Poetry in Prose

There’s no getting around the fact that Ben Lerner, author of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is primarily a poet, having published three collections before this foray into fiction. It’s not, in itself, a criticism. Beautifully written and keenly observed, the novel is more than passable as a sustained piece of fiction, coherent and effective at characterization, and with a number of compelling scenes.  But in his narrator’s concern with issues of translation, his asides on the function of poetry and the aesthetics of verse quoted in prose, and his pointed choice of words and phrases like “insufflation,” “hemic,” “the law of excluded middle,” to carry his meaning, Lerner imports the economy of language and density of thought more commonly associated with poetry.

Leaving the Atocha Station documents the stay in Madrid of Adam Gordon, a young poet on a fellowship in early 2004, tracing his development as a poet over that period. Gordon’s project, as described to the fellowship committee, is to produce a long, research-driven poem on the lingering effects of the Spanish Civil War on present-day Spaniards. The actual project Gordon has undertaken is more nebulous—a mystery even to himself—and not explicitly concerned with poetry. He avoids the other fellows and foundation staff and spends most days alone, reading Tolstoy and visiting a local art museum. Eventually he makes friends with locals, and is drawn into Madrid’s arts culture.

The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment . . . then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight . . . and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade. In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud.

This early passage encapsulates Gordon’s approach to his time in Spain as well as Lerner’s direct, borderline laconic, prose style. Gordon is forever modulating his state via spliffs, tranquilizers, alcohol, and “white pills” (probably antidepressants) that he self-administers in varying doses according to whim. Lerner documents moments like these in a straightforward, clipped style, alternating them with the rambling yet incisive intellectual meditations of Gordon’s internal monologue.

Lerner’s evocation of place is one of the novel’s great strengths. His use of Madrid as a backdrop is nearly as inspired as his choice to place Gordon there in 2004. Asked by his girlfriend, Isabel, why he is studying Spain and Franco now, instead of America under George W. Bush, Gordon can only make pretentious replies even he finds unsatisfying: “‘The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,’ I said, meaninglessly.”  When Isabel further challenges him, he greets her anger, “with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing,” in his rudimentary Spanish. His clumsiness with the Spanish language parallels the inherent difficulty of his relations with other people—Isabel doesn’t remain his girlfriend for long—which in turn evokes the myriad difficulties Gordon has with poetry.  Even when he stumbles into a historic moment for Spain, it serves to rouse him only briefly: as all of Madrid masses for street demonstrations, Gordon pursues Teresa, a translator whose polite disinterest in Gordon as anything more than a fellow poet and friend is maddeningly clear.

Gordon is daft, arrogant, and petulant, while also being thrillingly sharp in his internal monologue. Lerner integrates a number of engrossing mini-treatises into the text in the guise of Gordon’s stream of consciousness. Reading the work of John Ashbery on a long train ride, Gordon notes that although Ashbery’s poetry uses “language that implied narrative development—‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘later’—such  terms were merely propulsive.”  It’s a credit to Lerner’s facility sustaining the world of Gordon’s heightened, drug-addled intellect that such an observation feels not only unforced but fresh and engaging.

That observation also suggests a way of reading Leaving the Atocha Station. Time passes, and occasionally one of Gordon’s actions leads to something, but mostly the framework suggesting narrative development is, indeed, “merely propulsive.”  The novel is full of fascinating ideas, often displaying beautifully repeating patterns and surprising connections, but it falls short when it comes to plot. Lerner derives some narrative excitement from the historic moment mentioned above, and a bit more from Gordon’s pursuit of Teresa, and a tiny bit from his dilemma over whether to remain in Spain at the end of his fellowship. But by and large the novel’s events, such as they are, feel desultory, a string of occasions about which Gordon can pontificate. Combined with Lerner’s somewhat cool tone, the result is often a sluggish read.

But it seems fair to conclude that crafting a white-knuckle thrill ride was not Ben Lerner’s intent in taking on the novel.  As much as the novel is about anything, it is about Gordon fighting his way to an uneasy peace with poetry.  Where he begins the novel somewhat cynically, assembling meaningless poems by taking random phrases and then translating and mistranslating them, by novel’s end Gordon has reached a place of greater comfort in his relationship to poetry.  He arrives there by way of an almost-mystical process of gaining experience and confidence. It’s the same slow artistic growth encountered by any artist, and here it is rendered carefully, in invisible increments, by Lerner.  Poets, poetry readers, and especially fans of Lerner’s work will likely be excited, and rightfully so, to explore the author’s fascinating meditations in this new and fertile form.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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A Man Who Says No

An Algerian born working class Nobel laureate, Camus wrote fiction, plays, essays, and speeches. And he looked all the world like Humphrey Bogart. In The Rebel he asks: how can one respond to the experience of absurdity, without turning to nihilism and suicide, or the tyranny and murder that too often follows revolution? Assuming rebellion is “an essential dimension of human experience”, Camus examines how the rebel should act, and what the terms and consequences would be of that action. He considered this book-length essay a counterpart to his celebrated Myth of Sisyphus, and in it he takes on the massive concepts of value, freedom, and justice. Like the rebel, his method is provisional—and necessarily so. He progresses by associative leaps, metaphors, and delicate particulars.

Camus begins by describing a certain kind of rebel whose impetus is the experience of outraged innocence, an insulted sense of dignity: the feeling that something has “gone on too long” or someone has “gone too far”. Rather than respond destructively or try to replace what oppresses him, this person “pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror.” In this sense the rebel is unlike the heretics (“evil, be thou my good”) and the radical leaders (“we must force them to be free”) who set themselves on the level of their enemies regardless of consequence and “side only with themselves”. After sketching the characteristics of the ideal rebel, epitomized by none other than Ivan Karamozov, Camus establishes a genealogy of those who thought and acted in response to the metaphysical demands of their times. He moves from Sade to Baudelaire and the “dandies”, to Stimer, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and the surrealists. His observations about these men and the aesthetics that guided them are full of critical admiration special to those who study out of love and necessity.

“More a writer than a philosopher.” — Advisor’s note on Camus’ dissertation

The latter part of the essay sketches a history of rebellion by surveying the stages of the French revolution, then turns to rebellion and the act of artistic creation. The artist refuses the salvific myths of otherwordly justification, even of social or political progress towards an ideal state. The artist makes this refusal in favor of adapting and stylizing the experience ready at hand on its own terms, creating a world out of and within this one. In the closing section, Thought at the Meridian, Camus draws on all of his stylistic powers in a statement of determination and encouragement. Facing and accepting limits is his strongest advice for rebels who refuse to assimilate the characteristics of those they stand against: “The revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits.” This sense of measure offers a treatment for the malady of nihilism, and an alternative code of action for the rebel.

After its publication in 1952, (he had just recovered from a relapse of tuberculosis), most of the French intellectual circle would have nothing to do with him. Sartre’s main complaint was Camus’ rejection of Marxist-Leninism—the kind of political action that he had found imperative as a responsible thinker. There was a big fuss about The Rebel’s wrongs and weaknesses. Camus not only lacked large-scale political strategies, he lacked a systematic understanding of many of his sources. More than that he lacked a logically stable method of argument. In The Philosophical Review, David Sachs spoke for a significant group of critics when he observed of The Rebel that “claims are made in the name of logic, but where ‘logic’ occurs, it sometimes would be better to read ‘tendency’ or ‘drift’…Camus gives the impression of employing a procedure and reaching a conclusion more original and profound than in fact they are”. He wasn’t playing by the rules.

It may be possible to read Camus’ “drift” more generously—as a method adopted not out of laziness or ineptitude, but as an extension of his concern with rebellion. This long essay evidences a conceptual and expressive refusal to capitulate, not only to political ideologies, but to conventional modes of inquiry, a generic regime, or as Sachs puts it, “procedure”. The mode of reasoning Camus refuses (or fails) to participate in prescribes how a good thinker thinks. Modeled after god himself, a voice in the dark void of the universe, conventional reasoning predisposes its participants to singular positions and enforceable claims. Linear, not addressing what it deems irrelevant or unworthy, its power is brutally formulaic, predictable, and closed. Any interlocution is highly manipulated. As revolutions end in oppression, so conventional reasoning perpetuates reductionism under the myth of an ideal language for thought.

Camus takes issue with the premise of universal reasonability in The Rebel and elsewhere. For him, people are reasonable but the world is not. This gap is what interests him. And it is reason in the face of its disastrous context—the experience of the absurd, the mind against its limits, the conditions of life—that Camus engages. Drowning men don’t dance. Even if it were possible it would be unbefitting. Many a professor has smiled with tender condescension at the tattered works of Camus stuffed in the pockets of their students. But those who marginalize Camus as a “good writer but messy thinker” may be missing his true value. His insistence endears; his prose addresses the senses and emotions as well as the intellect. His ideas make sense on their own terms and his methodology, while provisional and limited, has integrity to his subject rare even in those who think clearly.

Andrea Applebee lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Publishing Solo is a new monthly blog series focused on topics relating to self-publishing. Its purpose is to provide information and engage conversation amongst both up-and-coming and established writers as we search for new ways to get our work out of that sad desk drawer and into the changing literary world.


Unless you’re a toddler who has handled an e-reader since the age of 4 (ahem, my nephew) or the offspring of publishing trailblazers Richard Nash and Jason Epstein (show me that baby!), chances are good that you’re still clinging to traditional publishing methods. You may not want to. You may deny it. But somewhere, deep inside, most writers want The Traditional Route—from your hands to an agent to a publisher to the shelves. Follow it up with a book tour, maybe a prize, some acclaim, an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, and massive sales (or, you know, a small but respected audience, if you’re into that sort of thing).

Beyond tradition, what is it that is so alluring about this model?  We live in an era where we embrace a constant stream of new media, a DIY culture of personal websites, YouTube videos, blogs, and social networking tools. We’ve become steeped in self-promotion. We’ve been presented with a bevy of self-publishing options, from total publishing packages, provided by such outfits as BookPros, to online print-on-demand platforms, such as Lulu, Amazon’s CreateSpace, and Xlibris. If you’re lucky, you may even find yourself in a retail store with an Espresso Book Machine, where you can literally watch your book being made in seven minutes. Yet we continue to pine for an outdated system.

I’ll admit it. I’m as guilty as the next person. And the things I want from traditional publishing are pretty much the same things most people want.

I want to be chosen. I want to rise above the slush pile, to be told my work is worth it, really worth it, by some discerning editorial eye. I don’t want my mother’s “it’s really lovely, honey” and I don’t want my workshop’s carefully neutralized critique, adhering to the prescribed ratio of “3 good things to 1 constructive comment.”  I want my work to be so good, damn it, that I am worth 55 lb. crème paper, a jacketed hard cover, and a paperback reprint. Perhaps this would quell, once and for all, that hideously stereotypical downward spiral of “my work sucks, I suck, everyone hates me.” Wail, wail.

I want someone to do the work for me. Let’s say I’ve written a book. I’ve nursed it, cursed at it, rewritten it, and repeated this cycle a few million times. For so many months or years, it’s been my baby. And now that it’s out of the cute phase, I want someone else to take care of it. I want a publisher who will connect me with an editor, develop a marketing plan, design a dashing cover, print a few thousand copies, and then sell them all.

I want to get paid. Self-publishing involves money upfront—not necessarily a lot, but you’ve got to pay something to have your book produced. In the traditional model, I don’t put money upfront. I am given money. That’s simplifying things, certainly, but you get the general idea. The publisher breaks down and tracks the financial details, determines the profit or loss margins, and alters all those adjacent elements—production, distribution, marketing—accordingly. While self-publishing often yields a higher percentage of profit per book, it also forces the writer to take charge of the financials. Personally, I happen to like a nicely formatted, auto-equating Excel spreadsheet. But this does not make me business savvy.

I want respect. If you have a book, people inevitably ask “what is it about?” But that isn’t what they really want to know—they want to know if it’s any good. If you have an agent, people want to know if they’re with a prestigious agency and what famous writers they’ve represented. And if you actually publish your book, people want to know who that publisher is. If it’s one of the Six Sisters—Random House, Penguin Putnam, HarperCollins, Time Warner, Simon & Schuster, Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings (whose subsidiaries include Farrar, Straus and Giroux, St. Martin’s Press, and Macmillan, amongst others)—nearly anyone will be wide-eyed and congratulatory. If it’s one of the world’s 85,000-ish small presses, the response is a tad bit different. Certain small presses have achieved a particular renown—Graywolf, Fence Books, and Nightboat come to mind. In these instances, select people will be dutifully impressed. If it’s a press that isn’t immediately recognizable, you’ll get the smile and nod. Then you’ll begin the justifications—a litany of the press’ attributes, successes, blah blah blah.

I could go on, but these are the issues that repeatedly come to the forefront whenever I consider what I should do with that manuscript fermenting on my hard-drive.

One would imagine that I, of all people, would not be so stubbornly hung up on The Traditional Route. After all, I do work in the self-publishing industry. I have seen firsthand some of the extraordinary benefits of forgoing a standard publisher. The economy of production and costs can have enormous benefits to the writer, the person purchasing the book, and the environment. Self-publishing can also be a valuable stepping stone to dealing with a traditional publisher. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve seen manuscripts that would not have otherwise seen the light of day put into the hands of people who have truly enjoyed them.

Let’s face facts. If you’re hung up on snagging a deal with a major publisher and you’re not Snooki in the throes of her 15 minutes of hyper-fame, you’ve got a tempestuous road ahead of you. Because of declines in book sales, the turbulent economy, and rise of the digital, major publishers are placing their bets on celebrity works and established authors. At the DIY Authors Conference at BookExpo America this past year, many significant panelists pointed out that the number of debut novels picked up by conglomerate publishers has dwindled considerably in the last few decades. There is perhaps no better time to consider alternate publishing methods.

Keep in mind that at a time when statistics are stacked against you, self-publishing does not necessarily signify a lack of talent or ability. In a sense, it returns the focus to the most important aspect of publishing—making the work publicly available. It’s worthwhile to consider your stubborn reasons for sticking with the traditional publishing model. Doing so pinpoints what you want out of publication and provides focal points and goals for your first self-publishing endeavor.


Up next month: self-publishing success stories.


Beth Steidle is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, DIAGRAM, and numerous print anthologies. She is currently employed as the first Self-Publishing Coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh Book Center, where she operates an Espresso Book Machine. Mostly she loves this machine. Sometimes she feels like kicking it.


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I’ll Take the Crazy Uncle Instead

Sometimes when I’m relating tediously essential information to a co-worker—inconsistencies within a fiscal report, for instance—I’ll notice a glaze of boredom slip over her eyes for a few seconds before she starts, then mutters apologetically: “Can you repeat that? I know your mouth was moving, but all I heard was blahBLAH blahBLAH blahBLAH.” This is how I often felt while reading Rosamund Lupton’s debut novel, Sister. What is on one level an eminently readable novel, with predictably-paced forward motion, is on another level a tepid rehashing of every Law and Order episode and blasé Hollywood cop-conspiracy movie you’ve ever seen. Ultimately, the blahBLAH diagnosis proves fatal for this modern crime thriller as it attempts a 285-page uphill tease before squashing not one, not two, but three twists into a tiresome 30-page finale.

To be fair, perhaps my expectations were set too highly. I was a victim of aggressive marketing. Already released in the UK and slated for US release in June 2011, the advanced reader’s plain blue cover demanded, in bold yellow letters, that I “READ THE UK PHENOMENON THAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT!” Beneath this was a smattering of succinct praise: “Exceptionally confident domestic gothic thriller,” says The Guardian; “Stunningly accomplished,” says Daily Mail; “Utterly compelling,” says Closer Magazine. I felt bullied and won over before I’d even opened the thing.

As one might expect, Sister revolves around the indissoluble link between two siblings: Beatrice, an uptight marketing executive transplanted in Manhattan, and Tess, her beautiful bohemian counterpart, recently found dead of an apparent suicide. Beatrice, distraught over her sister’s death, returns to London where she finds the situation immediately suspect. Her sister’s flat provides the stock setting for an unraveling crime, replete with stereotypically charged props: baby clothes for a stillborn child, creepy lullabies recorded on an antiquated answering machine, paintings of masked men, a broken window, an unplugged phone.

And voilá. You can already begin to see where this is going. Is the uptight exec going to come undone and discover what is truly important in life while solving the crime? Is the world going to attempt to sully the beautiful sister’s character only to have her returned to eternal grace? Yup and yup. The initial pairing of these female archetypes, with their ready-made impending reversals, is only the first of many stock characterizations. Coming up: a couple of incompetent detectives, one kooky psychiatrist, an overbearing mother, a posse of art students with facial piercings, some slimy men, and the pregnant woman who looks like a prostitute but has a heart of gold. If you feel like you’ve met them before, it’s because you have—they’re cliché characters given screenplay-sketched personas, with none of the fat an actor would bring to the role.

It’s not surprising that Lupton’s bio notes that she spent many years as a scriptwriter. Even the opening lines, rendered in a conversational tone, have the air of a voice-over. The story begins in letter format, with the words “Dearest Tess, I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment…” One expects this direct dynamic to shift, as these things often do, into a more traditional first-person narrative. Let the cinematic action commence! But Lupton chooses to keep the entire novel in letter format, a technique which she manages, surprisingly, to pull off and which occasionally yields the one element I ultimately valued: a transformation of the reader.

In fiction workshops, we’re warned consistently against the use of the second-person point of view. A sprinkling, perhaps. We’re pointed towards Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big Cities, as an anomalous 80’s-fueled exception, with the caveat: You can’t replicate it, so don’t try. In Sister, Lupton uses the “you” address in a more poetic fashion, most often in an implied manner, married to the “I”, or in extremely personal moments. There were plenty of times when the “you” didn’t move me, but instead reinforced my intrusion in a narrative fixture. But when it worked, it worked well. It drew me so strongly into the text that for brief moments I felt a direct connection, a merging of my past with Tess’ past, which was, in and of itself, a weird contemplative flare on death and the impotent status of the reader. For instance, when Beatrice says, “he also reminded me of Mr. Normans (did you have him for math?)”, there is that brief moment where I found myself thinking, Wait…who did I have for math?

And yet, it was all too few and far between. Even such remarkable flares could not compensate for the thin characters, increasingly preposterous plot, and unintentionally hilarious moments. When Beatrice says “my ending was a strand of hair caught in a zipper,” I just don’t know what that means. And when the killer, in the middle of an attempted murder, says (this is not a spoiler), “Who has an answering machine nowadays with a tape? Everyone’s got voice mail through their telephone provider,” I laughed out loud. A couple pages later comes the line “[The killer's] hubris was huge and naked and shocking.”

SPOILER…or not: the killer is a man. In fact, this would never have been a spoiler because Lupton seems to have imbued her entire novel with a militantly feminist bent. Not many of the characters are particularly likeable, but the men tend towards the heinous: the abandoning father, abusive boyfriend, lukewarm fiancé, despicable adulterer, stalker, dismissive policemen and, well, the murderer. And while it did not seem surprising to me that Lupton’s brief bio mentioned her scriptwriting credentials, I did find it strange that the only other thing mentioned was that she lives with her husband and two sons.

While I clearly wasn’t wowed here, I do believe there are interesting elements at play with both the novel and the author. I don’t mean to insinuate an inherent failure. Lupton is clearly skilled. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be so riled up. She understands the quintessential elements of successful pop fiction: a clipped pace, an emphasis on plot, a particular economy of language. Perhaps she just needs a little bit more time to adjust to the lushness, nuances and complexity that the novel form offers. By her third or fourth book I expect to be won over.

Beth Steidle is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, DIAGRAM, and several anthologies.

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Gina Ochsner weaves together the perspectives of multiple characters living in a slum-like apartment building in Perm, a city in post-Soviet Siberia, in her introspective first novel, The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight. The characters the reader spends most time with are Olga, whose job at the newspaper The Red Star is to “translate” distressing news stories into more palatable terms; her son Yuri, a young vet damaged by the war who prefers to spend more time with fish than people; Azade, a lavatory attendant who longs for the home her Muslim parents were forced to leave; and Tanya, a museum coat-check girl who dreams of losing weight so she can work as an airline stewardess among the clouds.

When the novel opens, Tanya, Yuri, and the other workers at the “All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum” are informed that they will be visited by a group of Americans who want to donate a substantial amount of money to the Russian museum they find most promising. Much of the novel is spent preparing to impress these American women when they visit. Their arrival sets off a comical series of misunderstandings as it becomes clear they are looking for a romanticized version of Russian culture, not the difficult and often dirty reality these characters live from day to day.

Ochsner (and her characters) deal with these realities with grim humor—for instance, one of the “perks” of working a museum job for months without a paycheck is free use of the toilets. These quirks of Ochsner’s humor are often emphasized by magical realism. In the first chapter, Azade’s husband Mircha, commits suicide by leaping from the roof of the apartment building. But he sticks around for the rest of the novel, his ghost running around voicing opinions while his body—unable to be buried in the still-frozen ground—lies on the trash heap.

But the gritty humor of these details is always held in balance with the genuine struggle the characters must face because of them, and their psychological consequences. Yuri hides from the world in a cosmonaut helmet left behind by his dead father. Olga despairs of the ability of language to convey truth. Tanya, an artist at heart, records her thoughts and observations of clouds in a notebook she carries with her, but cannot express herself to anyone. Working in a museum where all of the exhibits are cheap forgeries and imitations, Tanya tries to recreate icons of the Madonna and Child with chewing gum, popsicle sticks, and eye shadow, which promptly drip and turn into brightly colored smears.

Always this was what came of her attempts to think in hues and gradations of saturation; this was what happened when she tried to knuckle an understanding of her own life as it ticked from shade to hue. This was what came of her attempt to depict love in any form, even if it was from stuff as low and humble as wet coloured flour smeared on ice-cream sticks. (183)

Although Tanya feels that she has failed in her attempt to create something beautiful, to reach the transcendent through her humble materials, the reader cannot help but feel that she has achieved it simply through trying, through believing that it is possible.

The above passage is typical of Ochsner’s lyrical prose. Her pages are saturated with beautiful language, almost to the point of leveling out the perspectives of the different characters. As Yuri ice-fishes with his head encased in his helmet, the reader might have a hard time believing his thoughts could be as poetic and profound as those that Tanya records in her notebook. And perhaps her thoughts, along with the poetic longings of Azade for a home she doesn’t fully remember, would have even more weight had the language been moderated with other characters.

However, the characters themselves remain distinct. Each is occupied by different problems, has a different rhythm to their thought, and their own desires. These characters are all real people, complete with flaws and prejudices and insecurities that separate them from each other. Tanya says: “Suffering, if beautifully done, is an art form.” In the end, it is their suffering that brings these characters together, as well as their hopeful struggle to bring beauty and meaning to their lives.

Rosemary Callenberg lives in Western Pennsylvania, where she is working towards her MFA in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. It is here that, among other things, she teaches, writes, and pursues her love of beauty and of words.

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If you’ve heard of Alan Moore, it’s probably for his groundbreaking work on comics like Watchmen, From Hell, V For Vendetta, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all of which contributed to the respect that has emerged for comics as an art form over the past 20 years. Possibly you only know of him through the terrible movies adapted from those books—but let’s hope not. Moore had the good sense to take his name off those projects and tends to be pretty grumpy about movies and superhero comics in general when asked about them in interviews. Instead, he prefers to talk about more arcane subjects like history, religion, and magic.

Moore’s become known as an authority on that last subject. On his fortieth birthday he declared himself a magician, devoted himself to occult studies and started worshipping an old Roman snake god. It sounds crazy until you hear him explain magic as the manipulation of symbols (like words) to alter people’s consciousness (like stories), and that there basically is no difference between the word “spell” (as in to spell a word) and the word spell (as in to cast a spell). Then it only sounds kind of crazy.

In the mid-90s, during one of Moore’s periodic withdrawals from the world of comics, he wrote a prose book that explores his ideas about magic and the tenuous relationship between big ideas like truth, fiction, and history. Originally printed in paperback in 1996, Voice of the Fire was largely ignored, but Moore’s American comic publisher later went ahead and produced a beautiful hardcover edition featuring book design by Chip Kidd, an introduction by Neil Gaiman (the most successful comic writer to cross over into novels), and illustrated plates by José Villarrubia. The book was once again largely ignored.

Within half a page, it’s easy to see why the book remains an afterthought in Moore’s body of work. The opening chapter, told from the viewpoint of a half-witted prehistoric youth who can’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming, is as hard to follow as any book in the English language. And it’s not exactly lyrically on par with Joyce. Take this passage for example:

There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to the wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I.

There are 50 more pages where that came from!

Yet, over the course of those 50 pages, you can’t help but feel for this wandering pre-historic half-wit surrounded by powerful forces he can’t even put a name to, let alone understand. And the limited language begins to work its particular kind of magic, especially when the boy struggles to “glean that one may say of thing while thing is not,” an apt description of magic, fiction, history, or a lie.

From the tale of the man-child, Moore moves through time with a series of first-person narratives taking place in and around his hometown of Northampton. The reliability of these narratives vary, but themes of deception, betrayal, and disillusionment repeat themselves throughout, as do images of giant black dogs, one legged cripples and sacrificial fires. If you were interested in making distinctions, you’d be hard pressed to decide if Voice of the Fire is a novel, a set of interconnected stories, or something else altogether.

Some of the chapters could work alone as short stories, some more as character sketches. In every chapter, it’s impressive how expertly Moore inhabits each of these narrators, from a Bronze Age murderess to a hobbled and aging crusader to the disembodied head displayed on a pike outside the city gate, giving them a voice that’s uniquely theirs. This talent for first person narration carries over from Moore’s comic work, where he uses caption boxes (previously been reserved in comics for exposition or redundant descriptions of the action on the page) to render carefully crafted internal monologues.* In fact, he’s so convincing that many readers associate the views of Watchmen’s ultra-conservative, homicidal vigilante Rorschach with Moore himself.

Another of Moore’s formal concerns from comics that apply to his only novel so far is the depiction of time. Moore frequently uses the visual nature of comics to challenge standard perceptions of time. For Doctor Manhattan of Watchmen all of time happens at once, leading Moore (and artist Dave Gibbons) to juxtapose images from different periods in the character’s life in a narrative that’s just as associative as it is linear.

Many chapters in Voice of the Fire display a similar concern with time, crosscutting between flashbacks and present tense action, but what’s more interesting is how the novel as a whole deals with time. It spans centuries in what seems like a linear narrative, but images keep repeating, characters from the past appear before a more contemporary one in inexplicable visions, and key plot elements of disillusionment and treachery constantly recur. The book seems to ask, are we all as helpless as that half-witted manchild from chapter one, unable to tell the difference between waking and dream, “a thing that is become a thing that is not”? Yet as the book progresses and characters repeatedly march towards despair and doom, it becomes exhausting. Maybe we all have the same basic story, but do we have to read it over and over again?

Moore, however, rewards the intrepid reader with an absolutely stunning last chapter, which begins with the author typing the final words from the previous chapter. We arrive then, all the way from prehistory to present tense. We follow Alan Moore through the process of trying to find an ending to his novel in what is part first-person narrative (which never uses the words “I” or “me”), part metafiction, part essay, and part history lesson.

Despite a few rough spots, Voice of the Fire puts the reader right into the head of a unique and visionary artist, one who is prone to believing in a mad idea or two and is nearly convincing enough to make the reader believe, too. By that criteria, the book might quite possibly be an incantation in and of itself.

Steve Gillies is a 3rd year MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh and co-editor in chief of Hot Metal Bridge. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Artifice Magazine, The AV Club, and the American Journal of Orthopedics.

* Readers interested in Moore’s process for these first-person narrations should read his essay “Writing For Comics,” where he describes how he imagines every psychological and physiological detail of his characters, to the point where he stumbles around his room shouting and pretending to be Etrigan the Demon. That’s dedication to craft.

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Shifty Positions

Anna Moschovakis’ second book, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake tackles a great tangle of cultural systems with the probing wit and intellectual sensitivity announced in her first book, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006). Bookended by two shorter poems, four long poems comprise the meat of You and Three Others, taking their titles (as she notes in the Acknowledgements) from books she stumbled upon by chance.

Moschovakis hammers her found materials, chosen for a “bold stand toward their topics and the twentieth-century world they inhabit,” into various poetic shapes: lists, epistles, journal entries, theatrical dialogue, and even social networking posts. Yet the lyric mode provides a bass line for the collection, giving a heartbeat to her poems’ modal riffing.

The opening poem titled simply “[prologue]” announces:

The problem is I don’t care whether I convince you or not
In a perfect world I would be able to convince you of this

Everybody should always have a position on everything
We take our positions with us, like folding stools to the beach
The stools, when we abandon them, fade to the same color

Characteristic of Moschovakis’ earlier work, “[prologue]” launches a grammatical argument, shuttling through verb tenses as a means of exploring different angles of her concern about the speaker’s “position” (a sticky allusive term calling to mind a slew of possible applications) to her reader, and vice-versa. Moving by line from the indicative to the conditional to the more personal and unstable modal tense of “should” then back again, verb tense takes on a concrete symbolic function, much as our “positions” become “folding stools” we take with us, then “abandon.”

The book’s first long poem, “A Tragedy of Waste,” takes this movement between “positions,” or formal code-switching, a step further by weaving text from a Labor Bureau publication into lyric. “At the beginning of 1917 there were housewives / children, old people, sick people / fields, factories, stores, offices” sets an academic, factoid-y tone, which the lyric speaker’s (or positioner’s) voice interrupts with pronouncements such as: “This taxes the imagination. Too many studies have begun / and ended in the middle.” Breaking prose “facts” into lines of “poetry” highlights intrinsic tensions between what is said and what is buried in what is said, but it is the lyric moment that raises the emotional ante, turning text into poetry:

Human wants:

First the necklace of bone
then the shift of leather

tea, tobacco, and gambling

in other words

ten men could live on the corn
where only one can live on the beef [.]

In seven terse lines, the “study” above reaches a political and economic conclusion we can presume previously taxed the speaker’s imagination. If “[f]rom these definitions, one must pick / and choose,” lyric meditation (among poetry’s other tools) offers us a better path to the heart (both literally and figuratively) of our world’s contradictory “positions.”

Moschovakis’ concerns are not purely extra-literary, however. In “Death as a Way of Life,” a modal fist-fight pitches purplish prose against philosophical observation with interesting results:

Man dies, that is nothing

but
      when a woman sits on the edge of her bed, in front of a window, and lets down her red silken hair, threading it through her delicate fingers as it cascades in waves down her porcelain back, which reflects the moon’s silvery mood, so that any man privileged enough to catch a glimpse of her falls directly to his knees, blind, lost, panting for breath [ . . . ] still he has no regrets, and he welcomes death, invites it, knowing as he’s never known anything before that his life wants for nothing [ . . .]

Shifts in line, syntax and diction pull us from a creepy, faux-logical world where “[w]ith seven bullets, you could shoot a woman / in both breasts, both ovaries, her vagina and clitoris / with one bullet left for a target of choice” to a veritable cauldron of overwrought Romance. There is a Joycean sensitivity to rhetoric at work in these poems, as well as great humor. Though the idea of using bullets to target a woman’s sexual organs is not funny, the drastic code-switching that occurs in the two pages between it and the longer excerpt above collapses rhetorical forms so quickly that a reader might guffaw as much out of surprise as out of amusement at Moschovakis’ deftness of hand. Indeed, her control of and sensitivity to language’s ends and means saves her poems from falling into the trap of elliptical faux-irony plaguing many of her contemporaries.

What is at stake in You and Three Others is perhaps the messiest of modes, the human sensibility—that which does not dare lay claim to a systematic organizing principle, and which certainly feels itself weakest in the race for Progress. Both in the multiple sense of the global community as well as in the prime sense of the individual, You and Three Others bears witness to the web of forces burying the human cost of some of our “greatest” achievements—the establishment of the United States on the backs of its native peoples and ecology, the rise of capitalism at a similar expense, and, of course, the Internet’s uncertain terrain. As Annabot (the “chatbot” in “The Human Machine”) says to the machine when it declares “The Brain, the brain—that is the seat of trouble”: “My brain, whose brain? Those who feel, feel.”

HUMAN MACHINE: I ought to reflect, again and again, and yet again, that all others deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself. I place my hand over my heart.

ANNABOT: I cannot feel your hand.

HUMAN MACHINE: I cannot feel your heart.

If the book has any weaknesses, they are perhaps most evident in “The Human Machine,” where some of the lyrics risk self-referential obliquity. However, even the few off-key moments remind the reader that a particularly human consciousness accompanies us for the duration of the book’s journey—”Anna is a Capricorn. Her eyes are blue. Her favorite color is blue[.]“—whether in the form of the “you” co-opted in “A Tragedy of Waste,” or the cyborg Annabot and her foil Anna of the Five Towns (both a gloss of the author’s first name). That reminder comforts the reader even as it challenges her to consider her own position within the systems confronted by Mochovakis’ verse.

You and Three Others never loses focus of its concern with selves, and demonstrates a rare ability to speak convincingly about said selves through a complex web of modes that maintains a lyric voice while simultaneously critiquing the means that voice chooses. That Moschovakis is able to keep the emotional energy alive even as her poems remain unapologetically entranced with the ostensible anti-poetry of the systems she investigates is a contradiction that is as impressive as it is satisfying.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review and Blood Orange Review.

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In Which The Case for The House At Pooh Corner Is Made

It wasn’t until college that I read A.A. Milne’s The House At Pooh Corner, suggested by a friend equally enamored by the minimalism I was reading almost exclusively at the time. The recommendation may seem an odd one, especially for those whose familiarity with Hundred Acre Wood begins and ends with the Disney adaptations. While similarities between Milne’s books and the movies do exist—each finds Pooh and friends setting out to solve some problem they’ve discovered or invented, and adventure ensues—in the original stories, the “message” or “moral” is never explicitly stated. For Milne’s characters, the discovery process is as ongoing and uncertain as growing up; every moment, every interaction—each interruption, silence, and contradiction—is significant. In making the unexceptional—eating breakfast, climbing a tree, racing twigs down a river—extraordinary, Milne asks us to believe in the possibility of doing the same, makes the meaning compelling because we are a part of it.

Where their Disney counterparts are scrubbed clean of subtlety and complication (e.g., Eeyore’s resolute fatalism traded for his affable gloominess), Milne’s characters are developed and complicated, and one’s sense of self-worth is subject to change with experience (e.g., Piglet becomes convinced of his bravery, which gives him the mettle to sacrifice his house to Eeyore and move in with Pooh). Tensions in one story arise in others, allowing the characters’ opinions of one another to change as their strengths and flaws become apparent (Eeyore’s self-ostracization, for example, which the animals stop humoring by book’s end). No character is predictable, and their actions are as likely to surprise themselves as those around them. Milne’s characters, with their fears and affectations and failings (complimented perfectly by E. H. Shepard’s iconic line drawings), are less tidy than their animated selves—which is to say, they’re more like us.

The second and final collection in Milne’s series, The House At Pooh Corner grapples with loss, most notably Christopher Robin’s leaving home for boarding school. As he’s the center of the characters’ universe, Christopher Robin growing up and away poses a significant threat. Milne hints at this impending departure throughout, building to the characters’ realization of it: “Christopher Robin was going away,” Milne begins the final story. “Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last.” It’s not the only time the characters are aware of their vulnerability, but it’s the first time they are explicitly so. Both inevitable and—while still safe from it—unknowable, disillusionment is the price of growing up.

Above all else, Milne exalts imagination, which he distinguishes from education (which, in turn, he separates from intelligence), suggesting that those most capable of it are perhaps those with Very Little Brain, those who aren’t hastening their way into the adult world. Danger is ever-present in these stories, and even imagined dangers such as the Heffalump present real risks. But nothing is more perilous than the absence of creative thought—and for these characters, whether or not they’re aware of it, Christopher Robin’s loss of imagination means they’ll cease to exist.

It’s this reminder of what we’ve lost since we were Christopher Robin’s age, and at what cost, that helps ensure Milne’s stories’ relevance. What was once unique and exciting, we’ve become accustomed to; “Nothing”—as discussed by Pooh and Christopher Robin in the last story—is no longer a proper noun meaning “just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” This breakdown is natural, and it follows that fighting against it must be a conscious and constant choice. Milne reminds us of this, fittingly, in a description of nature:

“By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, ‘There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.’ But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.”

Milne’s characters are constantly trying, sometimes succeeding, but always discovering, because they’re looking and listening for what isn’t there but could be. Taking nothing for granted, they see the world clearly, with no confusion as to what’s really important—friendship, compassion, imagination. By the time we leave these characters, they acknowledge the disappointment of reality and grieve what will be lost to it. But they remain optimistic so long as they are able—the alternative being the truly unimaginable prospect. Milne has said he didn’t write the Pooh books for children, and indeed, what we learn from these stories, children don’t need to be taught. The House At Pooh Corner reminds us that while we may have forgotten how to see the world this way, we were able to once, and can again.

Jacob Thomas Berns is an MFA fiction candidate at the University of Oregon, where he teaches composition and creative writing. He is the founding editor of the online journal Miracle Monocle.

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