A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?

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Arlene Kim - What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoesPoet Arlene Kim rocked my literary heart at Richard Hugo House’s Lit Series earlier this year with an erasure poem displayed entirely in slides. This haunting response to the abuse of girls changed my conception of poetry. I bought her book, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, immediately and have carried it with me every day since.

Although the video of that evening’s performance is locked somewhere in a vault and I cannot share it with you, I can share this book and what it taught me about poetry. If you’re a returning reader to this blog, you know that I’m fascinated with poetry, but I am only recently learning to write it. So when I read a book like Kim’s, I am reading as much for what I can learn from it as I am for the beauty of language.

What Poetry Sounds Like

I’ve been reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry lately. In fact, it was his discussion of the way tension carries across a line that taught me to better hear poetry. Kim utilizes that tension incredibly well. In “Hollow Tongue” she writes, “The dead can speak / any language, I’d imagine,” and I became enraptured with the way the line breaks. I’ve run it over and over my tongue just to capture the way, as Pinsky has taught me, the line slows the sentence down and the sentence speeds the line up.

Another favorite selection I’ve been studying for line breaks is “Paper Suns,” where Kim writes, “My love. I tended him / after he fell. His charred wing stumps, / his elegy of scabbed feathers. Only then”. The line breaks give an extra charge to a poem already full of rich language and evocative imagery.

The Many Shapes of a Poem

My knowledge of forms of poetry is limited. What I can tell you is that Kim considers the entire page when she writes her poems.

The first poem in the collection, “Rot,” is a series of conventional paragraphs spread across multiple pages whereas “Wind,” also a poem set in paragraph form, gusts across the pages it covers with shifting margins and alignments. “Spool, Book, Coin” is written in very short lines that, according to the endnotes, mimic the wavering walk of a child. The way each of the poems in this book is laid out is so carefully considered and unique to each instance, that I wanted to (and will in the coming days) study them over and over to learn precisely how the layout and syllable counts affect my read of each poem.

Recurring Imagery

There are many images that Kim returns to again and again throughout the book including the woods, hair, and birds. It was the Biblical apple, though, that caught my attention. This was in part because it’s a relatively accessible image and occurs very early in the book, but it was also so lusciously invoked that I wanted to think about it over and over. “Rot” starts, “Begin / An apple. Experts agree that it starts with an apple.” The language was so simple and yet I was so firmly entrenched in Eden. I wondered how she did that and if I had somehow too firmly committed to one interpretation. The poem goes on in the next section:

A tempting red apple sits on the table. The person sees red, sees just the skin of the apple—not the flesh, or the seeds, or the table, or even the room. And certainly not the story. Not yet. The apple is of color. The person is of color. The apple has the property of redness. The person has the property of color.” – Arlene Kim, “Rot”

And so the poem isn’t just about sex and temptation but it’s about surfaces and the way we become beguiled and misled by them. There are many, many things happening beneath the surfaces of Kim’s poems and I look forward to discovering more as I read them. I was grateful for the notes she provides at the end of the book, but the poems are strong enough to do without them if you choose.

Now that I’m getting over my obsession with getting poetry “right” (damn you undergrad English courses), I’m really starting to enjoy reading poems. My favorite prose is usually about the language of a piece and concision anyway, and who spends more time crafting language than poets?

I recommend Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? for poetry newbies like me and also for my more educated poet friends. I learn from you, so please share your thoughts about the craft of this book with me in the comments below. And if I ever find that video of the erasure poem on the web, I’ll post it here.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Gabriela and the Widow: Jack Remick Teaches Writing through Writing

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The old adage, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” does not at all apply to Jack Remick. Before I read Gabriela and the Widow, Jack taught me about writing with the insightful questions he’d ask after we read our work aloud during the long-standing writing group at Louisa’s Café in Seattle. Reading Gabriela was even more of an education in the subtleties of craft.

Significant Detail

Driven from her village in Mexico by a civil war that kills her family, young Gabriela faces many hardships. Remick uses details like a “cotton blouse embroidered by hand in the faint light of the evening fire” to convey tender allusions to what Gabriela’s life must have been like before the war. When La Patrona, a woman who has “rescued” Gabriela, then takes this blouse and says she will burn it, the reader has a deeper understanding of how fully the woman is stripping away the essence of Gabriela.

When Gabriela craves a pair of white Nikes, it is easy to see that what she is really craving is a life like the Norteñas who wear these shoes. Later, Gabriela will be coaxed into other shoes, but even then the Nikes serve as a grounding point to indicate how much Gabriela is changing.

Objective Correlative

Terrible things happened to Gabriela when the war came to her village. Remick could have detailed them and we’d be struck by the horror without ever really getting inside Gabriela’s experience. Instead, Remick creates a correlation in Gabriela’s mind between toads and the horrible events—events that she refuses to quite remember. The reader sees her visceral reaction over and over anytime toads cross her path and in this way learns to empathize with her.

Remick builds on Gabriela’s reaction to toads throughout the story. What makes this relationship for me is when Gabriela begins remembering times of innocence that involved toads as well. The glimpse at what life was like before is heartbreaking and the tension between the dark and light memories makes both exponentially more touching.

Myths Retold

Gabriela finds safety in the North where she takes care of an ailing widow whose memory is failing. Gabriela helps her work on a list of objects and photographs and what they meant in the woman’s life. In return, La Viuda teaches Gabriela about what it means to be a woman. Though La Viuda has a somewhat colored view of the experience of womanhood, she doesn’t let her life turn her into a Miss Havisham. Instead, La Viuda intersperses myths and stories of great women with her own stories. Through tales about everyone from Helen of Troy to Xipe Totec, she helps Gabriela create an identity based on strength and womanhood as she transfers her life force to the young girl.

There are hundreds of things I could say about the reasons I loved this book—like the way Gabriela and La Viuda seamlessly slip from English to Spanish and back in their conversations, the magical realism (especially in relation to mirrors), or how in answer to La Viuda’s aging forgetfulness, Remick creates a shifting repetition that grounds the reader and also builds the narrative. What you need to know is the elegant craft reveals just the right amount of information to engage you, the reader, in telling the story.

Jack Remick can teach and he can sure as hell write. Read Gabriela and the Widow and find the things that speak to your writing. You’ll fall in love with the story and you’ll be a better writer for it. Although my work schedule doesn’t allow for weekday afternoons at Louisa’s anymore, I am grateful I can pick up Gabriela and learn from her and from Jack any old time.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Gabriela and the Widow from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Lisa Robertson Finds Poetry in Architecture

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Lisa Robertson Occasional WorkWhen I requested a review copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson, I was working as the managing editor of an architecture magazine while earning my MFA. The irony of my experience was how many architects used convoluted and turgid language to describe designs that were pared down to their purely minimal essences. The days I spent sorting through jargon like “fenestration” and “tectonics” were great training for nights spent finding the clearest way to communicate an idea in my own writing.

Essays on Art and Architecture

“We believe that the objective of architecture is to give happiness.”

A poet, Robertson uses her command of words to blend the architectural vernacular with everyday language. She writes in the persona of the Office for Soft Architecture which speaks in the first person plural about a wide range of issues that affect the urban environment from architectural style and color to invasive species.

One of the ways Robertson displays her skill with language is by pairing a simple sentence with a truly dense one:

“The Himalayan blackberry escaped. The plant’s swift rhetorical trajectory from aestheticized exotic, to naturalized species, to invasive alien, all the while concealing a spurious origin myth, displays a typically hackneyed horticultural anthropomorphism.”

At times, I found myself lost in the richness of her vocabulary, but the writing was so well crafted that I felt I still understood her meaning on some subliminal level. Just when I thought I might truly be done for, Robertson reeled me in by tying the lascivious undertones of strawberries in Jane Austen’s Emma to the Arts and Crafts Movement in British Columbia.

Some of my favorite essays in this book were commissioned to accompany art shows. I enjoyed leafing through the full-color illustrations of those shows and guessing what Robertson might have to say about them.

Seven Walks through a Changing City

“Imagine a very beautiful photograph whose emulsion is lifting and peeling from the paper. There is no longer a negative. To preserve it you must absorb this artifact through your skin, as if it were an antique cosmetic comprised of colloidal silver. You must absorb its insecurity.

The seven walks in this book are poetic journeys through a rapidly changing Vancouver. They are not meant as guidebooks. In fact, it would be impossible for an outsider to replicate the paths Robertson is describing. Instead, they impart the feeling of a city as it evolves around you. Sometimes she references architecture directly:

“Ruined factories rising into fog; their lapsed symmetries nearly gothic. The abandoned undulations of the vast mercantile storage facilities…”

Other times the walks become more emotional journeys.

“There was no window in the city that was not overtly moralistic – the roadways were illuminated and my decadence seemed to soak the asphalt so it shone.”

But the language is always evocative and it feels as though the setting is pregnant with potential stories even when Robertson is merely conveying a mood.

In Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Robertson finds poetry in the language of architecture and finds a new way to convey the experience of urban geography. It is a book architects will appreciate for the careful consideration of form and context and writers will appreciate for the plasticity of Robertson’s language.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Heidi Julavits and The Uses of Enchantment

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Was Mary Veal abducted from a high school field hockey practice or was she playing a sick joke on her family? Even after she resurfaces more than a month later, the answer is not clear. The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits explores what exactly happened to Mary using three interwoven stories that capture the angst of being a teenaged girl better than anything I’ve read in a long time.

Interwoven Narrative

These expertly linked tales give three very different views of Mary’s life. One tells what might have happened to Mary. It’s a story of a girl so desperate to be noticed or have something happen in her life that she runs away with a stranger. It could also be the story of a girl parroting another girl who made up a similar abduction years before.

“Let’s say that I tried to tell the truth and nobody heard me. Let’s say, then, that I’ve decided telling the truth got me nowhere. If I want anyone to listen to me, I have to construct a scenario that appears true, but isn’t.”

A second story is composed of Mary’s therapist’s notes from his sessions with her as he begins to develop a theory of “hyper radiance” based on Mary. It is a theory of how some girls take the negative energy of sexual repression and instead of allowing it to crush them, they turn it outward as a destructive force—“A work of art.”

The third narrative thread encounters Mary 14 years after the abduction as she returns to her family after her mother’s funeral. Here Julavits creates a compelling portrait of family dysfunction and denial dating back to the Salem witch trials. Because each character is richly drawn and plays a key role in the family’s enduring misery, the sections about them are fascinating rather than a trial of endurance à la The Corrections.

“Helen was a shadowy pro at expressing her own feelings by attributing them to others.”

Each story is so fully inhabited that I was guessing to the very end what really happened to Mary. And while I was focused on whether Mary told the truth, Julavits was feeding me all kinds of information about Mary’s experience that created this incredibly believable world of a young girl who feels lost, alone, and ignored.

Capturing the Essence of the Teen Mind

Like Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (I really have been on a teen angst reading binge lately), The Uses of Enchantment explores how truly wicked it is to be a teenaged girl and how that makes girls behave.

One of the things I love about this book is that Mary is ordinary. She’s smart but not necessarily brilliant and pretty but not remarkably so. Most of all she is in the middle of the torment of being a teen. All of the factors are there: the drama with siblings and peers, the complicated definition of self in relationship to parental expectations, and the pure work of trying to distinguish oneself just as you are learning who you are.

Mary uses the tools she has, manipulation and a budding sexuality (a real threat in a family where her mother cares more about whether she was raped than the actual abduction), to get noticed by her family. And the futility of being a teen comes through in Mary’s experience. She wields the power she thinks she has, but the people around her often fail to notice her efforts.

I highly recommend this book. While it isn’t exactly a mystery, it held me in suspense until the end and the world that Julavits creates is so well imagined in so many ways (dialogue, characterization, setting), that I think any writer will find something that relates back to your project and that you can learn from (all while you’re enchanted by a really good book).

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Uses of Enchantment from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Exploring the Aftermath of War in The Shadow of Xeno’s Eye

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When does war become your new normal, your life? What happens when the men in power then decide that war is over? These questions face us today in Afghanistan and Iraq just as they faced the Greeks after the fall of Troy. The Shadow in Xeno’s Eye by Jerry Soffer tells the story of one Ithacan soldier from the moment he bursts out of the Trojan Horse to the months after the Greek kings returned to their city states leaving a few men behind to guard the gates.

Inside the Trojan Horse

The beginning of the novel is chaotic. The Greeks are still mid-battle with Troy and a mess of men are waiting inside the horse for the moment when they will change the direction of this decade-long war. It’s a confusing scene and took me more than one read to understand where I was in time and what was going on, but once I got it, I was delighted to read this new perspective on a classic tale. I got a first-hand look inside the gates of Troy alongside the Greek soldiers after they emerged from the horse to see men “Gathered around a statue of a horned bird with jeweled eyes on a nest of vine leaves inlaid with gold.”

It’s been a very long time since I read The Iliad or The Aeneid, but from what I can recall, Soffer’s focus on the experience of lowly soldiers is a very different take than Homer or Virgil’s. Xeno, a simple Ithacan fisherman, encounters legends like Menelaus and Agamemnon, but his first-person narrative centers on the soldiers who bore the daily cost of war. If you don’t have any recollection of the basics of the Trojan War, you might feel like one of the soldiers on the field—taking orders without any real understanding of what’s happening—but even a quick Wikipedia skim will give you what you need to know.

“The men from Rhodes were quiet, even for a small contingent, but the feeling was more of weariness than brewing anger; voices were friendly, not raucous the way guys sometimes get. Their little brigade had a lot of seamen turned soldiers, like me, and they were glad it was over.” – Jerry Soffer

The Politics of Kings and Generals

One of the strongest scenes in the book is when Xeno overhears Agamemnon, Menelaus, and others discussing the real reasons they went to war and how they will resolve the problem of Helen. I remember the first time I heard George Bush utter about Saddam Hussein, “This is the guy that tried to kill my dad,” so it was easy to place myself inside Xeno’s mind as he realized how many lies had been told. What surprised me was how calmly Xeno reacted to the political intrigue. But as an ordinary soldier, Xeno’s good opinion was not going to be a deciding factor in the war… perhaps he realized that and escaped with what was most important to him—his life.

Boots on the Ground in an Unending War

Once Troy is sacked, it should be time for the Greeks to pack up Helen and sail back across the Aegean. But the kings want to preserve their right to settle Troy so a small group of men is left behind to guard the city. Xeno is among them and he takes for the first time a leadership role. It was very interesting to watch the men from different city states as their loyalties started to fracture. Soffer uses language rather than physical descriptions to delineate between different types of Greeks and also the tribesmen surrounding Troy. The pidgin in which they spoke to one another obviously affected relationships and trust between groups.

Perhaps I watched too much G.I. Joe as a child, but I kept waiting for Xeno to become a hero. He tried to work with the leaders each group listened to, but his leadership style was passive and I feared for all the men when the King of Phrygia showed up to take Troy for his own.

The Crone

Regular readers of this blog will know I have an obsession with crones. By far the most entrancing character for me was Beach Hag, an old woman living among the soldiers. Because of the way Soffer blended mythological characters with historical ones in dialogue (which is so spot on for this type of book), I kept waiting for her to transform into some goddess. I won’t spoil the book for you, but I will say that her presence was strong enough that when she disappeared, I waited anxiously for her to come back.

If you are a fan of history or are looking for an allegory to understand how unending wars affect the everyman who has to fight them, you’ll enjoy The Shadow of Xeno’s Eye.