What I've Been Reading

All last autumn and into early winter, I couldn't find anything to read that satisfied me. The problem was largely me--even books I had been saving to read didn't please me. I wanted writing that was more surprising, more original. I read plenty of stuff that was well-written, beautifully written, but it seemed to me to be more of the same. On top of that is the problem of getting the books I want to read at a reasonable price here in Japan. Due to the internet I can theoreticaly get pretty much anything, but my budget precludes me getting a lot of what I think I want.

I'm happy to report that recently I have read three books that pleased me.

First is James Arthur's Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). This is a first book but it reads like that of an accomplished author. I had read Arthur's poems here and there online, and was astonished at their authenticity. After reading the book, I've concluded that there's not a single poem in this book that is included to demonstrated cleverness or technical accuity. There is plenty of technical accuity and some cleverness--don't get me wrong--but underlying each poem is a depth of emotional truth, an authenticity, that is almost palpable. My favorite poem in the book is "Ghost Life," I don't find available online, but have a look at these excellent pieces instead:

"Against Emptiness" from 32 Poems
"On Day and Night" originally from The New Republic, available at Verse Daily (and my 2nd favorite poem from the book)
"Song of the Doppelganger" from Narrative (and a spookily well-crafted piece)
"The Land of Nod" from Poetry (another of my favorites)

The second book I enjoyed recently was Inger Christensen's The Painted Room (The Harvill Press, 2000). I'm crazy about Christensen's poetry, but this was my first foray into her fiction, and what a wild ride it was. As author & reviewer Dawn Pendergast said on the book-sharing website Goodreads, "This is the plottiest plot I've ever loved..." It's an implausible story, or stories I should more appropriately say, since not only are the narratives intertwined, but so are the consequences. Magical realism rears its sparkly head from time to time, but then is forgotten as events are taken as truth, only to later come under the suspicions of whose truth? From the painter who comes to Mantua in 1460 to adorn with his work the home of the local duke, to the family and servants living in the household, to the pope, the characters and their relationships are elaborate and convoluted to the extreme. SInce Christensen reveals stunning details long after an event has been explicated, you may find you want to reread all 119 pages of this little book. There's a certain reveal that I'm dying to tell you about, but will end my paragraph about this book in order not to spoil it for you.

The last book that recently I have enjoyed is Carol Maso's Ghost Dance (Ecco, 1986), her debut novel. This is written in the fragmented style of David Markson, whose work I adore, the stark difference being that Maso's fragments are her own narration, broken into short pieces (not all as short as Markson's however) that defy chronology. You have to pay close attention to know which bits to weave together in order to understand an event that is mentioned fify different times throughout the book. There is tons of repetition, which as you know I love, but you have to read carefully even the most iterated portions, because each version will reveal something new, however minute, and some of them will have huge revelations that will help the reader know how one thread ties to another. This is a book for an astute reader, but don't think that it's a cerebral book only. The emotional content of this book can exhaust you. I do have to say there was one scene in the book I found troublingly implausible, but for a debut novel, one small scene that isn't in the end all that important is overlookable.

The Joy of Repetition

So in my explorations of UbuWeb this past week, I came across a recording called "Via," made by British poet Caroline Bergvall, in which she reads 55 different translations of the opening verse of Dante's Inferno (you know the one: the first version Bergvall reads is by Dale (1996), "Along the journey of our life, halfway, I found myself again in a dark wood, wherein the straight road no longer lay.") The subtle yet significant differences of the 55 various translations, read successively, is mesmerizing.


This got me to thinking again about the effects of repetition. Actually it had been on my mind all month because of the use of it, to varying effect, in two of the volumes of poetry I read recently.

First, in Butterfly Valley by Inger Christensen, I was entranced by the repetition in the piece called "Watersteps," in which five fountains in Italy are described one time each in seven different sections (for a total of 35 descriptions of the five fountains.) The descriptions are parallel in each section.

For example, in the first section, each fountain is described in its own subsection in five couplets. The first couplet of each fountain's description contains information about when the fountain was built and who the designer was, among other details. The second couplet gives a very brief description of the fountain. The third couplet describes where the voice in the poem is in relation to the fountain while describing it. The fourth couplet introduces a red Jaguar into the scene, a car which reappears in every section. The final couplet describes what light is reflecting off of in the scene.

If all that repetition in detail isn't enchanting enough, the second section starts with its descriptions of the same five fountains in five subsections of five stanzas each, and each stanza not only refers content-wise to the other stanzas in the section, but there is also echoing from the previous section. The effect is that, if you read the description of the second fountain from the first section, and then read the description of the first fountain in the second section, you can reasonably guess what kind of information and detail will be included in the second stanza of the second section to describe the second fountain. Not word for word, of course, but you can predict the content, and that anticipation and its realization are deeply satisfying.

And it just gets more recursive as you go through all seven sections, with the red Jaguar reappearing, the fountain architects showing up again and again, the light reflecting of this object and that, and the sections building on one another so that the reader's expectations build and build. In fact, although one might expect this amount of repetition to be dull, in fact the reality is quite the opposite: it's thrilling to anticipate. I found myself holding my breath a number of times through the reading.

The other book I read recently using repetition as a formal element was H. L. Hix's Chromatics. In particular, there is a long piece called "The Well-Tempered Clavier" containing a succession of shorter pieces titled by using the following template, "Prelude and Fugue No. X in (Key)"; for example the first piece  is "Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C."

Obviously you expect repetition in a fugue, and you get it here. And while the word choices are, as usual with Hix, gorgeously precise, the effect of the repetition is not, for me at least in most of its instances, particularly useful. In fact, in a few cases it is merely annoying, sounding almost like filler. (By the way, I'd like to reassure you that I am a big fan of Hix, and find much to like in this book, but just don't find the fugue structure as interesting as I'd expected to. This book was actually a finalist for the National Book Awards; to see a more complete representation of the book and a sample poem, see the NBA website.)

So what is the difference? When is repetition useful (evocative, or joyous even) and when is it not, especially formal repetition? I probably shouldn't be attempting to blog about this yet, because I haven't got a definitive answer. But it seems to me that at the least, repetition as a pattern should build an expectation in the reader. And while Hix does repeat, he does so in a scattershot way that is not satisfying to me. But which another reader might find very pleasing while simultaneously finding Christensen's predictable use of recursion to be overdone, overbearing even.

I suppose it's a matter of temperment. And today my preference shows.