible to connotation and denotation, that meaning’s reach is total: acoustic sense (the sense, for example, Howard’s lines make to the ear, if not to the schooled mind, which is trained to unpack propositions and carry out theme-based exegesis) is still sense,^[1] even though—because at a remove from reference—it is more difficult to theorize about. The infinite citizen herself insists that “our only limit / will be of language”; “feral,” she tells us, “I enter / the court of words,” where “tangents come to take you away.” It would be wrong, then, to reduce the time-related mentions so ubiquitous in Howard’s book to anything like a series of genuinely-intended claims—which is not to say that they are never genuinely intended—and to hold their enigmatic character against them. Still, we can say that temporality exists as part of the book’s conceptual-scape. It is a conspicuous motif:

The speaker casts a casual eye toward an apocalyptic future (“we’re just friends / hanging out / in my apartment / until the world ends”). At times the world, the “whole earth,” seems to have ended already, seems to have already “retired from intimacy.” Elsewhere, the speaker is preoccupied with the present, “LOLing / in the middle / of mere existence.” Several of the poems included in the collection (e.g., “Look Book,” “Boreal Swing,” “1992,” and “Bildungsroman”) are essentially portraits of the speaker’s past, glimpses of poverty, records of the sensory impressions and memorable communications of the speaker’s youth (“This is our welfare half / a duplex with mint green / siding shrugged between / rail yard and main street”; “when I was / small and somewhere my / birthfather is drunk and / homeless, half-mad when / the cops ask him for his name / he’ll say, December”). These poems are, to a certain extent, set apart from the other poems in the collection in that they participate in a slightly different aesthetic; still, they exhibit continuity with the other poems insofar as they participate in the temporal triptych (past, present, future) Infinite Citizen is, elsewhere, constantly alluding to.

The colonial critique Infinite Citizen is carrying out is subtle. For the most part, it is not effected by explicit statements; rather, it is evoked by the politically charged vocabulary, or diction, Howard has incorporated in surprising ways into the poetry, a diction which, so-embedded, has become ambiguous without fully shedding its political resonances: Line sequences like “into the puffed metastatic coal became the water / into the affirmative action embryonic mortality / of the loon summit,” and “bioaccumulation became us Athabasca / sweet reconciliation spoke in / mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium” prime us, politically, without saying any one thing in particular. Isolated, creatively contextualized words in this way function as constant reminders; their associations haunt, invade, the text. We are not allowed to forget. The text refuses to be blatant, but it has found a way to do this, quite ingeniously, while simultaneously refusing compulsory silence. Even the text’s more positive incorporation of, for example, Anishinaabemowin concepts—such as the Shaking Tent—is a making-present, a kind of metaphysical assertion of a culture covered-over, if not outright killed, and of a portion of the speaker’s subjectivity which has been culturally minimized, or suppressed.

Infinite Citizen exhibits feminist preoccupations as well; the speaker, it seems, is a feminine subject; the colloquial language which, at times, erupts into what, at other times, seems like a specialist’s text (“hey, self / are you lovely yet?”; “with red needles I will ask you again / where is my good / gloss?”) calls to mind the work of writers like Margaret Christakos and Lisa Robertson, two of Howard’s former mentors. Wasn’t it Lisa Robertson, who, taking on the dead male poetry giants of the epic tradition, trying to outdo, or amp up, even their classical pomp, irreverently wrote “Hey Virgil / I think your clocked ardour is stuck…”? Both Lisa Robertson and Gail Scott, moreover, in different ways in their respective writings, have preoccupied themselves with ‘ornamentation’ and ‘surface,’ conceptions traditionally associated with femininity; they have made something out of these notions aesthetically as part of a feminist re-appropriation of writing itself (with Gail Scott producing texts which abandon plot in favour of imagistic and linguistic tangents, or, in other words, in favour of ‘ornaments’ which make up the text’s ‘surface’). Howard’s colloquial expressions, her speaker’s good gloss (deemed, by dint of inclusion, an appropriate subject for poetry), and the “punk psalms” she, at other times, refers to, elaborate and affirm a form of feminine subjectivity, as well as a politicized, dissident aesthetic which admits of only a recent history.

Throughout the text, Howard blurs the border between the subject’s cognition and the world which is external to it. The infinite citizen’s psychic geography is physical; it is made up of veins, blood paths, as much as it is populated with creatures and stones. A hare goes “to rut in the reverb / of precognition.” “The total psychic economy shimmers / a latent mouthpiece of maple.” The infinite citizen thus stands in relation to the environment as absolutely porous; the highway is ‘venous’; the snow is ‘hemodynamic.’ The mind and the body likewise reserve nothing from one another, extend into one another, become conflated with one another. In this text, there is only fluidity, never dualism; the spiritual is a good dirt; the spiritual is chemical.

At a technical level, Infinite Citizen is appropriative; the work, then, not only dismisses the boundary between the objective and the subjective, it does away with the territory lines gouged between texts. The poems in the collection help themselves to each other, as in the procedural poem “Ring Sample: Addendum,” which is made up of lines which occur in the book’s earlier poems.The words and rhythms of many other writers have made it into Infinite Citizen as well. Where Plath, for example, writes “O my God, what am I / That these late mouths should fly open,” Howard writes “could our late mouths ever know such a green word / as vertigo.” Where Plath writes “In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers,” Howard writes “in a daffodil chorus of posthumous laughter / this clapboard passport.” In one poem, Plath remarks: “All morning the / Morning has been blackening, / A flower left out”; in another, she speaks of a father figure at whom she cannot look much, since his “form suffers / Some strange injury / And seems to die.” Howard, who, seemingly moved by Plath, nevertheless refrains from embracing her totalizing bleakness, in a single poem, informs the reader: “All night the blood moon measures the dilation / of your pupil, pinprick or dinner plate / in this plenum where our attention fails to die.”

It is the plenum, nothing short of the plenum, which is, I think, the source of these new poems, as well as their resplendent infiltrator. Liz Howard has managed something extraordinary here, has managed, in fact, a number of extraordinary things: She has composed an incredibly thought-provoking, intelligent text and she has pulled this off in an impeccable, beautiful language. She has registered—expressed rather than turned from—life in its most gritty, sad, anxiety-producing manifestations. And she has managed to excite. And she has managed, also, ferociously, to marvel.

—Natalie Helberg

Liz Howard is a Toronto-based poet. She works as a research officer in cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Science degree with High Distinction from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals (The Capilano Review, The Puritan, and Matrix Magazine). Her chapbook Skullambiant (Ferno House) was a finalist for bpNichol Chapbook Award in 2012. Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is her first full-length collection.

Natalie Helberg completed an MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Guelph in 2013. She is currently studying philosophy at the University of Toronto. Some of her experimental work has appeared on InfluencySalon.ca and in Canadian Literature. She is (still) working on a hybrid novel.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

See Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption”↵

Beautifully, Wantonly: Review of Here Comes Kitty by Richard Kraft and Danielle Dutton — Natalie Helberg

Apr 052015

Richard Kraft & Danielle Dutton

Like a dream, it slips off the binds of the mind, building up structures which differ from those present upon rational waking. — Natalie Helberg

Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera
Richard Kraft with Danielle Dutton
Siglio Press
64 pages, Hardback $32.00 CAD
ISBN: 978-1-938221-08-8

Richard Kraft and Danielle Dutton’s Here Comes Kitty, a collage project (Kraft’s) with written interludes (Dutton’s), beautifully, wantonly, defies review. Like a dream, it slips off the binds of the mind, building up structures which differ from those present upon rational waking. The images it combines are unlikely bedmates. What it says, if it says anything, it says without concepts. It channels disparate locations and histories into singular, pressurized, visible forms. It could be read in terms of densely layered symbolism, but it would be wrong to side with Freud and insist on an authoritative parsing. How could we render this work which consists of carefully staged collisions, of artful incoherencies, coherent? How could we render the visible using words? We delimit and inevitably limit the unlimited, prodigious thing. We elaborate on it and hope to illumine. We describe and impose analysis. We suggest, even though these genealogies are uncertain, links to what has come before.

In 1933, the Surrealist and former Dadaist Max Ernst travelled to Italy with a suitcase full of wood-engraved illustrations. Some, he had excised from lurid French novels, others, from books on natural science and astronomy. There, over a three-week period, he fused these materials, breaking with his earlier approach to collage by using particular illustrations, in their entirety, as base pictures, which he reconfigured through the superimposition of other images, other bits of paper. The resultant pieces, violent, sexual, and suggestively eldritch—each, in line with the Surrealist spirit, and not unlike Kraft’s collages, ‘a fortuitous encounter of disparate realities’ on a plane ill-suited for them—became the content of Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté, which was framed as a collage novel.

Une Semaine is structurally chaotic; this is true of Here Comes Kitty as well. In keeping with the Surrealist’s embrace of Freudian dream-logic and loose associations, there is, to all appearances, no reason for the particular order of pieces found within each of Une Semaine’s seven chapters; in the case of Kraft’s work, there is no reason for the ordering of panels and pages found within the chapter-less text. No reason, but perhaps a rhyme. Repeated characters, symbols and settings lend a degree of coherency to the chaos of the pictorial, seeming anti-narrative in Une Semaine. Here Comes Kitty similarly recycles its motifs; in doing so, it orchestrates a clashing of tropes associated with birth and death, with innocence and sleaziness, with mirth and barbarism.

While Ernst used multiple found illustrations as base texts for the pieces making up his novel, Richard Kraft has used a single Cold War comic. The comic pits a Polish infiltrator against the Nazis. Here Comes Kitty is then literally built on the back of, and saturated with, a militaristic image repertoire. Yet each subtly bellicose comic panel is also ornamented with images large and miniscule from far more sanguine and even sacred source texts. Kraft has designed each panel loosely on the model of Indian miniature paintings; they are essentially for the eye which craves detail, which wishes to look closely and stall the motion forward that is the narrative impulse. Butterflies and birds, bright red lips and other playfully mismatched body parts are rife. Indian gods and goddesses are present. Mammals, domestic and exotic, run amok. Phalluses are in abundant supply, along with their only slightly less discrete symbols.

Ernst’s collage text is framed explicitly as a novel, but Kraft, punning, has framed his as a ‘comic opera.’ That is, Kraft’s collage looks the part of a comic, though it does not read like one. It is a comic whose panels are abused boundaries. Some images span multiple panels, occluding their borders. Some thought bubbles and speech bubbles do the same. The work’s various word bubbles contain fragmented, sometimes biblical, sometimes utterly random, sometimes oddly fitting, and sometimes onomatopoeic language: A swinging couple is pasted over an officer; the woman twirls in her green dress; her smile looks like it’s about to break; her partner exudes happiness. The officer’s speech reads “THOU DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT, I CHARGE THEE TO COME OUT OF HIM…” Choir-boy heads from a single source-text, moreover, are scattered throughout to remind us, with a wink, that the text is ‘meant’ to be sung:

As collage, which is to say by its very appropriative nature, Kraft’s work sets itself afloat on a sea of references. In this respect it is not unlike a comic opera. Like a comic opera, it satirizes; it renders ideological authority—whether in the text this takes the form of religious icons, particular political figures, or green uniforms—absurd. For Here Comes Kitty, sacred cows are comestibles. Beyond this, the work paints red lipstick on the horrible. It snatches up the horrible and hands it a drink and incorporates it into a Dionysian revel.

Though the book is not, like Ernst’s, divided into formal sections, Danielle Dutton’s poetical prose does disrupt Kraft’s thirty-two-page collage at regular intervals. There are four textual interludes, each of which consists of four pages of writing. The written pages carry on the same associative (or dream) logic that characterizes the collage pages, only of course in a different medium; they also riff off of some of Kraft’s motifs. Each of Dutton’s pages functions as a contained unit with an abstract narrative of its own; a given page’s content only loosely resonates with that of adjacent (written) pages. The sentences which make it up are subtly discontinuous:

I’d begun to feel a direct relation to each of the words I spoke. Mushroom. Angel. Destroyer. Had all this happened before? A small man took my bag. “Think of it as a hotel,” a man with a mustache advised. A chorus of boys was singing. I was sure it had happened before. “Their voices are the voices of angels,” someone called. This was a kind of sickness. I was standing on the grounds. In a certain spot in Germany,” I told the morning group, “you’ll find the longest earthworms in the world.” Someone passed a bottle, but the doctors never saw. “No arms, no legs, no bones!” I cried. One doctor had a headache. One doctor had no neck. “Be happy you’re not dead!” the handsome doctor recalled.

In working with the page as her principal organizing unit, Dutton was also coordinating her contribution with the larger project: Kraft used the page-spread as his unit when designing the ambient “comic”; each panel had to have visual appeal when considered as part of this larger, two-page unit consisting of multiple panels, in addition to capturing the eye on its own. Kraft was also working with a second version of the collage, a bird’s-eye, or god’s-eye version, in which all pieces could be viewed together simultaneously, rather than one after the other, as we would view them in the necessarily sequenced, though decidedly repetitious and non-linear, book form of the project.

Even this book version of the project, however, insofar as, like Ernst’s chapters, it is irrational, insofar as it is not logically apparent why this panel follows that panel, why this page was deemed the rightful successor of that page, dissents to time. Relatedly, it invokes pursuit and voyage as themes, yet confuses procession: The title, Here Comes Kitty, announces the arrival of a possible mammal, a possible guide: “KITTY IS HERE” announces a panel. “Look, it’s a cat!” cries a choir-boy, though there is no cat to be found. Eventually, a recurring cat image is given a speech bubble: “FOLLOW ME!” The collage is riddled with motion motifs. Miniature soldiers and other figures march to and fro, with or against the left-to-right grain of the read. Bodied and disembodied hands are perpetually pointing the reader in incompatible directions. Speedboats and other ships circulate, though they are never navigationally in sync; whatever voyage we have been enjoined to partake in, dizzies: it takes us from land to sea, to land, to sea.

Alchemical tales often begin with journeys. Some feel that the overall structure of Ernst’s Une Semaine is in fact less arbitrary than it appears to be, that the succession of chapters symbolically mirrors the steps involved in the alchemical procedure; alchemy had captured the imaginations of the Surrealists working in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Ernst’s novel explicitly appropriated alchemical symbols, the images associated with its elements: lions and men as the representatives of earth, dragons to evoke fire, women and the sea to bespeak of water, birds to signify air and the seven stages of the alchemical process more generally. Very similar elemental and zoological dimensions are discernible in Here Comes Kitty. Birds are ubiquitous, as are tides and conflagrations. Lions are not alien to this territory, nor is sun and moon imagery.

In the alchemical symbolic, the sun is yoked to sulphur and the moon to mercury. The alchemical process is supposed to culminate in the integration of the sun and the moon, of the masculine and the feminine, into a single androgynous figure. Both Ernst’s novel and Kraft’s comic opera achieve this amalgamation through the free combination of male and female body parts, and Kraft additionally through gender-bending thought bubbles (a male officer’s reads “I am a big girl. I sing! I sing!”). Ernst’s novel also consciously (and cannily) aligns alchemy and collage in order to exploit the former’s allegorical pertinence to the latter: in alchemy, a base of primary matter is destroyed, recombined, and purified to produce gold or silver. In collage, essentially the same thing occurs, only it is a source text which is aesthetically re-particularized. Here Comes Kitty is not interested in rehashing this connection, for the idea has been done already; however, it does stand at the edge of itself, emanating a related but original form of molecular intensity:

There is a kind of unbridled pleasure circulating through Here Comes Kitty. Its intrigue is addictive. It is serene and cataclysmic. It is spiritual, yet sinister. It is all delinquent-joy and death-drive, and yet it is equally inexhaustible, incessantly generating: There is a choir-boy’s head on the last page, gobbling wieners. He seems to be in a wooded area. The white rabbit says “HURRAH! LET US PLAY.” The owl says ‘abandon ship.’ The panel commands us to ‘set fire,’ and then to hush up and wait.

— Natalie Helberg

Richard Kraft is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. He has produced video, collage, photography and performance art. His work privileges open fields of meaning; it defamiliarizes by making use of incongruity and paradox. Kraft has exhibited in various galleries (Charlie James, LA Louver, Rosamund Felsen) and non-profit spaces (the Portland Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Photographic Resource Center, and the Laguna Art Museum). Richard has also co-authored a chapbook, In the Air (2013), with Peter Gizzi, which was released by Manor House.

Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life, a collection of lyrical narratives, and an experimental novel, S P R A W L, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award in 2011. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and has also been anthologized in A Best of Fence and I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Dutton has worked in the capacities of managing editor, production manager, and book designer for Dalkey Archive Press. In 2010, Dutton founded the acclaimed experimental small press, Dorothy, a publishing project.

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Lovingly Damaged Language: A Review of Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present — Natalie Helberg

Dec 092014

Is it any good is the wrong question; how is it changing the terms of our enjoyment is the right one. Cinema of the Present is a threshold experience I pin brilliant. It bites the fruit it invents and brains us, tingling. It is behind-the-scenes, pink wrench-work: It is an action on us. Now. —Natalie Helberg

Cinema of the Present
Lisa Robertson
Coach House Books
112 pages, Paperback ($17.95)
ISBN: 978-1552452974

Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present arrives lean and reels in intellection. It’s delicate and circumspect and gutsy at once. Like so much of her work, it astonishes the sentence. It is an attempt to pressure writing away from habitual crutches, as in the trappings of the heavy hitters, not just what we learn in Poetry 101. It is eclectic, rarified, and dense, scatterbrained and philosophical: It tells us that the stakes of writing are high, that writing sculpts subjects as much as it sculpts the domain they dwell in, and that, consequently, there is no trick-bag to rely on, no set of writing techniques we can master and remain content with. Robertson claims that she does not know how to write, each time, then begins. Cinema of the Present attests to this attitude: Writing, it insists, is the attempt to write itself: it is humility, excitation, and persistent process. It is integrity and risk.

While much of Robertson’s work—The Apothecary (1991), Debbie: An Epic (1997), XEclogue (1993), Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), Nilling (2012), and many, many other collections—embrace a lush, amped-up take on the sentence (the baroque), Cinema of the Present proceeds comparatively economically. It is close to Robertson’s 2010 work, R’s Boat, which in many ways anticipates it.

Robertson’s ‘baroque’ can seem semantically impenetrable: It arises from the creative ‘verbing’ of nouns—“rooms with no middle ground, differently foxed” (Occasional Work)—the use of “improper” adjectives—“Don’t be afraid tulip for time is fat / with our indiscretion” (Debbie)—general adjectival lavishness, or a more general clashing of unlikely but suggestive sentence-parts: “Loose-armed impostors, we’ll hone an incendiary calendar, from the still bosco contrive the days that shall give us History, that saline, perplexed crux: Day of Parked Cars; Day of Physical Secrets; Day of Consonant’s Lip; Day of Lucite…” (XEclogue). But it can also seem exquisitely clear and referential: “[A]nd then the theorist sauntering purposefully from her round hips, her heavy leather satchel swinging like an oiled clock” (Occasional Work).

If Robertson’s language-based interventions are at times rogue and rude, they are also well-informed. Robertson is somewhat of an extinct species, a bit of a Virginia Woolf figure, one of those rare writers who has had a chance to devote her life more or less exclusively to reading and writing, without the intrusion of anything like regular employment. She’s someone who’s survived by being innovative, by being communally embedded, and by scrounging.

She spent years living rent-free in a cabin on Saltspring Island, during which she gobbled up Phyllis Webb, Heidegger, Barthes, Jean Genet, Ezra Pound, and Proust, among others. She is well-read in general, and her influences are as myriad as they are motley: Virgil, Plath, Lyn Hejinian, Rilke, Lucretius, Susan Howe, bpNichol, etc. She was involved with the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver for several years in the nineties, where she became acquainted with key figures in the American Language movement as well as Russian Formalism (Viktor Shklovsky and his injunction to quicken perception by defamiliarizing language), post-structuralist theory, and feminist criticism. Before the Kootenay School, she attended Simon Fraser University, where she took courses from writers like George Bowering and Roy Miki and studied the Canadian avant-garde (a few names to mention: The Four Horsemen, Erin Mouré, and Nicole Brossard).

Of her early, baroque approach to the sentence, Robertson has said: it is a pursuit of a particular internal sound-structure, an attempt to produce a “full knobbly quality, or a torsion or a jaggedness or a swoony kind of movement from syllable to syllable.”^[1] The resultant sentences may not mean in conventional ways, but the fact that they do not only serves another of Robertson’s professed aims: to create sentences that startle, and, in startling, produce new emotional and intellectual terrain.^[2] The aesthetic Robertson adopts in Cinema of the Present is less gnarly, and yet it still glimmers; it finds alternative ways to invigorate language:

You are fundamentally forgotten and veiled or you are deeply erased and diverted.

It was a place like the farm, but near the ocean.

You were poverty shivering in an old turquoise city.

(from Cinema of the Present)

The intention animating Cinema of the Present is related: the piece is an attempt to construct a pronoun. The confessional voice that invokes the ‘lyric I’ risks sounding cliché and cheesy, but any work’s organizing pronoun, says Robertson, is in danger of becoming the site of formulaic, dry, taken for granted language; we need to trouble that site if we’re going to keep it. Cinema of the Present troubles its organizing pronoun by making it self-thematizing.

The text begins: “What is the condition of a problem if you are the problem? / You move into the distributive texture of an experimental protocol.” ‘You,’ the pronoun, a few lines down, sets “out from consciousness carrying only a small valise.” The poem, which consists of a hundred or so pages of double-spaced, one-line statements (sometimes questions, sometimes fragments), some of which are repeated in slightly altered form at irregular intervals, continues:

A downtown tree, the old sky, and still you want an inventory.

You were an intuition without a concept.

A gallery, a hospital, an hypothesis.

Pure gesture.

Many of the poem’s subsequent lines likewise explicitly qualify this ‘you’: “You are the silence they exchanged,” “You are a transitional figure who sees yourself as such,” but many do not. As in the above (“A gallery, a hospital, an hypothesis”), some are fragments which refer to the perceptual world, or just the world more broadly (“Atoms, theatres, famines”), and yet the pronoun/subject, situated with its valise at the frontier of consciousness, arguably absorbs them:

Each line that makes up the poem, though it can function independently, can also be read forward and backward (as in ‘you were an intuition without a concept: a gallery, a hospital, an hypothesis, pure gesture’); meaning can cascade forward or backward as many lines or as few as suits a reader’s fancy (you were ‘a hospital, an hypothesis, pure gesture,’ and, as the next line goes, “a gate made of carpet tape”). The poem posits consciousness as spongiform and figures poetry and poetic practice as a gate between subjectivity and objectivity. The “gate made of carpet tape” recurs throughout the poem as a figure for the mind’s immersion in the perceptual vista: it is a gate constituted by all manner of encountered materials: it becomes “a gate made of gas pumps,” “a gate made of bread and screws.”

The subject/pronoun the poem is preoccupied with, then, both surges up from and recedes back into language (“Your pronoun leaks thus”). The statements or fragments that seem to concern it least still become its tissue, and the pronoun, conversely, becomes the poem itself (“It was not your voice at all, but it can’t stop nor does it think”). It is this pivot which allows the poem to produce its meta-commentary: By the time we get to the line “You are banality,” or “You are no longer aesthetical,” for example, we can read these lines as referring to the poem itself. Besides its pronoun-anxiety, Cinema of the Present shares with R’s Boat, its precursor, a willingness to embrace what Robertson refers to as either flat, outright bad, or banal sentences, a willingness, in other words, to embrace everything—“What you wanted: total, gestural plasticity”; “You presuppose a free, opened and unlimited space”— while sequencing these materials in such a way that they come to work aesthetically (which sometimes means that the resulting arrangement has actually opened up a new aesthetic possibility: “at the edges of banality, there is sensing”).

Sequencing may be one of the keys to Robertson’s title, as well: In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin notes that a reality presented through film, which is pure in the sense that it bears no sign of the technology used to produce it, is only pure in this sense because technology has purged it, has edited itself out, cutting shots and assembling shots taken at different times, while mindfully orchestrating transitions between them. Robertson has used the essay in the past to stress the extent to which writers—and this reflects a deep dimension of her own approach—are mindfully patterning, or texturing, a linguistic surface; they are arranging materials, and, like filmmakers, are orchestrating transitions between the text’s moments. The double-spaced lines which make up Cinema of the Present, the arrangement of this text as an uninterrupted sequence of these lines, and the arrangement of these lines themselves make the text, perhaps more than her other works, the book-analogue of film. It exists as the effect of a complex form of visual reduction, as well as of a cinematic sensitivity to time and rhythm.

Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation,” in which Stein offers an elusive articulation of her own approach to composition, “writing the present,” provides another insight into Robertson’s title. “Writing the present” à la Stein involves, among other things, an attention to time in the work, which is the effect of “distribution and equilibration,” or what, in keeping with the above, we might call sequencing. “To construct a velocity is what you want” (Robertson). It also entails “using everything” (as in the way both R’s Boat and Cinema of the Present do) “by beginning again and again” (Cinema of the Present, like much of Stein’s work, unfurls along descriptive axes—it makes reference to the sensory world, but also to the project itself, its pronoun and the act of writing it—and does so in a playfully repetitious manner).

Stein’s essay also affords a pre-echo of Cinema’s open-ended spirit and structure. Robertson writes, “Curiosity, limbs and momentum: because of form you kept playing,” “You carried the great discovery of poetry as freedom, not form,” and “If you speak in this imaginary structure, it’s because other choices felt limiting.” Stein writes “No one thinks these things when they are making…no one formulates until what is to be formulated has been made” and “Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here.”

The open structure that characterizes Cinema of the Present and the vocabulary that Robertson has let loose in the work are also relevant to the work’s thematic content. The diction in Cinema is drawn in part from philosophical sources. There is explicit reference to Nietzsche and Aristotle, an injunction, at one point, to eliminate all contradictions (which is contradicted), and the repeated mention of “the indispensable horizon of all that occurs or appears.” There is even a possible reference to Foucault, the great theorist of disciplinary spaces: “Thus you were led to describe hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries.” And to Hannah Arendt: “So you came to nilling” (nilling being a passive form of willing, or an active form of not-willing).

Robertson has used Arendt as fodder before, in an essay on Pauline Réage’s controversial Story of O. In the novel, the eponymous protagonist, O, is made into a sex slave; more specifically, her boyfriend asks her to be a slave whom many other men—provided they are ring-bearing members of a certain salacious organization (at Roissy)—can make use of as his proxies. O is subjected to excruciating forms of corporeal torture; her body is mutilated, assiduously penetrated, yet at every moment she agrees to her treatment: she submits herself to it. Robertson reads Story of O as an allegory for the formation of the subject through the paradoxical form of agency that is nilling: the subject’s self-conscious self-submission to a power beyond itself (an Other), as occurs in the act of reading, during which the reading subject gives itself over to, and is transformed, however violently or benevolently, by text.

Cinema of the Present, seems, at times, to refer to this reading: It makes mention of “O, Rosy-booted.” Its organizing pronoun is said to want “to wear the feathered mask of a owl” (at the height of her subjection, O is shaved, attached to a dog-leash, and displayed naked at a party wearing just such a mask; she is afterward desecrated in the mask, on a table, as the sun comes up). The degree of permissiveness that characterizes Cinema as a curated space (it embraces banality, and anything: “What you wanted: total, gestural plasticity”), its ‘openness,’ aligns the work with Story of O (something like Robertson’s take on it), as well. O is obligated, as a slave, ordered, to remain ‘open’: her lips must remain parted at all times, for penetration, as must her legs. Cinema of the Present marks itself as likewise radically accommodating, and accommodating in such a way as to enable self-change. “Your problem is again your own transformation,” it says. “You are a transitional figure who sees yourself as such.” “Once again you acquire a new surface.”

Robertson’s whole enterprise is in this way encapsulated in Cinema. The work is concerned with writing’s (contingent and alterable) conditions of possibility, as well as with the subjective possibilities which are related to them. What it is possible to write, in a given time and place, is an index of what it is possible to be, since it is a subject who writes, or since writing is, ultimately, a subject’s possibility. To alter writing is to alter subjectivity: “Only the rhyme of discourse transforms you,” Cinema says. “Still,” it says, “you’re totally in love with subjectivity,” and “Still, at this late date in the political, you remain intrigued by fucking”:

O is fucked by her Other, entered, conditioned and created and, as a subject, beholden. Cinema is open to an Other that takes the form of un-aesthetical, flat-toned language, and, in being so open, is engaged in producing a counter-pressure to a second Other: ‘writing proper.’

In challenging and altering literary norms, Robertson has also produced new possibilities for the legitimate use of language, for language practices, and for the subjectivities that are what they are partly because they engage in these practices. Cinema of the Present persists with this Sisyphean endeavour: “It’s time for your late style”; “That your mouth lovingly damaged the language”; “You would like thought to release something other than laboratory conditions.” Is it any good is the wrong question; how is it changing the terms of our enjoyment is the right one. Cinema of the Present is a threshold experience I pin brilliant. It bites the fruit it invents and brains us, tingling. It is behind-the-scenes, pink wrench-work: It is an action on us. Now.

— Natalie Helberg

Lisa Robertson is one of Canada’s most celebrated experimental poets. She is associated with Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing but also resists being associated with any particular aesthetic. Her chapbooks, one-off essays, pamphlets, and scattered poems are too numerous to list here. Her books include The Apothecary (1991), XEclogue (1993), Debbie: An Epic (1997—a finalist for the Governor General’s award in 1998), The Weather (2001), Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), The Men: A Lyric Book (2006), Magenta Soul Whip (2009), R’s Boat (2010), Nilling: Prose Essays (2012), and, most recently, Cinema of the Present. She currently lives in France.

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Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Kai Fierle-Hedrick. “Lifted: An Interview with Lisa Robertson.” Chicago Review (Volume 5.1/5.2, Spring 2006)↵
Mark Cochrane. “Stuttering Continuity (or, Like It’s 1999): An Interview with Lisa Robertson at Cambridge.” Open Letter (Thirteenth Series, No. 6, Summer 2008)↵

Dream Eaters of the Apocalypse: A Review of Robert Coover’s The Brunist Day of Wrath — Natalie Helberg

Apr 022014

The Brunist Day of Wrath reflects a decade’s worth of labour and attention; it is a book that should, and does, take time to read, a book that, through mysterious means, nonetheless feels pressed on by some urgency. It seems feverish—serious and self-committed—though it is also pun-funny and clever-funny, daffy and delirious. And yet its eye, casting itself around like a billiard ball, picking up small-town grit and gossip, is uneasy, and should be, for it is accountable for its thousand crimes, self-conscious of its own apocalyptic imaginings… —Natalie Helberg

The Brunist Day of Wrath
Robert Coover
Dzanc Books
1100 pages, $30.00
ISBN: 978-1938604386

Robert Coover’s The Brunist Day of Wrath is a boisterous, bloody, jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring—for any writer, humbling—sometimes painfully, but always expertly, protracted ride. Countless characters and their countless voices well up out of its thousand pages, mingling as subplots crisscross and ramify: Cultists clash with the local and power-laden in a high-profile scrimmage for property; cult benefactors drain joint bank-accounts, screwing local, power-laden husbands out of their underpinning monies; skeptics balk, hoot, and forewarn; believers pray, persist together, at odds, or else, defecting, wail for reckoning; trailer-brats rapture cats; fathers disown sons and sons abandon fathers; signs are deciphered, then, ad hoc, re-deciphered; God is named, variously; musically-inclined yokels hit it big; an aspiring saint is gang-raped; demons are conceived, and, on a rooftop in the midst of a bloodbath to end bloodbaths, a murderous, evangelical biker is volatized by choppers.

The book before the book, The Origin of the Brunists, like the fictive doomsday cult whose origin it catalogues, begins with light. An explosion. Confused prose conveys its confused wake: ‘There was light and / post drill leaped smashed the/turned over the whole goddamn car kicking / felt it in his ears, grabbed his bucket, and turned from the face.’ Light: Two shadows, miners, duck out of sight; a cigarette in a small earthen chamber disintegrates the next instant. Gas. Light. Flame feeding flame. Black smoke furling into shafts, tunnels. Blocked passageways and rubble. The sentient shadows die. Or live. Many die. Most. Laboriously, for lack of oxygen. Singly and in groups. A message wrapped in a preacher’s fingers—stiff fingers—makes it to the surface. It prophesies the coming of light, the end of the world.

The accident at Deepwater No. 9 Coalmine, the essence of West Condon, ushers in the town’s demise, its economic and spiritual ruin. It gives rise to the Brunists, who inaugurate and so-name themselves so as to better await an end that, as livelihoods are lost and reputations are ruined, as sermons bubble forth alongside bar talk and smack talk, as lechers skulk to their lovers, and as poseurs pose to achieve base purposes, is endlessly deferred.

The Brunist Day of Wrath picks up here: Five years later, not much has changed. Those who lost everything in the first novel have lost or are in the process of losing more. The Brunists, having dispersed, gather once more in anticipation of the End’s anniversary (puzzling, they know). Only this time there are hellions: The children of the tyrannical Reverend Baxter—wife-beater, child-beater, convert but erstwhile Brunist nemesis #1—a man as fiery as the Book of Revelations itself—have grown up. Once friendly, neighbourhood terrorizers flaunting a charred human hand, eldest and youngest son are now cold-blooded gangsters. They bow to a ferocious god akin to that of the Old Testament (‘the Big One’) and, with a clutch of armed bikers—not Brunist-endorsed, though their tats are Brunist—not to mention with Nitro foraged from the abandoned mine site, plan to rev up, rip through and blitz West Condon.

Thus The Brunist Day of Wrath, like some horrible ouroboros, curls back to touch its origin: The mine explodes, ejecting prophecy—‘the Coming of the Light’—which, moving through a complicated chain of human intercessors, begets further explosion.

And yet there is a day beyond this day of wrath, an end beyond the end: an epilogue in which the novel becomes fully self-reflexive; this is a text about a writer, writing. It reminds us that The Brunist Day of Wrath, like most of Coover’s work, is largely preoccupied with signs and symbols, stories, story-forms and tropes. It is a book about the power they have over us, about the fact that they are human-generated, the fact that they rigidify around us in deleterious ways (or become crusty, as Coover says), and the even more momentous fact that they are tractable to invention: they can be appropriated and rejiggered; they can be wildly embellished upon.

Coover has devoted his art to shifting and embellishing upon them, partly by creating work that is self-interrogating (he is called a fabulist for this reason): In books like Briar Rose, in which an old crone subjects a sleeping beauty to innumerable variations on the eponymous tale, he creates the tale anew as a series of its own novel versions, and this despite the princess’s unremitting protestation (perhaps representative of a culture’s) that this is not how stories are told. But these stories, repeated, are both the dreams the child (culture) dreams and her waking reality; to not refashion them, to merely accept what has—for whatever corresponds, in real time, to Beauty’s 100-year slumber—been handed down, would be, for the crone, to risk sinking into ‘a sleep as deep’ as the princess inhabits: a dangerous, unnecessary, and even laughable automatism.

In Pricksongs and Descants, Coover uses a similar technique to refresh the short-story form; in, for example, “The Babysitter” from that collection, he varies a handful of scenarios across a series of short, disconnected paragraphs. The story is ‘modular’ in Madison Smartt Bell’s sense of the term: Key details are altered or swapped for reasonable facsimiles in corresponding paragraphs (text blocks): in one, the baby has asphyxiated on a diaper pin; in another, it is screaming; in another, she, the babysitter, strangles it; in still another, it is at the bottom of the bathtub, ‘not swimming or anything.’ Text blocks can corroborate or contradict one another; they ‘mean’ together paratactically, or resonate with more than follow from one another. Thus tone can shift from block to block, as can point of view; in fact anything, as Bell says, can happen.^[1]Variation, as a technique, is reflective of what Coover has called his wish to unpack a piece’s full range of possibilities, of an effort, as he puts it, ‘to explore the whole.’

Though The Brunist Day of Wrath has a realist quality uncharacteristic of some of Coover’s other work, it nevertheless preserves a drive toward narrative playfulness and the absurd. That being said, the book’s flights of fancy, unlike those in a work like Pricksongs and Descants, remain at all times recuperable by something like realism: It is not the case that anything can happen from, say, one free-floating text block to another: In fact, in both The Origin of the Brunists and The Brunist Day of Wrath, if we encounter something disjoined or surreal, this is likely because we are reading a character’s letter or journal entry. Similarly, Jesus, in the latter narrative, who has taken up residence in an apostate, cannot disappear into thin air; his presence, not to mention his bantering sacrilege, his fun, off-colour reasoning, can be explained using the real-world term ‘alter-ego’; he both is and isn’t a mere voice in a mind—a fact which doesn’t preclude carnal baptisms with members of his ex-congregation:

‘I’m ready to do anything for you,’ Prissy whispers, peeling down her leotards…She steps into the tub and kneels between his feet and commences to wash them, one at a time. And then she lifts them and kisses them. ‘You are so beautiful,’ she says. ‘You are the most beautiful man I have ever known.’ When she says this, she is gazing affectionately past his feet at his middle parts, which are beginning to stir as though in enactment of the day’s [Easter] legend. It is not hard to prophecy what will happen next. Is he being tested? Be anxious for nothing, Jesus says. As it is written, no temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. She has a car, she can be helpful to us. I, too, have known the company of helpful women of dubious morals.

What is notable on a stylistic level about The Brunist Day of Wrath is the sheer excess of Coover’s prose (the paragraphs in this work sprawl), and, relatedly, the amount of detail packed into nearly every character imagined: These characters are full-bodied, notably unique—unique as any of us are, perhaps more—and very far from the stock figures that dominate so many of his other pieces: princesses and private eyes, dames and woodsmen, characters whose respective profiles are, understandably and likely intentionally, blank as a trope’s. In some ways, the work is working realism through excess—conventional realism, anyway, since, as a character points out, ‘The conventional way of telling stories is a kind of religion,’ of course ‘the true realists are the lens-breakers’; ‘[t]ight-assed little paragraphs laid out like snapshots in a photo album are not for me.’ If the project, then, does, to a certain extent, locate itself within, and limit itself to, realism, it does so in order re-locate, or push, realism’s very mode of telling. Perhaps this pushing of realism is the reason Jesus, in the text, remains at all times plausible (certifiable). Perhaps it is also the reason characters, not Coover, pen the work’s zaniest digressions.

The text’s catalogue of kinds of signs and symbols—its interest in how ideas, experiences and phenomena are encoded and translated—is another point of excess; it is likely not unrelated to Coover’s commitment to the text’s full (and, in this case, metaphoric) potential: Dreams, dances and gypsy cards pepper these pages; if they are interpretations themselves, they must again be interpreted. Mute stroke victims blink eyes as visitors suss out their communications. Two bible college drop-outs even attempt to reconstruct the history of the Brunist cult’s formation; they use newspapers, stories, pornographic photographs and tape-recordings—versions, in short, to create a newer version. The Origin of the Brunists itself is more or less translated into the sequel, where it is mediated by the other characters’ acts of retrospection: We get it a second time in mosaic form, each pane perspectival.

Though The Origin of the Brunists shares some of the above preoccupations, musing on similar themes, specifically on ‘messages’—there are messages everywhere: ambiguous messages which are therefore as meaningful as they are meaningless: ‘the spirits never [say] things plain’ and ‘sometimes, well, words can mean two things, that’s all’—it nevertheless refrains from insisting on a message. This is perhaps less true (but not untrue) of The Brunist Day of Wrath. While in true postmodern fashion, The Origin of the Brunists mobilizes contradictory voices, allowing perceptive renderings of devout thought-processes and those of the incredulous, mocking, opportunistic newspaper editor (and perhaps absurdist), Miller, to exist on par, The Brunist Day of Wrath cedes itself to Sally:

Sally is Miller—one of the few central characters not carried over into the sequel—re-envisioned. She is a skeptic, a wit and a writer, and, in the epilogue it is she who, self-taxed, writes a version of the apocalypse, as it was manifest in West Condon. This book within the book, mentioned in a chapter written so as to seem to reference—so as to riff off the existence of—The Brunist Day of Wrath, institutes, within the text, the spectre of the author (for one thing, Sally is advised to try her hand writing from a male perspective—she uses some biographical details, though changes others). In some ways, she seems to channel Coover, who was inspired to complete his novel after George W. Bush was elected: the fundamentalists rose up and terror with them (Coover says ‘Young Bush,’ writes ‘Young Baxter’). As Sally says, ‘It’s like people are caught up in a dangerously insane story and they don’t know how to get out of it…’

This is why Sally, like Coover, in her capacity as a writer, aspires to shred story, to mutate the domain of the interpreted and the interpretable, to maintain its fluidity, or eat dreams (so she puts it). For in her text-world, truth is no more than a mode of rendering; lies expressed in the correct mode become true and effective, while truths expressed as opinions are dismissed in court. Even beyond the courtroom, a slick simpleton garbles facts to tenderly manipulate the dying and a West Condon reprobate lies to himself long enough, and elaborately enough, to confect sweet, false memories. Perhaps the only thing Coover’s book insists upon is story’s ontological potency. The work teems with real-world significance precisely because it is a story about story.

The Brunist Day of Wrath reflects a decade’s worth of labour and attention; it is a book that should, and does, take time to read, a book that, through mysterious means, nonetheless feels pressed on by some urgency. It seems feverish—serious and self-committed—though it is also pun-funny and clever-funny, daffy and delirious. And yet its eye, casting itself around like a billiard ball, picking up small-town grit and gossip, is uneasy, and should be, for it is accountable for its thousand crimes, self-conscious of its own apocalyptic imaginings: ‘What’s the toll now from all this madness?’ Sally asks, answering, ‘You might say a story has killed them all.’^[2]

—Natalie Helberg

Natalie Helberg is from Edmonton, Alberta. Some of her experimental work has appeared on InfluencySalon.ca and in Canadian Literature. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Guelph. She is working on a hybrid novel.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Joel Katelnikoff quotes Bell’s Narrative Design in his dissertation SCROLL / NETWORK / HACK: A Poetics of ASCII Literature (1983-1989). He also suggests that Coover’s stories in Pricksongs and Descants are modular in design, though without discussing particular examples. ↵
See also an interview with Robert Coover on Numéro Cinq and readings and interviews at the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennsound.↵

Can the Feraltern Speak? A Review of Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton — Natalie Helberg

Feb 052014

Language squelches in this text, pants, struggles, gets bored, comes more than once. The poems in this collection are love letters, or if they are not they are phone sex scripts, monologues by an impressively pan-gendered speaker who can swap genitals on a whim while spouting dirty talk in Middle English. — Natalie Helberg

Cunt Norton
Dodie Bellamy, with a foreword by Adriana Reines
Les Figues Press
75 pages, $15.00
ISBN 978-1-934254-49-3

Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton is wide open, a bliss text, pulsating. It is as open as a text can be, maximally excited, welling into hot, rank, sticky meanings.^[1] Alarming meanings. Tender meanings. Its lovers fuck, staining the page with Medusian laughter—Cixous, that French gorgon’s—such that even eroticized aggression—that cultural cage, that check on our sexual imaginaries—becomes risible, linguistic (so not less erotic). Language squelches in this text, pants, struggles, gets bored, comes more than once. The poems in this collection are love letters, or if they are not they are phone sex scripts, monologues by an impressively pan-gendered speaker who can swap genitals on a whim while spouting dirty talk in Middle English.

Cunt Norton is a conceptual project: It is the sequel to Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (2001) and, like Cunt-Ups, the fruit of a feminist deployment (and salubrious denaturing) of the Dadaistic ‘cut-up’ technique William Burroughs was busy plugging in the 1950s and 60s. For Cunt-Norton, Bellamy used canonical sources—poems from the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry—fusing them, smearing Chaucer through Hughes, with her own pornographic text. Like ‘cut-ups,’ the pieces in Bellamy’s “anthology” are the quickened, crystalline remains of a ludic encounter between language and itself. (‘You lie gently down and cut through my skin; you shower me with mica on the side of small rivers…’)

Like cut-ups, they speak to the idea that the speaking voice, and all writing, is an amalgamation, a patchwork of texts, a conflation of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ of ‘mine’ and ‘yours,’ ‘me’ and ‘you,’ ‘culture’ and ‘self.’^[2]Even Bellamy’s original pornographic material belongs to another, in this case, another poet: its lines are transplants, carry-overs from an e-mail collaboration. This source text, moreover, is active as a partial base in both Cunt Norton and Cunt-Ups, and so lines from one re-erupt in the other, seeming only slightly altered. Taken together, these books are reminiscent of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, which locks the same re-contextualizing tactic between two covers; as a pair, they are Marco Polo, radically echoic, co-constitutive, incorporated into one another.

Irigaray, then, is particularly apt when she turns up in Cunt Norton’s epigraph: ‘Between us, the movement from inside to outside, from outside to inside, knows no limits.’ In this vein, the text, too, begins, appropriately but never properly—there is nothing ‘proper’ about it—with a kiss: ‘So I take the tape off your mouth, no dance, and there is only the dance, and we tongue huge gobs of spit.’

The work’s fluid, gender-shifting speaker is the effect of this dance, or is made up of multiple voices which emerge and recede. There is no need to read a unified subject across Cunt Norton’s pages, and there is no need not to: disjunction and consistency exist there simultaneously. ‘The speaker’ is thus (rather magically) able to inscribe its own lover as a presence (Bellamy herself thinks of the text not in terms of a unified speaker, but in terms of two lovers): One “letter” reads ‘Love’s not while I jerked off, thinking of thee covertly…I slide between thy lips red: if snow be white, why then walls. I stick thy cock stone inside my cunt for at least fifteen minutes.’

Most of Bellamy’s work ruptures membranes, gushing through kinds of language, polluting, if not gender, consistently, then genre. The Letters of Mina Harker, for example, incorporates found poetic language into “original” prose, appropriates fiction and TV text (e.g., Stephen King’s Carrie; I Love Lucy), merges fiction and autobiography (read: becomes meta-textual ascension), and of course lodges itself loosely in the narrative framework that constitutes Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which it warps lovingly and re-hammers. As Kathy Acker, one of Bellamy’s aesthetic touchstones, speaking of one of her own pieces, claimed: “I placed the second text on top of the first text, crudely. You do what you have to…”

Even as a writer with narrative impulses, Bellamy’s interests lie less in narrative itself than in linguistic play and formal innovation, less in representation than in language that reminds us it is language, that orchestrates, as she puts this in an interview, ‘a romance’ with the reader. To borrow a phrase from Cunt Norton, it seems that for Bellamy ‘all is permitted, as long as we come.’ Pleasure and a fast-paced, libidinal sort of energy guide her writing, which often wreaks the loveliest havoc on conventional grammar as it shoots along impulsively and associatively, subsisting as pure, all-encompassing flow.

Bellamy, like Cunt Norton’s ambiguous, ever-shifting addressee, ‘wets everything’ she touches; she blasts the normalizing strictures that fuel Creative Writing (the institution) and desiccate it in practice, writing about these with a hatred that is as flagrant as it is delectably subdued.^[3]Cunt Norton, by virtue of its title, section titles (‘Cunt Whitman,’ ‘Cunt Lowell,’ etc.) and esteemed source texts, exists as a critique of these strictures in a way that Cunt-Ups cannot:

It exists as an extension of the culture wars Bill Readings locates in the 1990s, when the corollary of the rise of interdisciplinary studies seemed to be canonical erosion: All of culture, too much to anthologize, was suddenly too legitimate to leave out (ambassadors from the margins were railing at the doors; the guardians of Culture, guarding their own authority, wrote some of them up). Cunt Norton, then, pays homage—facetiously, of course—to the form of denigrating tokenism that often buttressed and continues to buttress the English canon’s—perhaps any canon’s—claim to political correctness and inclusivity: Emulating Norton minimalism, it includes one woman writer and one black writer (‘Cunt Dickinson’ and ‘Cunt (Langston) Hughes’).

More than this, though, and as others have noted, it engages with the philosophical question of whether those existing on the fringe or beyond the borders of a hegemonic system can speak through and within it. This is the question Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak poses in her famous essay on ‘the subaltern.’ Spivak answers in the negative. Audre Lorde was answering a similar question (answering it similarly) when she wrote ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ The Language poets thought differently, suggesting that language itself—read: ‘the master’s house’—can render itself strange to itself. Rendered strange—rearranged, syntactically fractured—language, the suggestion ran, could reveal and transform the oppressive logics of the day, which it otherwise consolidated.

Bellamy, in Cunt-Norton, is in some ways embracing a Language strategy, is choosing to dwell in the master’s house, is pissing in it, using its materials while soiling them with others while leaching through the walls. This is why the text’s language is often so cunningly beautiful: ‘I hear spirits sob in each blood-on,’ the stone made stony (made strange, though not unrecognizable), the dead text (‘the graveyard under my tongue’) renewed. And yet Cunt Norton has no master, or rejects various masters, or defaces various homes:

Bellamy has her own version of the subaltern: the feraltern, a mythic, unruly, improper, ravenously expansive form of energy, a figure that represents her own negotiations with what she describes as a brutal, vulgar, working-class childhood, and with different forms of aesthetic pressure she encountered in the late 70s and early 80s. In 1978, Bellamy moved to San Francisco, where she of course found herself at the confluence of various hot writing scenes: feminist writing groups rejected her impulse to write about sex and violence (queer writing communities embraced it); the Language movement’s cachet and ubiquity made it difficult to pursue narrative as poetry (she had to pursue it as ‘New Narrative’). The feraltern is in part a response to that matrix: it is both powerful and vulnerable; it is every gesture that flies in the face of naysaying forces, that both yearns to shit and shits on censorship.

Cunt Norton, like Cunt-Ups, is an attempt to explore, source and ultimately spew forth feraltern energies. It is too feral, then, too dirty, for a master—again, whatever master: It borrows what it can from whatever dominant movements (‘Language poetry’; ‘conceptual writing’), while exceeding their bounds. It is too close to being syntactically and narratively coherent to be conventional Language poetry. This is slightly less true of Cunt-Ups, which, as a ride that is a rhythm, is, compared to Cunt Norton—whose secretions sound seamless and seem effortless—bumpy, more jarring, littered with halts:

You’re my third victim and we’re standing up fucking kept the skulls kept the skulls slowly like a wave at Ocean City. I wiggle around and shiver…It’s such a thrill to have something you actually touched, I stuck the tape between my legs and tried to hump it, a diffuse feeling over-came me like my cunt had expanded and you’re floating. (Cunt-Ups)

That thing which everybody feels, when their ravenous ghosts stream out disturbing meals or love, saying fuck me, thy cunt is so huge—we all know that—yet here thou art, begging for “security” from my body, my glassy brooks, thinking unutterable things. (Cunt Norton)

Even Cunt Norton’s conceptualism—since Bellamy has edited, has sculpted these cunt-ups—is baroque (impure).^[4] It also wears its idea:

Vanessa Place writes ‘I have come to consider conceptualism, qua conceptualism, that is, as writing that does not self interpret, is not self-reflexive, at least not on the page.’ Against this, the oral/aural sex motif that runs through Cunt Norton codes the feral subaltern’s predicament: The cock in the mouth (the cock/tongue in the ear) is language itself, is the master’s house, ramming its violence, rendering speech impossible, or enabling its colonized forms. (‘I would die if thou put thy tongue in mine ear, thy salamander, thy divine child in mine oven’; ‘the Tongue is not made for Speech as I bang my Cock against the back of thy throat.’) The mouth, conversely, which risks violence, figures the idea that the tongue brutal words, brutal logics and institutions sit on might offer them back metamorphosed: ‘Slobber all over my Cock until Eternity. Tell all the Truth but tell it like the Earth hatching.’

But if Cunt Norton is, like the heathen poetics it enacts, an ‘upheaval born of our hangover from imbibing too much Western Civ.,’^[5]and if it explicitly inscribes this idea, blowing blow jobs like molten glass into a theme for its pages, it is nevertheless not reducible to this idea. It truly barfs. In her Barf Manifesto, Bellamy explains that The Barf—which, arguably, names an approach to writing, an aesthetic, as well as writing with certain qualities—‘says so much…says too much’; its meaning is ‘so surplus it decimates form,’ its form ‘so vicious it beats the fucking pony[-piñata] of content to bits.’

Cunt Norton, then, is a fickle renegade, forever changing its mind as to whether language is stymieing or generous, as to whether the master’s house is or is not the master’s house. It is a plexus of affective complexity. If it fucks, fucks up and fucks over its linguistic forebears, it loves them and lapses into them too (‘Each time I open my mouth—though assaulted and battered by the wind—when I close my lips around you, I enjoy it’). Cunt Norton speaks; it is spoken. It thinks, and its thinking is perverse. And beautiful. It is as beautiful as the word pulchritude is ugly. It is immaculate filth.

—Natalie Helberg

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

In “The Rejection of Closure,” Lyn Hejinian writes ‘We can say that a ‘closed text’ is one in which all elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the ‘open text,’ meanwhile, all the elements of the work are maximally excited…’↵
‘All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard.’ (William Burroughs in “The Cut Up Method”)↵
See, for example, her chapbook-length Barf Manifesto as well as her essays collected as Academonia.↵
‘Adding on to and/or editing the source material is more a strategy of post-conceptualism [baroque, or impure conceptualism]; so is reneging on the faithful execution of the initial concept…Do these broken promises point to a failure in a conceptual writing text?… Failure is the goal of conceptual writing.’ (From Notes on Conceptualisms by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place)↵
This line is from Barf Manifesto.↵

Natalie Helberg Joins the Numéro Cinq Masthead as Contributor

Nov 272013

Natalie Helberg is joining the Numéro Cinq masthead as a contributor. Wonderful to have her (along with the two other recent new hires, Gerard Beirne and Adam Segal). Natalie’s first contribution to the magazine was the deliciously smart review of Adrián Bravi novel The Combover in the current (November) issue.

It’s worth adding that not only does Natalie join the masthead, she joins the extended NC community of editors and contributors, a cadre, so to speak, of alert, intelligent, creative, bookish, adventurous individuals who, despite living at the far corners of the continent (and beyond) manage to commit to the magazine, form friendships, foster an esprit de corps and, often, be very funny communicating with one another. It’s a little world, highly entertaining and inspiring.