rodney1946's reviews
23 reviews

WOMANWANDERSWARNINGThe late Hannah Weiner's posthumously published Page(Roof Books, 2002) is a remarkable piece of writing. It seems to me to be less a matter of schizophrenia or clairvoyance, both of which “afflicted” Weiner. The book seems squarely in the tradition of the more experimental of the poets of the latter part of the century, particularly Bernadette Mayer and Ron Silliman. Each page of Page appears to be written in a day, over a day perhaps, or maybe in a minute. The book is made up of four serial poems, the first and longest and most perceptive, entitled Page, as its an analysis of what makes up a page. It is unclear exactly who is doing the talking in the poem, it could be heard voices, or seen words, but just as easily Hannah Weiner talking, or rather writing, to herself (“Hannah, youre stuck”), educating herself. It is an epistolary book, and probably is just as easily genealogical or biographical.

In this, Maggie Nelson's phd thesis on the Women of the New York School, she has a great chapter on Alice Notley, from which I have gleaned the following quotes: 

Alice Notley as quoted and channeled by Maggie Nelson: 

"Notley privileges the play of gender performativity, along with a long standing belief that cross-gender identification is a central aspect of being a poet: “I used to have this whole girl theory of poets, that all poets are essentially girls, and especially all the ones I related to, and that was what made all male poets different from other men. . I think that men who are poets have to be in touch with their girl selves in order to be good poets, and I'm beginning to think its' my responsibility as a woman poet to be in touch with my male aspects in order to work properly." 
from an Interview with Ed Foster, Summer 1987 

She certainly is Intense. The work is driven and doesn’t pause much, doesent ask permission, or care much how it is being received. Though it seems to me Ann L. is always reconsidering. 

Here are some other attributes: exhaustive, self conscious, investigative, self reflexive and wandering. She relies heavily on syntax, or morphing, deforming, exploring syntax to keep her poems moving. She also uses fragment, and disjunctive ness too. And of course, indeterminate, she is. The hallmark of the post-modern, this last. 

The poem “Invocation” in On A Stair, is a more lyrical, more condensed, more romantic version of her work. Probably cause it was written as an Ode, or an apostrophe, a non-elegy, an encouragement for Bernadette Mayer, after she was rendered motionless, speechless and almost sightless from a huge stroke [from which she has since recovered a long way]. 

Lauterbach relies on spontaneity. Doesn’t plan out even her sentences. Each word has many possibilities for what comes after it. She is in love with possibility. A sentence wanders, taking off in the middle for other lands. 

Her word pool is strange. Besides the attributes given to Mayer (Mistress Quaker, Pilgrim, Hooligan of Ages) the poem is motored by “I” words: and complicated half abstract words like conditionally, viable, literal, incipient, brevity, dilated, dim, iteration, potion. 

In her investigations she never gives up, but surrounds some event, some thought, some perception. 

S. S. Van Dine. The Benson Murder Case. New York, Scribner’s, 1926.

“When an author has been so unfortunate as to write a popular novel, it is a difficult thing to live down the reputation. Personally I have no sympathy with such a person, for there are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.”  Willard Huntington Wright, 1909.

Philo Vance/Needs a kick in the pants.

Ogden Nash

With sales of over one million volumes, S. S. Van Dine was one of the most popular detective novelists of the Twenties. His series of novels featuring the self-consciously aristocratic detective Philo Vance were published by the august firm of Charles Scribner, and edited by the indefatigable Maxwell Perkins, also shepherd to the talents of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. S. S. Van Dine was really Willard Huntington Wright , a former academic and aesthete, art critic and editor with H. L Mencken of The Smart Set. Under his own name he published a half dozen books on art, society and literature (including a well reasoned attack on the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica). As S. S. Van Dine, his first of twelve mystery novels was The Benson Murder Case, published in 1926. His cultured and erudite detective/hero/alter ego, clearly reflects the new privileged lifestyles of the Jazz Age. as well as any number of quintessentially twenties qualities such as nerve and excess. They were highly and dramatically publicized. Although now they are more likely to be judged preposterous and pompous, they were immensely popular in their time and forecast an American obsession with the rich and famous continuing into the 21st Century. The Canary Murder Case broke all records for detective fiction, selling 20,000 copies in the first week of publication. It was also the first detective fiction to run in the eminent literary magazine Scribner’s. 

Van Dine’s stories were the anti-thesis of the hard-boiled school, taking place largely among the upper classes and in the realms of high society and high culture, featuring the people, events and institutions of New York, including Stieglitz and his gallery, the famous Halls-Mills Murder and other true crimes of the decade. Many of Van Dine’s six letter murder cases (Canary, Bishop, Kennel, etc) were made into movies starring William Powell or Basil Rathbone as Vance, and including among others the wildly popular Louise Brooks (who ends up a corpse in the Canary Murder Case). Ellery Queen and Rex Stout, were to follow more successfully in his footsteps as the fascination of the public with Van Dine and Vance waned in the thirties. He is largely forgotten today and when remembered, as a curiosity of the times.

The Director of Love

Richard Siken's
Crush is an amazing book. The long lines are merciless and perfect. They are so elegantly crafted they remind me of the beautiful strokes of paint. They also seem to be the work of a cinematographer.The book is of course about unrequited love, about the need for love, about the failure of love. But it is also about using form to discover what is important. To save yourself, one's self, his self. The hypnotism of the lines, the density of the texts makes us complicit, and proves a queer sort of intimacy. Does it matter that the tumultous and turbulent loves told about in the book are same sex? Yes and no. I don't know. It should. But I can see how it doesn't also. The structure of this book is the story, the story board even. It is no accident that the first poem is entitled Scheherezade. Siken's Thousand and One Nights are told with a combination of ferocity and sentimentalism (in the best sense of this poor word), and he saves himself from the worst excesses of romanticism and expressionism by the use of a variety of directions. Imagine this, look at that, etc. The Director of Love. The books ends hopefully.

of its time (early 2oth century) and place (California this is outstanding

James Tate's second full book was Oblivion Ha-Ha, published in 1970 by Little Brown. It has an orange and blue dust jacket with a picture of kite flyers. The back cover is a full page photograph of the romantic young author.
The book is most famous for three poems, "The Blue Booby," "Little Yellow Leaf," and "The Wheelchair Butterfly ('Beware a velvet tabernacle')." At first glance the book is full of funny surrealist poems, the song of a manic whipporwill. Its all of the same sequined cloth. However, just below the surface of so many of the poems there is a sad and lovely melancholy. The words which appear most are Orange, black, dark and darkness. The poems are in the same category as and somewhere in between Ashbery and Simic. In these poems bread sighs, a "rollerskate collides with a lunch pail," " the dark is an available religion," and "chameleons can walk around a small room." These are tall skinny poems of delight and despair. I particularly liked the following poems:

1. Poem, which starts of the volume, is terrific:
"He did the handkerchief dance all alone
O Desire! it is the beautiful dress

for which the proper occasion
never arises.

O the wedding cake and the good cigar!"

There's a little Kenneth Koch there too.

2. "Prose Poem," which is of course lineated and racous [raw cuss].

3. "The Tryst," in which the word 'baleful' is perfectly used.

6. When Kabir Died," " 

and these; Failed Tribute to the Stonemason of Tor House, Robinson Jeffers," "Conjuring Roethke," "No End to Fall River," and the long last poem "Bennington."

"Hello again, mad turnip,"

In The Big Sleep, Chandler introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled, incorruptible private detective who would feature in a series of novels and stories. What chance did anyone have? It was as if Rembrandt had inked comic books, or Rodin had sculpted sex dolls: Chandler, a writer who could somehow dazzle while describing a bougainvillea in a Los Angeles streetscape, placed an impossible-to-dislike protagonist in intricate plots with drawn-out mysteries, surprise twists, seductive dames, and enough corpses to keep the mortician’s wife in mink. The voice that croaks to life in The Big Sleep would be imitated many times over, but this was the book that first exposed readers to that combination of cynicism and wit. With time and a big-enough magnifying glass, you might spot an inconsequential loose end, but no matter. Chandler would be worth reading even if the plots were nonsense—for mood, for character, for sentence-by-sentence quality, and, most of all, for the lines. Here’s one to whet your appetite: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
                                                                 --------Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic's Great American Novels (March 14 2024)

An important book. So much fun, but also heartbreaking.Lana Turner/we love you get up.

Leopold Bloom, bloom, bloom. Fellow traveler. This is the ONLY book I've ever read twice. Hallelujah.
Peer into it a lot.Such language> ravishing