From our Editors: LGBT Novel Recs from Allen Fulghum

Hi all, I’m Allen, one of West 10th’s prose editors. I’m a senior in Gallatin studying modernism, homosexuality and the First World War. When I sat down to make a short list of my favorite 20th century LGBT novels to share with you all, I realized that I’d chosen at least one representative of each decade from the 1910s to the 1960s—so here are six decades of LGBT literary history, condensed. 

Six decades, six brilliant LGBT novels

Maurice - E.M. Forster (1913)Written in 1913 but only published posthumously in 1971, Maurice was well ahead of its time in its nuanced depiction of a young man discovering and coming to terms with his sexuality. While Forster carefully examines the difficulties of identity and love, Maurice is ultimately founded on the belief that same-sex relationships have the capacity to be profound, beautiful and happy—a radical thesis for a novel written when men were still routinely arrested and imprisoned for having sex with other men.   

Orlando - Virginia Woolf (1928)Subtitled “A Biography,” Orlando was written as a paean to Woolf’s friend and erstwhile lover, the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West. With typical élan, Woolf transforms Sackville-West into the novel’s eponymous protagonist, a sex-changing immortal who begins as an Elizabethan nobleman and ends as a successful female author in ‘the present day’ (that is to say, 1928). Traversing three hundred years of Orlando’s life, Woolf relentlessly questions conventional notions of history, authorship, gender and sexuality.   Nightwood - Djuna Barnes (1936)Contained in a deceptively slim volume, Nightwood is a superbly stylized portrait of a doomed lesbian relationship in the bohemian Paris of the interwar years, explicated through the head-spinning speeches of Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Conner (who is just as campy as his name suggests). This modernist masterpiece was lauded by T.S. Eliot as “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.”    Notre Dame des Fleurs/Our Lady of the Flowers - Jean Genet (1943)Similarly to Nightwood, this novel renders the Parisian underworld in prose so rich and revelatory it practically creates a new class of literature. The lives and loves of its central characters—sex workers, trans women, and teenage murderers, all bearing charming monikers like Divine and Darling Daintyfoot—are unspooled by a capricious narrator who creates the world of the novel while masturbating in his prison cell (!!!).   The Charioteer - Mary Renault (1953)Renault, having worked as nurse at a British military hospital during the Second World War and later emigrated to South Africa to live with her female partner, was uniquely equipped to write this novel, which follows a British soldier who falls in love twice over as he recovers from a combat wound. With equal measures of heartfelt psychological insight and cutting social observation, The Charioteer struggles with the tensions between idealism and reality, individualism and community, and innocence and experience.  Another Country - James Baldwin (1962)An earlier novel of Baldwin’s, Giovanni’s Room, is often hailed as a masterpiece of gay literature, but while Giovanni’s Room is a claustrophobic investigation of one man’s psychology, Another Country seems to encompass an era. The characters are gay, straight, bisexual, questioning and in denial; white and black; working-class and middle-class and destitute and wildly successful. In a rhythm reminiscent of jazz, the novel traces the cast as they move in and out of each other’s lives, coupling and splitting up and getting back together, rising and falling in fortune—but always circling around the specter of a character who commits suicide at the end of the novel’s first act.

Poetry Review: Dobby Gibson's It Becomes You

Dobby Gibson’s newest full-length book of poetry, It Becomes You (Graywolf Press, 2013) is a mismatched collection. Gibson writes of the details of his daily lives. He has many. He is a father, a Minneapolitan, a bearer of malignancies, and, of course, a poet. He really is a poet.At worst, he is clever. Just clever. At best, his lyrical poetry is spot-on. He is able to make something neat and crushing out of the chaos in which he lives. Not at his best or his worst, however, his poetry reads like a long list of interesting things and ideas. And that isn’t bad.The book is divided into five sections. The first, second, and forth comprise the bulk of the book. They are one- to two-page poems. They do most of the work. His third section, a list, is called “40 Fortunes.” It’s hit-or-miss, but mostly just clever.“1. There isn’t an ocean for a thousand miles, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t beach.2. At the necessary moment, going naked will be your most convincing disguise.3. If you can fix a lawn mower with a pen knife, you are a funny old man.”The last section, his magnum opus and the book’s title poem, is thirteen pages long. It bears his signature wit, but it is also highly political (at least satirically so) and highly personal at the same time. It touches on so many of the book’s so many themes.This is a book worth reading. Gibson leads an interesting life. He has interesting ideas, and he sure is clever.-Beau Peregoy, Poetry Editor

Read This Book: A Brief Look at Sam Pink's Rontel

The narrator of Sam Pink's latest book, Rontel, makes it clear from the beginning what it's like inside his head: "If people had access to my thoughts and feelings, I’d be asked to live on a rock in outer space—one with a long tether to a building in Chicago if any of my friends (just kidding) wanted to come visit.” But he's so wrong. So wonderfully, wonderfully wrong.In a style reminiscent of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Rontel takes a look inside the mind of a twenty-something year old as he wanders aimlessly about Chicago. Sometimes he eats a sandwich. Sometimes he stares at homeless people. Sometimes he thinks about getting a job. Sometimes he adds "Let me show you how a real man (does something)" to his conversations because he doesn't know why but it sure makes him sound a whole lot more like a real man. And sometimes he rides the train and reads the paper:"I looked up from the paper and out the window.Felt like my face was the ugliest melt ever at that point.Like, the worst.I felt so stupid looking.Always felt ugly and stupid on the train.Like almost, sagged.Sagged out.Sagged out and sorry.Horrific.Sorry I’m so saggy, but I’m sagged out and sorry.Suck my dick—I thought, addressing myself.The train was underground.I stared at the tunnel wall, and its lighting.Thought about stabbing someone in the throat repeatedly.Is there any way to do it except repeatedly.Could it really stop after one stab.I thought about stabbing someone once then just standing there.Seemed like that would be worse.What would I do just standing there after the first stab.Would I talk to the victim.If they said something to me, I feel like I’d definitely respond.So I’d either have to stand there to make sure the person died or stab them repeatedly to ensure it.Also, seemed like if I stabbed once then paused, it would be hard to get back into it.It’d be like sweating in a shirt then taking the shirt off and putting it back on, like, fifteen minutes later.So, yeah.Repeatedly.Once seemed cruel.That would be the worst thing to read: “Man stabbed in throat once, dies in alley over an extended period of time.”Just get it done—I thought, looking back inside the train car.Finish everything you start.Finish yourself.I’ma finish you, Chicago—I thought, feeling pleasure in my testicles from the shaking of the train."No man that thinks such thoughts should be exiled to a rock. We should be parading him around all of the town squares we possess and singing his praises.Or we should at least call him up and say something positive like, "That'll do, pig." Something to that effect.I say this because, on the surface level, this is perhaps one of the most mundane books I've ever come across. I mean it. He doesn't do anything. He just sort of exists for 96 pages. However, we are given complete access to any and all of the narrator's thoughts, no matter how pathetic, uninteresting, disgusting, or depressing they may be. And it's hysterical. The book is absolutely brilliant, and you should really go and buy it right now. But make no mistake, these aren't just the narrator's thoughts. No, no, no, my friends. These are our thoughts.At first, you almost hate the author for it. You hate him for even intimating that people could think thoughts like the ones above. But the book is so funny, you choose to continue and hope the narrator will redeem himself along the way. Needless to say, he doesn't. In fact, he gets worse. It's around this time that you find it harder and harder to distance yourself from the narrator's hypnotizing honesty. Slowly, the disgust leaves your mind, and you begin to realize that these unapologetic thoughts are the redemption. You realize the character never required any salvation because there's nothing wrong with him. He's you and he's me, and there is something so liberating about that.This is the glory of Sam Pink's writing. He drags us through the ugliest, filthiest parts of our minds and still manages, whether intentionally or not, to make us feel beautiful, still make us genuinely wonder at the dull, brief mysteries of our lives.-Joe Masco, Assistant Poetry Editor

Poetry Review: Zbigniew Herbert's "Elegy for the Departure"

Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) is perhaps best known in America for his poem “Report from the Besieged City,” and for his ability to demythologize time-worn tales as in “Why the Classics” or “Daedalus and Icarus.”In 1999 Ecco Press published Elegy for the Departure, a collection of poems translated into English for the first time. The collection includes poems from Herbert’s 1990 book of the same title as well as poems from earlier volumes. The book is arranged in roughly chronological order from 1950 to 1990. Some of the poems, especially in the first section, display Herbert’s attention to myth, his political voice: “—how to lead / people away from the ruins / how to lead / the chorus from poems—”. Much of the collection, though, turns to a more personal voice. He speaks often of his childhood: “home was the telescope of childhood / the skin of emotion / a sister’s cheek / branch of a tree.” In the later poems of the book he is ruminative, looking back upon his life: “I thought then / that before the deluge it was necessary / to save / one / thing / small / warm / faithful.” The language throughout the collection is lively, whimsical when you least expect it. Section three is made of clever prose poems that read like abbreviated fables: funny and sad all at once. Each is titled with a single noun, which the poem goes on to offer a definition of. “Drunkards” are people who “drink at one gulp, bottoms up,” who spend their time looking up through the necks of their bottles, but maybe “if they had stronger heads and more taste, they would be astronomers.” We also hear from a Wolf caught in one of Aesop’s fables. The wolf is terrorizing the sheep, but he admits that, “Were it not for Aesop, we would sit on our hind legs and gaze at the sunset. I like to do this very much.”I am continually amazed in reading Herbert’s poems—both long and short—at his ability to move the reader forward in the poem without any use of punctuation. This is a style that is certainly abused by many of us amateur writers so it is refreshing to see it done so well. I’ll leave you with my favorite lines from the book, which demonstrate the energy and rhythm of Herbert’s writing. From “The Troubles of a Little Creator”:A small puppy in vast empty spacein a world not yet readyI worked from the beginningwearing my arm to the quickthe earth uncertain as a dandelion puff ballI pressed it with my pilgrim’s footwith a double blow of my eyesI fixed the skyand with a mad fantasyimagined the color blue--Laura Stephenson, Editor-in-Chief

Books For People Who Aren't Sure If They Like Books

Hello friend. How are you? It’s been a long time. It’s been over a year since I last assigned you a book to read. Did you manage to power through that 192-page book in the 388 days it has been since I last spoke to you? I hope so. I didn’t want come back too soon and spook you off. I just want you to be comfortable.For those of you who were able to finish Civilwarland in Bad Decline, I have another recommendation. For the rest of you who need another 388 days, take your time. I’ll check back with you on December 2, 2013.Swimming to Cambodia is a book by a fella named Spalding Gray. He was asked to play a role in the The Killing Fields, a film about the Cambodian Civil War. Swimming to Cambodia juxtaposes his adventures and shenanigans while filming a Hollywood movie against the real story and history of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and the result is simultaneously gut busting and gut wrenching.I bet you’re asking yourself “Hey Conor, I get why you’d recommend this to a smarty-pants who likes books, but why would you recommend it to somebody who doesn’t like to read?” I’ve got three major selling points for you my friend.It’s funny. Spalding Gray has a mastered a sort of dirty neuroticism that reminds me of the hypothetical baby-fusion of Woody Allen, Harmony Korine, and Hunter Thompson. A decent-sized portion of this book deals with Gray, a neurotic and gawky man in his 40’s, trying to conquer his fear of the ocean while high on opiates. It is exactly as good as it sounds.It’s short. The edition I’m holding in my hand is a scant 133 pages, and when you take into account how large the type and how small the pages are, the final page count becomes even less intimidating. I managed to plow through this in two hours while waiting for a train home before Hurricane Sandy.It’s smart. The parts of Swimming to Cambodia that aren’t dealing with a man stoned out of his gourd coping with his hydrophobia are extraordinarily insightful and powerful. If you were to ask me before this book what the Khmer Rouge was, I probably would’ve responded “A video game character.” Though the subject matter is often lighthearted, Gray is capable of switching gears instantaneously. The story takes wild nosedives that leave you at the precipice of despair, before Gray finally pulls up on the controls and resumes talking about wanting to marry a hooker.Look. I’m not a dummy. I know how these things work. I assign this book to you, and you just sit around on reddit procrastinating until 2 AM, when you panic, realize you won’t be able to read the book, and desperately scramble to look for a movie version. Then you leaf through Google and Sparknotes, hoping to find somebody who has made a list of the differences between the film and the book, so that you can come back to me appearing as prepared as possible.Rest easy my friend: I’ve got you covered. Swimming to Cambodia was originally written as a monologue. It was designed from the get-go to be watched.

"He broke it all down to a table, a glass of water, a spiral notebook and a mic. Poor theatre—a man and an audience and a story. Spalding sitting at that table, speaking into the mic, calling forth the script of his life from his memory and those notebooks. A simple ritual: part news report, part confessional, part American raconteur. One man piecing his life back together, one memory, one true thing at a time. Like all genius things, it was a simple idea turned on its axis to become absolutely fresh and radical."

-Theatre Director Mark Russell on Spalding Gray

Jonathan Demme, the man who directed Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia adapted Swimming to Cambodia for the screen. However, this is not a scenario in which you’d have to scramble around the Internet trying to find out any differences between the book and the film. I’ll make this easy for you:  there are none. The exact same thing you see on screen is right there in your book.Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not necessarily suggesting that you only go and watch the film. There are a few things that might go over your head if you’re not paying full attention, and it definitely helps to be able to flip back. By no means am I saying that this book will make you feel dumb, but as it deals with Cambodia, a place I’m assuming you’re not familiar with, sometimes the names and other proper nouns can get confusing. It’s not a particularly difficult book, but it will definitely keep you on your toes.I’ve saved my trump card for last. If I haven’t won you over yet, listen up. There’s a story in the book about John Malkovich telling a dirty joke. So, get on that man.-Conor Burnett, Prose Editor

Mayakovsky's Revolver: A Double-Take On Matthew Dickman’s Latest

In my experience, the Dickman brothers and their poetry are polarizing topics amongst creative writers. Most people really do either love or hate them. I’ll admit that I was in the latter camp, – I was suspicious of the Dickman public image, which is very Portland, cool and offbeat, and this prejudice ruined what individual pieces of theirs I read or heard read aloud – until, like a critic should, I gave their work a fair chance.  When I actually read Matthew and Michaels’ poetry collections in full, I flipped.Flies won me over to Michael Dickman. Mayakovsky’s Revolver similarly convinced me of Matthew. The collection, which West 10^th reviewed earlier this month, is full of surprising language and metaphor. My favorite example occurs in The Gas Station, when Matthew encounters a gunman: “this guy came out swinging / a gun, his face like an apartment / that no one had lived in for years, / the gun pointing just above my head when it went off, …”Due to its thematic content, Matthew’s collection may not be entirely accessible on the whole. Not every reader has been threatened with a firearm. Neither have most readers lost a sibling to suicide, a narrative that runs throughout Mayakovsky’s Revolver. Regardless of how foreign some of the collection’s content may be, most of its poems are believable and engaging.This is due to the fact that the emotion behind the language feels honest. Before Mayakovsky’s Revolver, I’d unfairly assumed that Dickman’s poetry relied more on gimmick than on art and was more striking for its cool, modern voice than for its sincerity. Mayakovsky’s Revolver, for the most part, proves both assumptions wrong. The collection is consistently both artful and passionate.Only one piece, entitled Dark, made me think that perhaps my original misgivings about Dickman’s poetry, which are doubts that a lot of haters share, carried some weight. Dark occurs in Mayakovsky’s Revolver’s second section, Elegy to a Goldfish. In general, I am less enamored of this section than of the rest of the book. But, I have a definite issue with the piece Dark.Dark includes bits of different stories – a line about an abused boy, a line about a self-abusive girl – in an arc that focuses mainly on Dickman himself.  Neither the story of the abused boy nor of the self-abusive girl is developed; neither the boy nor the girl is even named. These two characters feel inauthentic, like archetypes of other people that appear in the collection; the inclusion of their stories feels gratuitous. In Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Dark presents a disappointment. It lacks cohesiveness and, I think, the emotional urgency that makes the rest of the collection so compelling.--Lauren Roberts, Managing Editor

Poetry Review: Gerald Stern's In Beauty Bright

In Beauty Bright, Gerald Stern’s latest collection of poems, is meditative, celebratory, intimately sad, and funny. Stern deals in terms of time, gathering up old years and sticking them in with new ones. Midway through a poem that seems to be taking place in the present, he’ll admit: “it is probably / April and it’s probably twenty, thirty / years ago” and then he’ll move along, keeping the focused, wild momentum that is so familiar in his writing. The span—temporal, geographical, tonal—of a Stern poem is immense. He moves from the Ruhr to New Jersey to the Mississippi; from 1936 to the American Revolution; from violence to a place where “everyone hugged / the person to his right although the left was / not out of the question”. He sorts through his personal past in the same lines that he grapples with the pasts of entire cultures and countries.Stern is 87 now, and has written seventeen collections of poetry. He writes about his age often—“for I am going in reverse / and my slow mind has ruined me”; “Too late now to look for houses / to give readings, to flirt, to eat blueberries / to dance the polka”—but he is also preoccupied with the fullness of things that have already happened. He recalls streets and people in clipped and intense detail, occasionally confessing “I don’t know what the year was” or musing “someone should mark / the day, I think it was August 20th”. The poems of In Beauty Bright are rich and strange, and they barrel forward with a strong, intuitive rhythm. Stern himself is as observant and  expansive as ever, naming what used to be around him with the same care as he names what’s still around, proclaiming “there is so much to say about him I want to / live again,” granting each small thing and year its due attention.--Maeve Nolan, Poetry Editor

A Review of Das Energi by Paul Williams

Sifting through second-hand paperbacks at a musty bookstore on the Upper West Side I stumbled upon Das Energi, a hippie-spiritual classic from 1974 that I’d heard my friend’s parents talk about when they would reminiscence about times when music was political and LSD was legal. It was one of those popular books that everyone eventually forgot about as the decade passed and the peace and love mentality of that generation faded into the 80s.Usually these kinds of “Feel the world, heal the world” narratives can be hard to get through, mostly because they are repetitive and almost always vague, but this one struck a somewhat different note. Paul Williams manages to weave lyrical prose with hard slang into a strong and thoughtfully structured manifesto, a mantra for a new way of living life. The structure of Das Energi follows suit, each page as varied as the voice. Some pages are run-on paragraphs, set in a conversational tone Williams asks an obscure “you” why fear is so potent, why we choose to ignore the metaphysical implications of our existence. Others are only a line, something short and thoughtful to be repeated over and over again. Though he traverses a number of topics, from guiltless sex to our obsession with efficiency to the potency of religion, the one line he refers back to constantly is: “You are God”.  Williams seems to believe that worshipping a separate and nonhuman entity is pointless and detracts from the self-evolution and discovery that is necessary to contribute to the energy flow of the world.In some ways Williams came very close to sounding like the stoned middle-aged gypsies you might bump into at Burning Man while waiting in line for beer, but it is his stylistic voice that separates him from the ‘wishy washy’ aspects of spiritual culture that mainstream society can’t seem to handle. He has a very forceful approach to his doctrine and often ends up sounding much more like Karl Marx than Gandhi. His constant reference to “shedding old skin”, “setting yourself free” and of “not seeking but finding” are dispersed between urgent didactic lines like “Here and now, boys. Or else spend infinite future fighting quarrels of endless past.” He pushes forward the importance of responsibility and even outlines three self-made laws of the economics of energy. Admittedly Williams’ inconsistency in writing is sometimes shaky—it is harder to sink into a piece that chooses not to commit to any tone or mood—but he is nevertheless an earnest and often charismatic writer with enough skill to pull off a book that could have been excruciating. His words are familiar the way an old jazz tune at a coffee store is; you know the basic melody but the vocal riffs and trumpet solo always take you buy surprise.--Michelle Ling, Art Editor

Poetry Review: Elaine Equi's Click and Clone

Elaine Equi's newest collection, Click and Clone, is a clever, playful exploration of "the tone and timbre of American life as it has been colored by the new metaphors and images brought to us by our continuing technological revolution." Equi's poems are punchy and energetic yet intimate, and she displays a surprising breadth of form. From faux tarot readings to a sonnet comprised entirely of headlines written by consummate poets at the New York Post, Equi strives to overthrow the common and the fixed. In "Follow Me," she declares, "I don't stay / inside the line. / I don't go / outside the line. / I am the line itself."Whether writing about clones or consumerism or Haruki Murakami, Equi shamelessly exhibits her wit with wordplay and poignant aphorisms. Yet there are times when Equi crosses the line between clever and banal, when it seems like she tries too hard to elicit a few laughs. For the most part, however, she remains as fresh and modern as the title of the collection itself.Click and Clone is not for the timid or the steadfastly old-fashioned. As Equi puts it in "Side Effects May Include," "Warning: these poems may cause / headaches, hives, hard-ons in women, / . . . Do not read these poems if you are pregnant / or nursing without consulting a doctor first."--Jarry Lee, Assistant Poetry Editor

Poetry Review: Percussion Grenade by Joyelle McSweeney

Percussion Grenade (Fence Books, 2012), Joyelle McSweeney’s third full-length poetry collection, begins not with an explosion, but with a warning: she intends for her poetry to be read aloud. She likens you to a Looney Tune and to a flight attendant. This is the first page.The three that follow, however, are a waste, as are many throughout the book—blotted with Douglas Kearney’s illustrations. Kearney depicts the title images and obvious themes of the book’s sections. These depictions, however, are purely literal and lack an interesting perspective. They subtract from the otherwise extraordinarily dense block of text that is Percussion Grenade.Like fragmentation, McSweeney’s poetry violently rips through every thought that falls within its “killzone.” This killzone, however, is not grenade-sized. Her work is an atomic bomb. The thoughts are all but neutralized.And she’ll beat anything to death. Each poem relies on dozens, sometimes hundreds, of images. They appear, they reappear, they disappear—they are flung at the page from every direction. Consistency isn’t worthy of her writing. It speaks—or screams, rather—for itself:

Crescendo! MacCaw! I’m a magpie with a caralarm and an airplane a patented / genome a reinforced cockpit door and a poptab brain a vivisected aquifer / shunted and split ten ways between here and the San Fernando Valley and the / Rift valley and the Kusk Valley the Rhine and Tuscaloosa and South Bend and / St Marks Venice and St Marks / Opeeeeeeeeogalala! OpeeOrkneyIslanders! BushTwins! OpeeeeeeeeCree!

“Opeeeeeeeentropy!” Percussion Grenade is an unleashing of poetic chaos, literary terrorism. She warned us.-Beau Peregoy, Poetry Editor

Poetry Review: Matthew Dickman's Mayakovsky's Revolver

The brothers Dickman, Matthew and Michael, found themselves thrust face-first into the world of poetry around 2009, when both had recently published their first full collections of poems from Copper Canyon Press. The two received mixed reactions to their collective worth, heralded as either a gimmick of hip, Portland poets, or as a sort of polarized harmony, where each poet’s distinctly different style pulled away from his twin’s, only to have each void filled with the other brother’s voice.With his newest collection, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Matthew Dickman has established himself independent of any of the gimmicks or cheap tricks. Mayakovsky’s Revolver is drenched in a sort of dark enlightenment, a world permeated with imagery that is at once visceral and hauntingly surreal. This is a world where the speaker’s third grade teacher wears  “a rosary of barbed wire underneath her white blouse,” a world where the speaker will try to pass notes to his dead brother on the day of his funeral, filled with an entire penumbra of emotion.Dickman is still jubilant, but he is also quiet, pensive. The elements and subjects of the collection are at once celebrated and mourned, as “blackberries will make the mouth of an eight-year-old look like he’s a ghost.” The poems in Mayakovsky’s Revolver take place in quiet moments, the shadows of memories that can only exist in the world of poetry. The collection laments the death of a dead brother, while embracing the life of a twin brother, staring right into the smallest of moments, and, in spite of everything, managing to find great love and great loss.--Eric Stiefel, Assistant Poetry Editor 

“A Voice… Apart from Me:” A Commentary on the ‘Poem Voices’ of Dorothea Lasky and Eileen Myles

Last Friday, sixty or so noir-clad poetry bugs gathered in the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House to hear two poets read.  The first was Dorothea Lasky, a bundle of whimsy with an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst and a head of distinctly Dr. Seussean curls. The other was Eileen Myles, an ageless wordsmith from Boston, author of countless poetry collections and possibly one of the coolest people this side of the Mason Dixon.  Both poets presented an assortment of new poems and also read from their most recent books, Thunderbird by Lasky and Snowflake/different streets by Myles.I attended this reading with the intention of writing a more standard review of each collection, but upon Ms. Lasky first opening her mauve-stained lips, I knew that the reading called for a different kind of commentary.Reading a book of poems alone, silently, is how we most often receive poetry.  We take note of the visual clues on the page that help to guide our rhythm and perception of the work; but ultimately, the poems enter our brains via this strange portal where how the words look truly affects how they sound, and finally what they mean, more than any other type of writing.  It doesn't always happen that the way you imagine a poem to sound will be how the poet actually presents it; and this surely didn't happen last night.  I was impressed that both Lasky's and Myles's poems became brand new, and I think better, thanks to each of their extremely different, equally evocative "poem voices."Dorothea Lasky has a speaking voice that is so high-pitched and clear, it seems as if she never smoked or cursed a day in her life (though, as of Friday night, I can attest to the fact that at least 50% of that is highly false... see pg. 4 of Thunderbird).  She is giggly and self-deprecating, making quips between poems to get the audience as comfortable as she seems to be.  The voice she assumes once she starts reading possesses the same high-pitched, almost child-like quality, but suddenly increases in volume by 10 fold.  Then most notably, her inflection takes on an alarming pattern where it sort of sounds like a 4th grader reading a paragraph about the solar system out loud to the class.  Hearing this voice read lines like "I care for monsters/But only because I am one" and similarly simple and hard-hitting lines that riddle Thunderbird, changes the work.  Lines that initially may appear dramatic or angry on the page, take on humility and occasional irony.  At first listen, Lasky's "poem voice" was so different from what I expected that I found it a bit jarring.  A few poems in, however, I wanted to immediately re-read her book, this time with an ear for how endearing and unique Thunderbird can sound.Below is a link to Lasky reading a poem from her book called Who To Tell.  I recommend reading the poem silently and then having a listen.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F4_42iMQ-kJuxtapose Lasky's high-pitched, performative "poem voice" with Myles's gravelly, colloquial one for a mesmerizing study on how different poets choose to present their work.  I attended a reading of Eileen Myles's over the summer where she revealed that she often writes poems in her head while driving; so, her process of putting the poem on the page is sort of a backwards translation from aural to visual.  I can't speak for Lasky, but for Myles, how the poem sounds is a huge part of the equation.  This becomes very clear when she reads.Myles's husky and understated speaking voice establishes upon first listen that this ain't her first West Village rodeo.  She reads her poems breezily and conversationally; you can tell she's used to interacting with her poems off the page.  She also reads quite quickly, but with such a cool self-assuredness, that even if her words flew by too fast for you to catch them, you find yourself nodding in comprehension.  Most distinctly, as Myles reads poem after poem, a strong Boston accent surfaces, which is uncharacteristic of her every day speaking voice.  This is not intentional, she admits.  The accent slips in and grows thicker as she gets deeper into the experience of reading.  This unique addition to her already colloquial voice gives simple lines like "For the most compelling birthday party I'd been to in a while I bought three cards," a jolt of charm, due to how those "ar" sounds so patently feature the Boston accent.Here is a video of Eileen Myles reading from Snowflake/different streets.  See if you can detect all the awesome qualities of her "poem voice," and how they add to your experience of the work.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV5bnSCcewMThis wasn't the case on Friday, but I have certainly heard and been disappointed by writers that read work, which I loved on the page, aloud to an audience (an example would be Augusten Burroughs... sad).  Not all experiences with "poem voices" at a reading will end well.  But the role of the "poem voice" does add a fascinating element to the medium, putting poetry at a crossroads between a visual art, a literary art, and a performing art.Below is a link to the schedule of events at the Writers House this year.  Free readings, free wine, free food for thought.http://cwp.fas.nyu.edu/page/readingseriesBy: Amanda Montell, Assistant Poetry Editor

Thanks and Joan Didion

Thank you to everyone who submitted their work to the 2011-2012 print edition of West 10th! We will be reviewing the submissions over winter break. Expect to hear from us regarding your submissions in February!On a side note, we noticed that Joan Didion is discussing her new book Blue Nights at Symphony Space tonight at 7:30. From their website: "Didion discusses her deeply moving new memoir about her daughter, and her own fears and thoughts about growing old, in her first book since the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking. As with that memoir, in her new one, Didion confides and confronts her fears, frailties, and sorrows about her life as she looks back and forward.  In conversation with her nephew Griffin Dunne (After Hours).""Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember."—Blue NightsTickets and information here

"Your Father on the Train of Ghosts:" A Review

Lauren Roberts, Assistant Poetry Editor of West 10th, reviews Your Father on the Train of Ghosts by G. C. Waldrep and John Gallagher.

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallagher’s collaboration, YOUR FATHER ON THE TRAIN OF GHOSTS reads how an air vacuum surrounding one passing vehicle feels: the poetry can suspend time, steal breath from your lungs. Whether or not this effect is sustained across the collection’s 221-paged sprawl is debatable and depends entirely on the reader’s willingness, their ability to be surprised afresh with each variation of certain stock devices that appear throughout.Bridges, trains, windows and flames are some of the many, often revisited tropes that bind the collection together. These images serve as metaphors for many different things in turn: Bridges symbolize people; trains are relationships, weather, music. Windows are a very complex structural element that we’d prefer not to go into for brevity’s sake, and flames are what happens when you’re not paying attention. Bridges, trains, windows, flames; such reiteration establishes a rhythm like wheels on a track, signals an essential unchangingness even as the composition moves forward through varied landscapes.And to where, toward what end, are Waldrep and Gallagher driving? Nowhere, really. They’re less interested in a destination for YOUR FATHER ON THE TRAIN OF GHOSTS than in developing a concept: there’s art in “confusion / of desire and location, trust / and vector.” It’s a prettily wrought, if purportedly aimless trip that the poets invite us on. I’ll Decorate My House With You encapsulates this in its last couplet, the penultimate followed by an extended final line, “And then we invent something / for the dashboard that replicates the horizon, and we go for a drive.”

On the way to our version of the horizon, there are definitely things to marvel at. Especially in GHOSTS’ first third, where the collection’s central ideas are expressed with its most phenomenal lyricism. Poems here create and hold us flush against the skin of a weird, totally new atmosphere, inside of which the commonplace become unmoored, morph and blend together.Then, in the middle and beyond, every varied thing blends together almost too well. We’re no longer on the verge of any realization. Even awesome specificities, never before mentioned occurrences, have apparently happened before – “in Los Angeles / another designer wallpaper artist / dedicates her blog to / Krishna” ; “the hearses are circling the playgrounds again.”Another and again. These qualifiers occur until it becomes easy for a reader’s eyes to glaze over. Everything seems plain immutable, interchangeable; by page 87, one of GHOSTS’ narrators too falls sadly, dangerously deadened to what’s occurring as he perseveres with the collection’s theme. He sets the scene for On the Performativity of Grief As Ecstatic Culture, saying, “The curtains in the clown house were on fire again,” and doesn’t recognize the implications of that statement until “…the sirens approached. / Are they in there, / I remember you kept asking. Are they still inside?”It’s inconclusive whether any clowns died in the incident. The toll’s not important, anyway. The real potential tragedy is that maybe you couldn’t appreciate this startling and good poem because you were lulled into complacency after the last fire, pages back in the collection’s girth.

Mercurial Lamb: A Narrative of Collaborative Mutation

Eric Kim reviews Matthea Harvey's "adult-children's book" Of Lamb, a new erasure put out by McSweeney's.In their new release, Of Lamb (McSweeney’s, 2011), poet Matthea Harvey and painter Amy Jean Porter collaborate on a story that haunts, delights and surprises all at the same time.  Through vibrant paintings that complement a dark, tilted narrative, Harvey and Porter have concocted, as Rae Armantrout calls it, an “adult-children’s book [...] each page like a Valentine’s Day chocolate with one drop of arsenic.”Inspired by Jen Bervin’s Nets and Tom Phillips’s A Humument, Harvey’s erasure of David Cecil’s A Portrait of Charles Lamb is eerie yet coherent, foreign yet familiar—in her own words, “an irreverent and warped retelling of the nursery rhyme.”  Mary, essentially, had a little lamb, but they did more than just go to school together: “They pin’d and hungr’d after bodily joy/ Lamb and Mary met in whatever room happened to be closest/ Who would not be curious to see the pictures?”  Carefully balancing abstract nuances undoubtedly facilitated by the erasure process (“Vacillating Lamb owed everything, owed nothing to love”) with concrete plot points that tie the whole thing together into a narrative (“Lamb found Mary crying in the hedge”), Harvey showcases through Of Lamb the innovative, subtle capabilities of erasure poetry to mutate the original for the better.The point here is mutation: it is not the mere recreation of the nursery rhyme that spellbinds readers; it is those remnants of the familiar story that have been warped in the most disturbing sense, from children’s song to bestial tragedy, from linear narrative to disjointed, kaleidoscopic experience—those moments are what make Harvey’s erasure a complete success, a modern chronicle of change through the seasons to an eventual coda: “He could not stop the clouds or the sun/ Lamb thought conclusions were all alike.”  The process of whiting out, of erasing significant portions of the original text in order to understand a different kind of narrative, simulates not only Lamb’s snowballing physical and mental disintegration by the end (“Lamb’s mind struggling, forgetting [...] His figure had grown dim”), but also Mary and Lamb’s mercurial relationship, the fragmental shift from love to loss.Porter’s paintings often highlight this mercuriality: Lamb is a different color in each drawing.  His fleece is not “white as snow,” but shades of burgundy, indigo and emerald, each reflexive of the mood of that specific page.  But the most curious moments in the book are when Porter’s paintings instead complicate Harvey’s text.  For example, to “Mary shut his eyes to the future and ardently turned to animal satisfactions,” Porter paints Mary devouring a piece of flesh behind Lamb’s back.  Meat eating, a strident motif in the book, is at first Porter’s interpretation of Harvey’s text: “animal satisfactions” does not seem to point to meat eating so readily.  But later, Lamb in fact reveals, “Should I tell you I watched her eating a bit of cold mutton in our kitchen?”  Porter’s accompanying painting illustrates Mary licking a pink lamb popsicle, then three pages later, lamb licking from the ground that very popsicle melted.  Harvey’s coupled text at this point is less obvious: “Year by year he appeared fatter, but Lamb was not full of fun.”  Such an impact of Porter’s paintings on Harvey’s seemingly abstract words, and vice versa, suggests the need to read Of Lamb not as a mere poem with accompanying illustrations, but as a collaboration of the two mediums, each as much a part of the narrative as the other.This duality makes it difficult to define what Of Lamb is about—because semantically the words say one thing while the paintings say another.  But they certainly work together, as Harvey puts it, “like a game of telephone, or an archeological site, each layer taking something from the layer before and transforming it.”  Harvey’s textual mutation interacts with Porter’s illustrations in a way that resists meaning-making and facilitates encountering, unexpectedly experiencing Mary and Lamb page by page.  Perhaps the point here, then, is not to inject meaning into Harvey and Porter’s chocolate, but rather to taste the injected arsenic, to enjoy the mutation as the drug it is.Eric Kim, Poetry Editor

Books for People Who Aren't Sure If They Like Books.

Conor Burnett defends literature from its egghead stigma, recommends books that entertain."Odds are, if you're on this blog you like reading and writing a lot. This post is not for you. Though you totally can still read it. Please read it."Odds are, if you're on this blog you like reading and writing a lot. This post is not for you. Though you totally can still read it. Please read it.I read. I read well. But I'm not well-read. I can power through a million books a month, but I still have trouble getting interested in the books that are generally perceived to be important, or intelligent. I read a lot, not to absorb information, or to enlighten myself, or to show off. I read because books are a form of entertainment. And people don't seem to remember that.Books are good. There is nothing wrong with books. But dozens of my friends haven't read a book since high school. Hell, one of my friends hasn't read a book since 9th grade, and he managed to stay in Honors English for the entire rest of high schoolNow, to me, the stigma involved with books stems from the fact that we use them so often in classrooms, and libraries, that they catch a bad reputation by association. People associate books with being forced to sit down, and choke through a terrible one for a class you don't want to be a part of in the first place. Teachers cramming books into your brainhole day in and day out, 6 or 7 periods a day, is draining. What people forget is that being force-fed anything sucks.  Doing something against your will is the absolute worst. Plenty of times I quit things I genuinely liked because my life was over-saturated with it. I used to absolutely love playing basketball. After a year of playing Junior Varsity, on a team that won two games (they were our first two games, we thought we were going to be unbeatable) and for a coach that made us practice every day, even over winter break, I no longer enjoyed basketball. So I joined the school play, because I liked to perform for people too. Except the exact same thing happened: they drilled acting and performing into us literally 7 days a week, and it made me absolutely hate the school plays.Now, with some distance between me and my days as the starting center on an absolutely terrible JV team, I can safely say that once again I enjoy basketball. Mr. Steeves is no longer riding me to get plays right, and to "not to be afraid to use my body when grabbing a board."This is all a huge round about way of saying this: just because we were force-fed books for years, doesn't mean that they're something that we should permanently ditch when we can. Your crappy high school English teacher made you read 5 books a marking period, and set all these crazy deadlines, and assigned unimaginative projects. I swear, I won't do that.The cliche goes that "high school was like a jail." My blog posts are going to be the halfway house between said jail and the Real World. I'm going to suggest books that shoot the gap between entertaining and intelligent. And remain calm: there aren't any dead-lines, you don't have to write a paper, you don't have to do anything other than sit back and read. I don't expect anything out of you, friend. No pressure.Short stories are the perfect starting point for what I am trying to accomplish, here. I'm treating you as a skittish animal. I'm trying to lure you over to my side, and if I make any large sudden movements or chuck "War and Peace" at you, this entire thing will be for naught.That said, the book I suggest you read is CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Rather than subject you to a long diatribe as to why I think it's brilliant, I'll sum things up fairly quickly. George Saunders wrote a book of short stories. Because George Saunders is good at what he does, this book is simultaneously intelligent, funny, and easy to read. And above all, the stories are entertaining.I didn't hear about this book through a literary magazine, or a book reading, or from an English Professor. I read an interview with Ben Stiller where he talks about how he's been fighting for years to adapt the titular story into a movie. If you can't trust me, trust Ben Stiller. If you can't trust Ben Stiller, may God have mercy on your soul.

Now the Feminists Have Beef with Jennifer Egan, Too

If you remember, chick lit authors and loud Twitter presences Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult were really pissed earlier this year with all the press Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was getting when it came out. They claimed that the book was being pushed to a higher level of greatness than it deserved, all because he was a man and the NYT Book Review was a "Boys Club". Google #FRANZENFREUDE or click the link above for more info-- they may have had a point. So because of this, many women writers were shooting for Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad to be the book of the year instead. And now that Goon Squad has won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, all of the literary feminists of the world should be happy, but instead they're pissed because in an interview with the Wall Street Journal hours after winning the Pulitzer, Egan inadvertently dissed CHICK LIT- NOOOOOOOOOO!Here is the quote that's causing feminist backlash all over the internets:WSJ: Over the past year, there’s been a debate about female and male writers and how they come off in the press. Franzen made clear that “Freedom” was going to be important,while  others say that Allegra Goodman was too quiet about “The Cookbook Collector.” Do you think female writers have to start proclaiming, “OK, my book is going to be the book of the century”?JE: Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at “The Tiger’s Wife.” There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.Jamie Beckman, a columnist at The Frisky, wrote an article shaming Egan for acting as if the problem here was the fact that Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan was not that she plagiarized, but that she borrowed material from chick lit authors, implying that chick lit was "derivative" and "banal". Beckman mentions that Egan is “one of her favorite authors of all time,” but now expresses doubt that she’ll ever recommend Egan’s work to anyone again.Egan has yet to issue a statement apologizing or reiterating her claims.My personal opinion: Whatever girl, you won a f$&#ing Pulitzer. And it wasn't won by writing chick lit, sooooo.

Is it all true?

Hi everyone.The semester is almost over! I'm sure we're all excited. I have news about a book some of us might have read (and if you have not read it, then perhaps you will recognize the title). The book Three Cups of Tea is under scrutiny because of questions about its accuracy. The non-fiction book talks about Mr. Gary Mortenson's tale of building schools for young girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan after he was saved by people from a small village. Was everything stated in the memoir true? How much of the truth was exaggerated? A CBS news report questions the authenticity of this book because of things like the  dates not correlating. Moreover in an interview, the author added a disclaimer. He claimed the example CBS drew upon was compressed to fit all the events that occurred within a years time frame. The company which published "Three Cups of Tea" did not have a comment on the matter.Some of you might be wondering: "What about the sequel? Is it accurate?" I'm not sure. We will have to wait and see if another report will come out on that book. "Three Cups of Tea" raises questions about the publishing company and about the regulations for memoirs. Are they well regulated? Should the regulations be stronger? What do you think?To read the full article regarding this book follow the link:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/business/media/18mortenson.html?_r=1&ref=books

Crazy On You

Hello all, hope you're second semester segues swimmingly.  Can anyone believe that's the year's almost over??? I for one, cannot wait for summer so I can begin tackling my comically long list of BOOKS-I-MUST-READ-RIGHT-NOW.  The process started last night when I walked over to St. Mark's Bookshop and perused their sales.  If anyone is looking for the classic local-indie-bookstore, this is the place to go.  (Shakespeare and Co. is close in terms of atmosphere but is part of a mini-chain, plus not as indebted to village history as St. Marks.)  For one thing, they have an abundant number cool/weird/obscure magazines, a great poetry section, and plenty of signed books from NYC authors scattered throughout.  Last year, for example, I was thisssss close to getting a signed copy of Patti Smith's Just Kids.  Although they don't have much event space, which is unfortunate, they do stay open to midnight--perfect for late-night book runs like the one I made on Monday night. What did I find?  The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides for only seven dollars.  And though it was MY LAST SEVEN DOLLARS, I figured it was worth it.  Food?...ehhhh.  A good book?...now we're talking.  Plus I'm excited to compare it with Sofia Coppola's film version.  (Now don't hate y'all.  Yes I saw the film first, but in my defense, I didn't know it was based on a book til afterwards.)  Time to blast the band Heart and rock some "far out" 70s vests. 

REVIEW: Yoko Ogawa's HOTEL IRIS

At a party about a month ago, I picked up a thin paperback that was sitting on my friend's kitchen table called One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed. I hadn't heard a thing about it but apparently everybody else had-- the cover claimed it was an international bestseller (translated originally from Italian) with over 1,000,000 copies sold. One Hundred Strokes is an ostensibly autobiographical novella that recounts a Sicilian schoolgirl's sexual exploits over about a year. It isn't really a coming-of-age story-- it's more like borderline soft/hardcore erotica, a strange book about a young girl who discovers her body and "wants to explore its limits," asking for help from a few older men she finds to seduce her on the way. I took it home with me and read it quickly, and it was quite a romp, as far as that kind of stuff goes. I say "romp" because it isn't a story of a sexually-curious girl who gets hurt and learns a lesson at the end after something tragically rape-y happens to her. Melissa P, the novella's protagonist, doesn't really learn many lessons. She is in control the entire time. She learns about her body as she goes along-- she is entirely conscious of what is being done to her and how her body reacts to it. So she's a likable protagonist, because she isn't stupid. Sure she's naive, as most sixteen year old girls are, but she has limits for herself and eventually knows when to hold her hands up and say "no." I wouldn't go as far to say that this book was a good book, because it wasn't. It's a translated text, and the prose just kinda pedals through until it gets you to the end.Similarly, Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris also follows a naive protagonist who goes through a journey of sexual enlightenment and awakening -- sort of. The difference between One Hundred Strokes' Melissa P and Hotel Iris's Mari is that while Melissa P falls in love (healthily, almost normally) with the idea of sex, Mari instead falls in love with a fifty eight year old sadist who lives on an island off the coast of her tiny Japanese shore town. He whips her, and binds her, and essentially makes her his slave, and she doesn't think twice-- because she loves him. And so all these things he does to her, she "LIKES IT", or thinks she does- because of how in love with him she is, she doesn't know anything else. Originally written in Japanese, the translated prose of Hotel Iris is really quite beautiful. There are moments in the story during which the writing itself is just as exciting as the suspense you feel during the graphic sex scenes between Mari and her "lover". (There is one chapter in particular in which Mari and the old Russian translator visit a traveling circus that does nothing to advance the plot but is gorgeously descriptive and sad, and may be the literary highlight of the entire book.)My one issue with Iris, though, is Mari herself. The author gives us reason enough to like her-- having grown up beneath her mother's strict grip, it's exciting to watch Mari invent excuses to leave her post at the front desk of her family's run-down motel to go gallivant with the old translator. But this is where Mari's agency stops. In any scene where Mari is with translator, her character draws inward and becomes-- boring, maybe? Although the observations she makes about her lover are certainly perceptive and intriguing (the old man is actually quite a fascinating character in his own rite and not at all entirely despicable), they all come from a place of utter entrancement, pure infatuation. The fact that Mari is so in love with this stranger, the fact that she never once questions her feelings towards him, makes her quite limited as a protagonist. Even during the climax of the story, during which Mari is exposed to a truly humiliating circumstance, her inner thoughts sway only slightly-- she's still so in love with the translator that her thoughts come close to being inconsequential in the context of the events she's experiencing. Mari's lack of any sort of emotional revelation, big or small, made me question how to feel at the end of the book-- is Mari's blamelessness what makes this story tragic? What makes the story good? Or is the ending a sort of triumph for Mari? It's difficult to decide. Which, I suppose, is a good thing.Unlike Hotel Iris, One Hundred Strokes doesn't leave you with much of a feeling at all. Because Melissa is never really hurt, although she is likable, there is no reason to really feel for her. It certainly made me question the thought that a protagonist has to be likable in order for a book to be good. In this case, with these two books, the answer to that was blurred for me. I'm certain I much preferred Hotel Iris to One Hundred Strokes.So:Do not read: One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa PInstead, read: Hotel Iris by Yoko OgawaAlso, while we're on the topic, watch Secretary!Enjoy the snow?CD