New Poetry I'm reading

I enjoyed Carl Phillip's new book as I discuss here on the KR.
Right now, I'm wending my way through Emily Wilson's Micrographia. Her syntax rivals Hopkins at times (but without the rhyme), and the imagery is like medieval miniature, a marvel of density, precision and patience. Zach Savich's recent book is on my table next, beside Vanishing-Line and Aquarium, two books by Jeffrey Yang. Looking forward to picking through each of these carefully.

Octavia Butler's Fledgling vs. Meyer's Twighlight

Somehow Octavia' Butler's Fledgling came out the same year as Meyer's first Twlight book, but to less acclaim. Butler's book is so much more subtle than Meyer's also compelling book. Butler adds dimensions of race, American history and first person narration that create depth from a quite similar plot line. Why then is Meyer's book more popular? Setting aside (unjustly) the quirks of publishing and timing, I think Meyer simply succeeds in plot where Butler dwells in character. Against Aristotle's advise, Butler privileges one character over plot that comprises many. I plowed through Twilight, skimmed the middle two books in the series, and admired Breaking Dawn. Meyer's characters accumulate momentum between them and drive the book. Butler presents one character, Shori, intimately. This device repeats the basic structure of Butler's earlier Kindred which also took you into the mind of a young women undergoing an unexplained and supernatural transformation. I enjoyed Kindred as I did Fledgling, but I could have put either book down half-way through or two-thirds of the way through with as much satisfaction as at the end. That's because by then I've absorbed the details of the character's peculiar situation and the premise of the novel. Beyond that, Butler's plot is mere footnotes. As a poet, I worry that I will let language enrapture me at the expense of plot. But here is another potential trap: character and premise at the expense of plot. But plot alone makes only the Twilight series and not Woolf's The Waves. I assumed there's something good in between ;) But what is it and how do I write it?

Thoughts on Carl Philips for the KROnline

A few of my longer, more carefully edited thoughts here in a review of Carl Philip's new book, A Dream in Horses.

Epistles and First person narrators

Reading Frankenstein after a few contemporary novels is odd because this book comprises letters and extended first person monologues. Not pages and pages of snappy dialogue that could be film script! (For example, I just finished The Eyre Affair which reads like a movie script; apparently the author wrote them for the industry before turning to novels.) The devices are so transparent. One character meets another and tells him he will tell him his story. Inside that narrative, he meets another character and that character says , "Wait! let me tell you my story." The book does include bits of dialogue and action, but much less than one might expect. I'm a bit envious of the nineteenth century writer... why can't I just tell everything in letter exchanges or long, retrospective first-person narratives? I suppose I could, but I also suppose it would be boring and/or trite.

I realize how little I know about the history of fiction or its progress, despite a few degrees that suggest I ought to. When did dialogue begin to take such prominence? I could tell you about stream of consciousness in Woolf or multiple narrators in Joyce, but I'm not sure about that more simple development.

Shelly's narrator on Past and Future "Natural Science"

“ ‘The ancient teachers of this science, said he, ‘ promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promised very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hand seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the inivisble world with its own shadows.’

“I departed highly pleased with the professor and his lecture, and paid him a visit the same evening.” – Frankenstein

Is Frankenstein Sci Fi?

In the horrible/uncharitable/anti-feminist introduction by Rieger to the edition I’m reading, he claims that we shouldn’t see Frankenstein as precursor to science fiction because: “The science-fiction writers says, in effect, since x has been experimentally proven or theoretically postulated, y can be achieved by the following, carefully documented operation. Mary Shelley skips to the outcome and asks, if y had been achieved, by whatever means, what would be the moral consequences? In other words, she skips the science” (xxvii). This reflects a simplistic notion of science fiction, both its motivation and its actual content. Predictive fiction – I think of P.D. James’s Children of Men or Asimov's I, Robot – considers the consequences of certain futures or developments. A gesture might be made to the “how” of such development but the emphasis is on postulation of consequences; the scientist (or more likely, technologist or engineer) deals with “how” and it is precisely the privilege of the fiction author to assess what would happen if such and such were possible, by whatever means. The scientist takes on supernatural (as in superintendent of nature) or natural powers; god-like or nature-like, she can bend or determine the laws of life. In this, she fulfills a role more like God in Paradise Lost than the author of a how-to-create-y text-book, as Rieger implies. Perhaps the science fiction reader enjoys the possibility than a person could accomplish y by “scientific” –i.e. human and natural – means more than by “magic” – i.e. supernatural in the sense of nothing-to-do-with nature – that tends to dominate so-called fantasy novels. But the effect of such accomplishments, the world brought about by a new technical or physical possibility, that is almost always the focus of “science fiction,” or again, as I would prefer, predictive fiction.

Predictive Fiction and Frankenstein

“The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.” – Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

This seems good advice on which to recommence my novel. She incites her reader with the simple claim that, like all good ghost stories, her story is based on the truth. Isn’t this what readers of science fiction prefer over those of fantasy? (if such a distinction is helpful) Science fiction implies a building from science, from experiment and experience – from truth. Especially in predictive fiction, the author extrapolates from present reality toward something more than reality but not outside its structure, by definition. At least, that is the kind of science fiction/predictive fiction that I prefer.

If Frankenstein were predictive fiction, it is a successful one and not only for its readability. So many of its themes grow from reality and so many more intertwine with our present. We can make life now, in many different ways. We must take responsibility for life, on the planet, for the life we permit and the life we take away. The mutated fish can face us like The Creature; the IBF child can turn to its parents with the same demands; but most importantly, every ‘naturally’ conceived child can—and perhaps will – address its creators with need for justification for its origin. So we create gods and turn to them: to pose the question of our origins and our destinations

Last week, I was lucky to see a vampire ballet based on a short story by John Polidori, a friend who stayed with Byron and Shelly while she wrote Frankenstein. The dancing had its limitations but the costumes and the concept were remarkably innovative.

Now back reading Frankenstein...

Frankenstein and Life

We saw Frankenstein by the British National Theater in a film version at SIFF last week. I’m afraid it’s leaking into my writing. That’s not inappropriate, but I don’t want to let it color the work too much. The play and the book are about the creation of life, the mystery of the difference between life and death, the responsibility of altering life. (I really need to read the original Shelley.) These are themes I’ve been thinking and writing about for a while now, from my dissertation to my article on species to teaching Aristotle’s On the Soul. It’s exciting to teach that text now because it provokes us to discuss the relation between life and non-life which seems especially pressing in relation to current biological and technological innovation. (And that’s very trendy even to passive students.)

I couldn’t help but imagine that the Creature spoke for, say, a child who’d been created by artificial insemination by, say, two men from the genes of different men or women. How would the child feel about the nature of this conception? Would she feel “unnatural”? Brought about into a situation that necessarily marked her as different? Of course, the Creature succeeds insofar as it speaks for all children: Why parents have you brought me into the world only to allow me to suffer it? Why am I not like everyone else? Why have you brought me to life if only to die? At the end of the play, the Creature asks Victor who’s near death what death is? And will he die too? Even Victor, the genius, doesn’t know.

Keats on Winter

"There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,"

-Keats, Hyperion. A Fragment

Great Thoughts

I’ve just discovered Kay Ryan. Well, really, I’ve heard about her for years, picked up her books and rejected them a dozen times, and now, finally, I’m captivated and compelled by her precision and minimalism. I’m thinking about Ryan, along with Rae Armantrout and Heather McHugh, in preparation to review a few other new books. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the lack of representation of women in literary journals, MFA program faculty and the like (for example, here in Slate). I think there’s some vague sense that women get MFAs because they have free time after (or when) they raise families and need to "express themselves" thus have only introverted and domestic, not Serious poems. This triumvirate of serious, funny and cerebral ladies should disabuse anyone of such presuppositions.

Today, I’m just thinking about Ryan, but the rest of the authors might come up in my public reviews. In Ryan’s more famous book, I entirely missed the poignancy and comic seriousness of the first, title poem “Say Uncle.” Now, I feel it and it hurts – like a strained lower back. It pulls you up in this truly painful way but with such suddenness and excess that you laugh at your own incapacity.

The poem that really got me, though, in my current disagreement with philosophy was this one:

Great Thoughts

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus,
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

Ryan sets up confusing and then counter-intuitive analogy. Why would one think that great thoughts do nourish as parents do children? Then, before explaining, she frames a second analogy: instead of like children, the thoughts are like the eucalyptus. What? The reader as yet has no idea what kind of great thoughts she means or what qualities they could share with that tree (scent? dusty greenness?). The next two lines resolve both apparent false analogies: great thoughts clear a space beneath themselves, perhaps poisoning the ground, perhaps taking its nutrients (I’m not quite sure how it works with eucalyptus: with black walnuts, it’s a poison.) So, well, gosh – the end of the poem tells me – it is awful here, next to great thoughts, if you aren’t having one, or worse, if you are trying to grow one, then, there’s no room. You must go to the fringe of the meadow and sow your seeds if you want any sunlight or soil.

That's where I'm headed, I hope.