The Best American Poetry 2020, Part II

I thought it was time to read another batch of poems. Many of the poems in this set shared themes of grief or illness. Victoria Chang's long narrow prose poem "Obit" echoes the shape of a tombstone. She writes of visiting her mother's gravesite after a stranger has been buried nearby:

                                      ...Before this other
stone appeared, my mother's stone was
still my mother because of the absence
around her. The appearance of the new
stone and the likeness to her stone
implied my mother was a stone, too, that
my mother was buried under the stone
too. ...

Ama Codjoe's "Becoming a Forest" at first feels like just a vivid imagining of the title--"in my marrow/the blood of sap, the rungs of pinecones"--but becomes more freighted with meaning: "...a cry, to be anything buzzing with blood/or wings, anything alive, including grief, because/isn't that ... what my long ago dead dreamed,/ tossed in their short allowance of night?"

William Brewer writes of peeling an orange on a airplane but connects it to Agent Orange, to herbicides and industrial waste and his father's cancer. Timothy Donnelly writes of his own cancer treatment, juxtaposed with news headlines of 2018, especially war-related violence in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, countries where the United States' foreign policy decisions directly or indirectly contribute to the death toll. Amidst this juxtaposition, there is this (perhaps even sublime) moment:

...I dropped a fossilized trilobite in the toilet

and it cracked in half. Millions of years of structural integrity
finished just like that. ...

In his contributor note, Donnelly elaborates: "The point isn't, of course, to compare personal suffering with suffering that takes place on a much greater scale and with far more complex implications, but rather to reflect on how both kinds of suffering will happen simultaneously, with the former sometimes distracting our attention from the latter in a way that is no less problematic for being kind of inevitable. The poem tries to widen its circumference in order to accommodate as much knowledge as it can, even to the point of documenting items of no apparent consequence, but it does so in the hope of keeping everything it remembers, even the merest debris of a life, from folding into oblivion. I have come to think of this as one of the two most important tasks a poem can set out to do."

The Old Drift

I was anticipating I'd have a lot to blog about after finishing The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, a weighty tome that tells a story about the history of Zambia, wound through with a multi-generational family saga, and ultimately flirting with science fiction. The truth is, though I found it interesting, I'm not sure I liked the book. It's not that the characters weren't likable--some were quite unlikable, but I still was able to sympathize with them and wish for their success (OK, I lost my goodwill for a couple of the men, but only in their later years; even the men I resented most were mostly likable as boys and youth). It took me some time to get into, perhaps because--after a striking preface voiced by a mosquito swarm, which returns chorus-like at transitions throughout the novel--the first section is told from the point of view of one of the early English colonizers, complete with dense language and saturated with racism. In the afterward, Serpell reveals that much of the detail comes directly from the real autobiography of Percy M. Clark. I read many books that include a family tree at the beginning, but in few does the visual impact my reading as much as this one did while I was reading The Old Drift--it captures not all, but most, of the interactions between the three focal families, and in some instances it assures the reader that characters, often in dicey circumstances, live long enough to have children. I wonder if I would have experienced the pace of the novel differently if I hadn't known who was going to survive (and, in some cases, hook up). Knowing that the author is Zambian, I was surprised that so many of the focus characters are white; some explanation for this comes from the "swarm": "This is the story of a nation--not a kingdom or a people--so it begins, of course, with a white man." It makes me wonder how Serpell would tell the story of a kingdom or a people.

Perhaps one of the elements that kept me at a bit of a remove was the lack of sentimentality--despite the many connections that are made over three-plus generations and more than a century--there is a dearth of romance. The characters are often aimless and self-deluded; even where there is drama (or even melodrama or elements of allegory--I think of the perplexing figure of Sibilla and of the Weepers), there is seldom a straightforward hero. This is a book told over time but deeply skeptical of "progress"; by its end, great changes have taken place, but the implications for individuals or the greater groups/swarms to which they may belong remain murky and up for discussion.

Eh, not feeling super inspired. Hate to break the streak, though, so here goes. I was feeling somewhat inspired over the weekend when I finished this journal page, partly inspired by an Effy Wild Moonshine painting and partly inspired by reading Jungian interpretations of fairytales.

My recent fairytale reading has primarily been through The Water of Life: Russian Tales in Jungian Perspective by Nathalie Baratoff. (One nice feature is that she discusses the cover painting in her preface). The book includes seven Russian fairytales, as collected by Alexandar Afanas'yev, each followed by Baratoff's analysis where she explores how the figures of the tale represent aspects of the psyche and their relationships to each other. There is definitely something a little different about the Russian fairytales, although the analyses often hit the same beats as von Franz's or Neumann's analysis of Greco-Roman myth. There's a lot of Baba Yaga. In some ways, women seem more present in these tales,

although most of the them do follow the coming-of-age adventures of male youth (the exception is "The Feather of Finist, the Bright Falcon." And, while "Mar'ya Morevna" actually focuses on Ivan Tsarevich, Mar'ya still has a compelling presence, casually slaying an army off-screen). Surprisingly, there's one fairytale that ends with the two heroes eaten by lions (and this is the tale that, to me, had echoes of Arthurian romance, particularly Gawain's quests). Sometimes we're just not ready/able to integrate some of the unconscious elements may be the moral of that one--don't worry, most end with some version of a hieros gamos.

Ring Shout

Last week I wrote about reading Charlaine Harris' Gunnie Rose books. I was thinking about what other books I would compare them to. Although they're not really that urban (perhaps with the exception of San Diego-set The Russian Cage), I think they're similar in tone to other urban fantasies, Seanan McGuire's October Daye and Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson series, for example.

The alt-history and Old West vibes call to mind Cherie Priest. Also Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory books. It seems like there's been an increase in contemporary Westerns and alt-Westerns--in part, I think, combatting a historic whitewashing of the Western genre and depicting a more diverse and often more accurate landscape. Karen Memory, for example, brings in as a character Bass Reeves, the first black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River.

One recent alternate history standout is Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. It's one of Tor's novellas, and it packs it  powerful punch in under 200 pages. It features a sharpshooting female protagonist, Maryse Boudreaux, and her crew of women fighters, combatting the literally monstrous ku kluxes, a supernatural threat embedded within the Klan. WWI is over and veterans have returned to a country still marred by racial violence, with Birth of a Nation playing as a recruitment message for the KKK. Maryse and her crew work with the community effort led by Gullah wisewoman Nana Jean to harness the power of the ring shout to combat the power of the kluxes.

The action of Ring Shout is dense, but it introduces a compelling cast, several action sequences, harrowing encounters with a despicable villain, spiritual journeying, moral dilemmas, dubious bargains, and a climactic mountain-top battle with worldwide stakes. It draws heavily on horror (much more so than I prefer, although it's appropriate to the subject matter; while I'm not very well versed in Lovecraft or the contemporary responses to his mythos, I'm sure there are parallels with some of them, likely including Lovecraft Country) and is deeply steeped in African and African American traditions.

Sidenote: Katherine Hazzard-Donald's Mojo Workin' gives an interesting nonfiction perspective on the role of ring shout in "the old African American hoodoo system," along with many other aspects of hoodoo.  

Weird and Wondrous

Kind of a low-key day. I felt enjoyably productive yesterday & kind of anticipated more of the same today, but instead I basically just loafed around.

Anyway, in honor of Easter, I thought it might be a good opportunity to blog about two recent reads that really embodied a "sense of wonder," Flames and The Rain Heron by Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott. Both are pretty unique: language on the literary side; I suppose I'd label them "magic realism" if I really had to pick a label. Both set in Tasmania (or some version of it), both paying close attention to nature and to human nature.

Flames begins:

Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge. She was definitely our mother--but, at the same time, she was not our mother at all. Since her dispersal among the fronds of Notley, she had changed. Now her skin was carpeted by spongy, verdant moss and thin tendrils of common filmy fern. Six large fronds of tree fern had sprouted from her back and extended past her waist in a layered peacock tail of vegetation. And her hair had been replaced by cascading fronds of lawn-colored maidenhair--perhaps the most delicate fern of all.

This kind of thing wasn't uncommon in our family.

It does not get less strange from there. The next chapter powerfully tells the story of a hunter, a man who bonds to and swims with a seal to hunt tuna. While the novel ultimately centers around the brother and sister children of the fern woman, each chapter is told from a different point of view, ranging from a hard-boiled woman detective to a river god in the form of a rakali water-rat, as the story itself ranges across Tasmania before returning to Notley Fern Gorge.    

Flames seems timeless in some ways but is set in the present day. The Rain Heron is set in a post-apocalyptic near future (although perhaps "apocalypse" is a bit strong; life goes on, in its way, perhaps "post-coup"). A troop of soldiers is sent to a rural mountain-top, to hunt down a woman who is said to know the location of the mythic bird. If The Rain Heron or the myth/folktale at its heart has a moral, it's not a clear or simple one. It is, in part, a story about choosing violence and choosing nonviolence.  

The Best American Poetry 2020

One way I'm celebrating National Poetry Month this year is by reading the most recent installment in The Best American Poetry series. I've done this a few times before; it can be fun to see to whether the selected poems (about 75) seem to complement or contrast with the guest editor's style. I'm not familiar with the work of Paisley Rekdal, guest editor for the 2020 volume. I'll come back and read her forward after I've finished the anthology (the introductions often quote from the included poems, and since most of these recent poems are new to me, I like to come to them fresh first).

I won't read the collection in one sitting; generally, I'll read batches of 5 or 10 poems, first the poems and then the contributors' notes. All of the poems in the first batch of 5 (they're arranged alphabetically by poet's last name) are interesting, though none will probably make my personal favorites list. The author notes were particularly engaging; Reginald Dwayne Betts writes of reading past editions (and notes sections) as a young man "sans MFA program, sans writing mentor, sans a functional library" and being inspired. His poem "A Man Drops A Coat on the Sidewalk and Almost Falls into the Arms of Another," capturing a moment between two drug addicts, is probably the most lyrical. The title bleeds into the opening lines:

            as in almost Madame Cezanne in Red,
            almost falling, almost no longer--as in
            almost only bent elbows, almost more
            than longing, almost more than unholy,
            more than skag, white lady, junk, almost

            more than the city eclipsing around them,
            Winchester Gun Factory's windows as broken
            as the pair refuse to be ...

Julia Alvarez' opening poem, juxtaposing the public responses to the Thai soccer team trapped in a cave and the children imprisoned at the U.S./Mexico border, is more narrative. "We can become the good people we already are," she concludes in her contributor note.

Iranian American poet's "Invention of I" seems ghazal-inspired, with couplets contrasting English and Farsi/Persian grammar and cultural values. The longer excerpt from Rick Barot's "The Galleons" is also comprised of couplets, here with more of a prose-like tone. He writes of his mother's experiences as a Philippine immigrant, sometimes speaking on a grand scale ("Maybe history is a net through which/just about everything passes."), sometimes quoting directly from recorded interviews, sometimes describing archaeological history, sometimes family history ("You know  that wedding ... dress in the picture, we had to borrow it from our neighbor.").

Brandon Amico's "Customer Loyalty Program" uses the dense, generic-seeming language of commercialism ("The opposite of not existing/is shopping. ... I am my credit score") with some (kind of black) humor. I enjoyed spotting a reference to the Beatitutes ("...I withhold./I charitable contribution. I put into/a MEEK fund so I inherit whatever's left/when the wars are done. ...").

Charlaine Harris' Latest

Oh, do I hate spending hardcover money on a book I consider a "beach read"--something relatively short & fluffy, probably a romance or urban fantasy. It's not that I won't re-read these books eventually; it's just penny-pinching plus a bred belief that some books were just made to be mass market paperbacks. Still, I knew I was risking some new-release spending when I picked up An Easy Death and A Longer Fall, the first two books in Charlaine Harris' new-ish Gunnie Rose series. 

I'm a big fan of Living Dead in Dallas & the Sookie Stackhouse books (sure, they fall off a bit toward the end) and I found the Midnight, Texas trilogy middling but enjoyable. I was in the mood for something relatively light that wouldn't require an epic commitment, and Harris seemed to fit the bit. I also thought there was a chance the stories in the first two books would be self-contained enough I wouldn't feel I absolutely had to buy the latest. (In fact, that build of telling a contained story, episode-style, while also building up higher stakes in the larger fictional world is a skill of Harris', notably deployed in the Southern Vampire series.) And I suppose I could have stopped after the first two installments: the particular job is fairly well wrapped up at the end of each novel, but the larger stakes and questions--the relationship between Liz & Eli and the question of succession in the Holy Russian Empire--remain hanging. And The Russian Cage, just from the title, has to address some of that, right? (Part of me wonders if this could turn out to be a trilogy; it seems to have the potential to sustain a longer series, but I imagine things are going to escalate quick after crossing the border into the HRE.)

The books are urban fantasies in Western clothes, or vice versa. In a world where the United States fragmented after FDR's assassination, various droughts, and influenza (and the Romanovs fled Russia to eventually take over California), Lizbeth Rose is a gunnie, a gun-for-hire guarding settler caravans and other travelers. The likable heroine is probably the series' best feature, though the shoot-outs (Lizbeth may have a moral compass, but it's remarkable how often it points to justified killing) and the worldbuilding are a lot of fun. The secondary characters are sometimes sketchy but usually interesting--you can appreciate Harris' mystery-writing bona fides & while the initial security job generally seems straightforward, there always ends up being an element of mystery.  And suspense ... think I'll get back to it now ...

Basically a 21st Century dime novel, but awfully pretty.