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Mackenzie

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Plural

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Workman 1

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Review

Fan Wu is a semi-oceanic species of octopus jumping up and down. He works in performance, poetry, and the ecstasies of collective action. You can read his work in _Feeld, The Flaherty Film Seminar, The Vermin,_ and _C Magazine_. 

##### **Ⅰ.**

The power of a poem so depends on its expressive performativity. “Dave’s, Lake Michigan, Early June” (published in the _London Review of Books_, October 2015) performs a flowing scene of non-identity through the mouthpiece of its speaker. (We will call this speaker “Anne” for the sake of convenience, acknowledging our ignorance of her connection to the Anne who authors her.) How I mean non-identity: the poem performs a specific textual self, but it cannot exhaust the self that is its object, the self that the poem creates in its composition. Something of the self shimmers beyond the poem as a mystical lining. Some evoked feeling remains unspoken. What poetic language creates is greater than itself.

Anne has her own ideas about inexhaustibility:

> old monk saying.   
> Don’t look for a kernel

> of \[whatever you need\]   
> in the forms of things,

> seems to be the message.   
> You peel off the shell,

> get another shell.   
> Thunderstorms (evening)

Poetic non-identity is turtles (hells) all the way down; each reader peels a different layer away to reveal a different self underneath, endlessly. Just as things in the world resist your desire to pull “whatever you need” out of them, in this poem-object, there is no locatable essence that would grant Anne the coherence of an identity. The self never coincides with itself, as a moment never coincides with its occurrence. The non-correspondence between language and its subject casts a shadow from poetry upon our daily lives. Even when Anne sings of the “same joy and joy and joy,” no two joys are the same. The second and third utterances bear the temporality of repetition with a slight but undeniable difference. This poem speaks on behalf of the non-repeatability of each instant; the self is a layered thing infinitely unpeeling.

##### **Ⅱ.**

Anne’s poem begins with a PJ Harvey quote, “…\_until my middle name is excess\_…”, a scrap of lyric excised from the song that includes it, “We Float.” Another clue to the intertwinement between Anne’s mood, half-adrift in limbo, and the lake in which she swims.

Lake Michigan is the poem’s excessive middle; it is the tumultuous or restive vessel between two shores. First shore:

> I will sit on the porch and   
> try to think.

> Prepare for thinking   
> (in the car as we go)

The shore that opens the poem is the present casting a wish upon the future. My journey has a destination only through my _will_. Yet already some things are in the way of thinking, namely the verbs “try” and “prepare.” There is so much concern with forethought, which takes the form of laying the ground for thinking. Who knows what distinguishes thinking from its attempt, from its preparation. And Anne won’t tell: the poem is structured exclusively in tight-lipped free-verse couplets that hint at psychological depth without showing you what’s inside. The second shore:

> on the lake.  
> Packing up I consider

> how I mostly spent my time here  
> avoiding thinking.

Thinking, which at the trip’s outset was Anne’s goal, turns out to have been the evaded kernel that the poem circles around. The lake overwhelms the thinking self with its wealth of possible experiences, its crickets, its overhead lightning, its bone-chilling depth. It becomes for Anne the perfect place to arrest the question of thinking. (Of course, this excerpt investigates its own performative self-contradiction: doesn’t one need to think in order to write? Doesn’t the composition of the poem demand thought to put it into place?) Another question that reaches straight to the reader: Is there something traumatic or disturbing in thinking itself that she was avoiding by avoiding thinking? No answer. Only more avoidance when Anne invokes “some monk advice / to prevent / lofty thoughts on departure.” Leave them both behind, the thought and the thought of failing to think. Between two shores:

> Nightlong thunderbolts   
> move me from thinking

> to rethinking.  
> A lake,

Here, nature is the trigger for an unusual movement whose distinctions are unclear. What’s the difference between thinking and rethinking? Anne suggests that rethinking is not a matter of generation or creation, but a shift of perspective. After reading about “\_leac\_ (leek or garlic)” and “\_luxus\_ (excess, of ‘plants / growing obliquely or too much.’),” she begins “Rethinking garlic and bent plants.” We’re hardly able to find an instance of thinking that is not rethinking: where did the original, unrepeated idea go? Poetic language turns the world over for us again and again after the world is realized as devoid of a first thought.

##### **Ⅲ.**

The poem is divided into three parts. Roughly there is a chronology: I. Arriving at the lake; II. Settling in at the lake; III. Departing from the lake. Time takes place at most as a rough template, and within time the poem moves by free association. Anne switches registers; she looks at the root _men_ – in her book of etymology and discovers its relationship to monks; whereby she recalls an old monk’s parable, turns it around in her mind, before then turning her attention to the material world and how “A burning haystack / topples cleanly, ingeniously / into the lake.” Anne mixes the descriptive technique of haiku, which attends to the objective landscape, with the hushed lyricism of confessional poetry. In doing so, she stages poetic language’s passage from interior to exterior, its liminal position between psyche and lakescape.

So the poem, against the stability of identity, performs not a personality with qualities fixed by arrangements; but rather the impression of a process of thought whose loops and whorls are wildly connected, moving outward into the world, only to involute back into the non-identical self:

> Generally I admit  
> my spirit strays all over the place

> but there  
> in the numb stream

> it narrows to an absolute.   
> An absolute what?

> An absolute crossroads.   
> Breathe or die,

As her spirit strays, splitting herself from itself, the poem’s attention keeps wandering away until a dire moment erupts. Suddenly the body, closed into stillness by the cold of the lake, “narrows to an absolute” and locks into place as a locus of identity. But even here, in the absolute centre of the poem, nothing is absolute except an option, a possibility, a “crossroads. Breathe or die.” And, having chosen breath, Anne’s spirit strays forward, onward.

The poem gently invites you into the space of the Lake: I remember the calm of the body expiring in a minor pond in North Ontario, storm piling clouds into the pebbles. And thinking plainly about loss, and inquiring about language, all while the duskladen shore loaded up against me. Anne from the poem merges with my remembered self, in thunderstruck intimacy. Two non-identical moving spirits passing each other in the nightlong depth.

Writer

Performance

issue-130-p72-74.pdf

The article reviews Anne Carson’s poem “Dave’s, Lake Michigan, Early June”.

The Lake Is a Plate of Itself: On Anne Carson’s “Dave’s, Lake Michigan, Early June”

Tess Edmonson is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Much has been made of the negligence afforded to early 20th-century Swiss writer Robert Walser’s contribution to modernist literature, both during his lifetime and in its legacy. While authoring seven novels – _Jakob von Gunten_ (1909) most famous among them – as well as thousands of short stories, Walser supported himself in a variety of itinerant, low-paying occupations: bank clerk, copyist, butler. At 50, he checked into the Waldau Sanatorium, where he would remain the rest of his life.

_Looking at Pictures_, New Directions’ eighth book of Walser’s work, is among a number of 21st-century correctives in English translation. The collection consists of short pieces of prose – stories, scripts and critical writing – about art and its makers. Some of these were originally published in German-language journals and newspapers in the ’20s and ’30s, while others survive only in microscript form: an idiosyncratic shorthand Walser executed in pathologically small print on scraps and fragments of paper, an archive of which was thought to be inscrutable for decades after his death.

Among those microscripts reproduced here is “Diaz’s Forest,” written in 1924\. Describing an 1875 canvas by Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, the text exemplifies Walser’s interest in ekphrasis over its conventions. As in a number of the texts in _Looking at Pictures_, he begins by setting the painting’s subjects into narrative, activating them with a contextual fiction. In the forest, Walser writes, are “a little motherkin and her child”; the mother reprimands her child for its dependence. “I swear to you,” she tells it, “as truthfully as I am standing here with you in this forest painted by Diaz, you must earn your livelihood with bitter toil so that you will not go inwardly” (86). This is the first diegetic break, as the subject acknowledges her painter. The second comes as the painting’s leaves “murmur” about “\[w\]hat has been written in this brief essay” – the subjects acknowledge the critic. The effect is that of making indistinct what, in criticism, one takes for granted to be distinct: the artist, the subject, the writer, the reader.

A similar loosening occurs in “An Exhibition of Belgian Art,” whose title might mislead us to expect an exhibition review; its text, however, abruptly does away with the standard methodologies of art criticism, or rather with art altogether. Walser first tells us of the location of the exhibition; then of a coffee he drinks, a dream he remembers. In a conversational tone and with a structural non-sequitur, he asks if we’ve heard of the artist Niklaus Manuel, a 16th-century Swiss artist and dramaturge. He lets us know that Manuel was also a provincial governor in the town of Erlach, where Walser completed part of his military service during World War I. Walser’s cursory descriptions of the works on view –“now a vernal landscape, now a snowy one, now a flower painting, now a picture of a lady” (66) – make it clear that assessing their formal qualities is not the task at hand; this work will inevitably be performed by those whom it interests. “Everything I have neglected to say,” he writes, “can be given voice by others” (70). Rather, it is Walser’s peregrinations around the exhibition proper, the literary digressions that looking at pictures makes possible, that become central to art’s meaning-making.

Similarly circuitous is “Apollo and Diana.” In it, Walser considers Lucas Cranach the Elder’s c. 1530 painting of the twin gods of sun and moon, a photograph of which hangs in the rented room of the story’s narrator. His landlady, unimpressed by the display of nude figures, removes the picture from its place on the wall, leaving it face-down on a table. He reproaches her for this act of “falsely construed morality” (42), insists on hanging the image; she acquiesces, and even offers to mend his pants. The seeming nowhereness of this story– its lack of insight or allegory – points again to Walser’s privileging of the incidental over the willful, the anecdotal over the schematic. And as in “An Exhibition of Belgian Art,” these misdirections give evidence – managing both sentimentality and sarcasm – of the social life of the artwork.

Material considerations are also taken up in “Scene from the Life of the Painter Karl Stauffer-Bern,” which consists of a fictional dialogue between real historical figures: the painter of its title and his patron and mistress, Lydia Welti-Escher, a 19th-century Zurich heiress. In love, they escaped from Welti-Escher’s husband to Rome where, exercising his considerable political influence, the husband has Stauffer-Bern arrested. Both heiress and painter spent time committed to mental institutions; both exited and committed suicide shortly thereafter, within months of each other. In Walser’s script, they appear negotiating the matrices of art and power in which their love is bound up (“It offends and infuriates me to be financially dependent on you,” says Stauffer-Bern).

Walser’s historical fabrications extend equally to the biographies of Watteau (“As I attempt now to sketch his portrait, he seems to me like a wish, a longing” \[124\]); of Van Gogh, whom he concludes must have painted _L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux_ (1888–89) out of love and not for money; and of Aubrey Beardsley, whose life he envisions in detail: “If I am imagining him accurately, he would often lie all day with a graceful and very exact indolence in his luxuriously outfitted bed” (111– 112). But these are fictions that ring true, making possible unconventional modes of engaging with and writing about art. The pages of _Looking at Pictures_ give breadth to the ludic and the miniature, including insights both exceptional and mundane. One hundred years after their composition, released into contemporary art publishing’s thinkpiece economy, the texts’ purposefully limited scope gives way to a kind of linguistic play that has little currency in today’s writing about art. Of Beardsley, he writes: “Among other pages, there exists one by him depicting a burning candle. It may be that never before has an illustrator reproduced the flickering of a candle in so candle-like a manner, so flickery” (112).

issue-130-p71-73.pdf

This article reviews Looking at Pictures, a collection of prose by 20th century Swiss writer Robert Walser.

Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures (New Directions, 2015) 