Matt Donovan

Writer’s Notebook—Poetry Where Nonfiction Fails

May 4, 2021

Not long ago, I flew to Chicago with a list of phone numbers, an interview itinerary with several social workers, ER doctors, and victims of gun violence, and a book project that was already unraveling, although I didn’t know that yet.

[Matt Donovan, photo by Brandan Sodor]

More than a year into writing a journalistic exploration of guns in America, I had an agent, deadlines, punchy chapter subtitles, and a two-sentence handwritten mantra pinned above my desk: Figure it out. Get to work.

Given the structure and premise of my planned book, “getting to work” often meant jetting off to different locations to ask a single pre-determined question about guns. A few weeks prior to arriving in Chicago, I’d traveled to Cody, Wyoming, to speak with teachers, parents, and the town’s sheriff about a new proposal to arm public school staff. Soon, I’d be spending the entire day with a ballistic detective in Cleveland. And my misguided agenda for Chicago? To ask about a trauma surgeon’s claim that we could change public opinion about guns by barraging the public, in the wake of a mass shooting, with graphic photographs that capture the way a bullet ravages the human body.

Given all the inherent problems with that question, I’m humbled by the patience, kindness, and generosity of the Chicago residents with whom I spoke. I’m particularly indebted to two people who ultimately revealed to me the myopic nature of my approach.

The day after I arrived in the city, artist Garland Martin Taylor offered me an extended tour of his studio. I tried to capture just one of his beautiful, multifaceted, ever-changing sculptures in “Here the Thing with Feathers Isn’t Hope,” and the ways in which Taylor’s artwork uses metaphor to interrogate firearms helped me understand that I needed to rework my planned nonfiction book into a collection of poems.

And then I met Pamela Bosley, co-founder of Purpose Over Pain, an organization that fights for gun law reform and offers support to parents who have lost their children to gun violence. In a conference room in Saint Sabina, a church on the city’s South Side, Bosley began our conversation by matter-of-factly describing the murder of her son. Her response to the tone-deaf question that I eventually asked is incorporated verbatim into my poem, “The Wrong Question More Than Once,” which I hope reflects my failure in that moment to understand the most fundamental truths about race and empathy in America.

After our discussion, Bosley led me outside to the sprawling memorial wall which commemorates hundreds of neighborhood residents. She pointed to a photo of her son—grinning in a white tuxedo and holding a cane—that was captioned “A Night of Elegance, Prom 2005.” I stood there on the sidewalk, looking at a picture of Terrell Bosley—whose nickname had been Mr. Music, who had been killed at the age of eighteen while unloading a drum set in the parking lot of a church—having just asked, a few minutes earlier, about whether photographs of the dead could enact grief and change.

Matt Donovan is the author of two collections of poetry—Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press 2017) and Vellum (Mariner 2007), as well as a book of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). A new collection of poems—The Dug-Up Gun Museum—will be published by BOA Editions in 2022. Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

J. M. Tyree

Editors’ Notebooks—The Counterforce

March 15, 2021

Read an excerpt from The Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice—a book publishing tomorrow by Fiction Advocate.

Against Sobriety

Fiction, viewed as a kind of hallucinogenic drug rather than a vitamin supplement, doses our metaphorical pineal gland, that “seat of the soul,” as Descartes called it. In some frogs and sharks such a gland contains a light-sensitive “third eye.” In humans it is connected with the production of melatonin, and, in the 1960s context, it was also associated with research into the effects of psychedelics. Welcome back to Pynchon.

The questions asked in this regard by John N. Bleibtreu (a rather Pynchonian surname) in his 1966 essay in The Atlantic, “LSD and the Third Eye,” remain relevant to the medical, cultural, and literary inheritance of the counterculture in general and the drug culture in particular:

The principal question concerning psychedelic estates remains: How much disruption can the system tolerate? […] The problem of how to maintain a certain madness while at the same time functioning at peak efficiency has now captured the attention of many psychiatrists. There seems to be a point at which “creative” madness becomes degenerative, impeding function rather than stimulating it.

Pynchon wishes to deal out altered states that defamiliarize the world and creatively disrupt how we see. To quote two standard taglines of the 1960s: Another world is possible—all power to the imagination.

In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas’ disc-jockey husband Wendell “Mucho” Maas sees the light when he takes LSD and listens to rock and roll:

When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the ‘you’ is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.

This way of seeing the world or hearing the voice of the human person could be associated with the paradoxical and slippery notion of “The Counterforce” broached by Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), at least as expanded and writ large in the zeitgeist of the counterculture. The counterforce, viewed in a “lower case” variation, so to speak, can provide a doubled-edge metaphor for the process of creative resistance to various types of oppressive power, while at the same time darkly evoking its mirror image in the world-ending terminology of nuclear strategy.

The counterforce is not actually an organization you can join and it might not even exist (let’s face it). It is both illusory and necessary as a provisional and mobile concept that advances storytelling – fiction – as one way to envision alternatives to the present, and, therefore, for the future. In this specific sense, Pynchon proposes that facts alone cannot save us from our current predicaments – we need better stories.

The Pynchon Wiki usefully lists some of its quotations from Gravity’s Rainbow on the “counterforce” as follows:

“Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable… new life”
“a nova of heart that will … change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are”
“the possibility of another night that could actually … light the path home”
“Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness”
“love, dreams, the spirit”
“love that can even make the oppression seem a failure”
“some promise of event without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find till now”
“the living green, against the dead white”

Here we see the more positive side of Pynchon’s imagination nicely condensed. Love; the fight against oppression, the “dead white” and what Against the Day (2006) calls “the wrong people”; the ecological mythology of Vinland as a fictional Eden in the green New World; the realm of dreams; the possibility of a new or alternative life reached through uncovering the beach—the beach beneath the paving-stones, as the Paris slogan of 1968 had it.

Mucho Maas adds the prospect of mind-altering substances to this book of love, while Doc Sportello, the burn-out private investigator protagonist of Inherent Vice (2014), uses marijuana to see an alternate America that contains his stoned vision of what is described in terms echoing Gravity’s Rainbow‘s counterforce as “the night… about to turn epic….” To be “against the dead white” is to be against the day and for “the living green.” And this flaky eco-sensibility of regeneration and redemption, a “nova of heart,” is perhaps Pynchon’s clearest definition of the counterforce as a perceptual change that carries other potential forms of liberation within it. We need fiction to help us see how to see.

The counterforce of love is inherently political insofar as it “can even make the oppression seem a failure.” (Note the careful wording here: seem.) And one might add laughter into the mix along with love, since it heralds the promise of embarking on what we hope for and risk on a good trip. The same old world awaits us upon return, of course. It is heartbreaking to consider the failure or pollution of a generation’s optimism about the power of love, music, art, and politics to change the world. But, according to a certain way of thinking, or a certain lens on the potential contained in the subversive elements of the past, that heartbreak suggests the possibility that something like the counterforce cannot ever be eradicated entirely, even if it seems to lie dormant during reactionary eras, like the 1970 of Inherent Vice, or more recent times, for that matter. Pynchon’s novels are highly cognizant of the dangerous collapse of the counterculture and its replacement by forces of exploitation and surveillance, but Pynchon refuses to give up on the failed but perennial ideals of a more loving, less greedy world. Inherent Vice mourns the loss of alternatives in the culture but it doesn’t stop there—like any good private detective, it supports the hopeless cause.

In her fascinating book Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture, Joanna Freer connects the political with the psychedelic in Pynchon’s novels. She champions Against the Day as Pynchon’s “most psychedelic novel” and argues that it “works specifically to problematize the ‘real’,” in the process suggesting “the potential multiplicity of perceivable realities.” Along somewhat similar lines, David Cowart argues in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon that the “visionary moment” so valued by Pynchon is “commonly occulted by sobriety.” As Pynchon critics often note, all this is largely intended in a figurative sense, one that needn’t involve real drugs, necessarily, which in any event are never portrayed by Pynchon as the only answer to the problem, and are as often as not depicted in the novels as adding further tools of exploitation to the arsenal of oppression. (In Inherent Vice, heroin and cocaine, in particular.) This, then, is something more like a wider challenge to the so-called “discourses of sobriety” – history in particular – from the critical perspective of a particular form of historical fiction that foregrounds its own fictional status.

Equally, such trips, whether literal or metaphorical, cannot be reduced to the private, apolitical experiences that seemed to dominate the drug culture when it became detached historically from countercultural radicalism. Instead, consciousness expansion and various forms of political consciousness-raising are inextricably linked for Pynchon in a mode of analysis that exceeds the boundaries of sobriety. So Freer argues productively that there’s “a warning elaborated throughout Pynchon’s oeuvre against allowing imaginative or visionary experience to become an end in itself, dissociated from a critical, interpretative practice aimed at alleviating suffering and escaping oppression.”

Indeed, on this view, imaginative work forms a prelude to other forms of engagement. In order to build a different world, we first must envision that it might be something other than what’s there at the moment, and to cast off the claim that this is how things always must be. Pynchon attempts to re-enchant the everyday mundanities of American life by recasting the New World as a puzzling map whose legends do not point only to exploitation, a map within the map featuring a fictional territory, with treasures open to lovers and losers, loners and flakes, amateur sleuths and paranoiac novelists. Viewed through this powerful fictional lens that both magnifies and distorts, our mental map begins to wobble as we fall under the influence of this spell or drug.

Baudelaire notoriously recommended that one remain “continually drunk,” but, he asked immediately afterwards, “on what?” The answer: “Wine, poetry, or virtue, as you wish.” It’s also true that Baudelaire wrote up his experiences with hashish in his ambiguously titled Artificial Paradises. Is it OK to admit that paradise is always artificial? Does its fictional status make it any less valuable? Is it enough of a consolation to see things in a slightly different way—to imagine those alternative versions of oneself that try harder to love and do better at fighting back?

No, not quite. On one hand, it’s a start; on the other hand, it can trap us into doing nothing, just as Bleibtreu noted about psychedelics like LSD and their “degenerating” effect of diminishing returns. So, hallucinogens are optional here—all of the above can be taken as metaphorical content about the power of love, ecology, fiction, and good critical prose. In The Crying of Lot 49, it’s Oedipa who points out to her psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius, who wants to hook her on LSD, that “I am having an hallucination now, I don’t need drugs for that.” In a pointed turn, it’s revealed that Hilarius began his career at Buchenwald.

That said, Walter Benjamin, responding in part to Baudelaire, connected his own experiments with hashish to his early notion of “genuine aura,” which he described in almost spiritual terms as an inherent bit of magic waiting to be discovered in “all things, not just certain kinds of things, as people imagine.” Inherent Vice‘s Doc Sportello might identify with this experience of expanding one’s consciousness by one means or another, especially since this vision of the fragile, interconnected world is radically opposed to smashing things to pieces. What sounds New Age or proto-hippie is more deeply ecological and philosophical insofar as it places something that might be divine (or something like that?) in a coextensive relationship with everything that exists in our beautiful, sad, hilarious, tragic, bizarre, lonely, hopeful, tender, fucked-up, and fantastic world.

Buy a copy of The Counterforce – Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice from its publisher, Fiction Advocate. The book appears in the Afterwords series featuring new takes on contemporary classics.

J. M. Tyree (Twitter: @textplusimage) is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff, from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum), an NPR Best Books selection, and of BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters), from the British Film Institute and Bloomsbury. He also wrote BFI Film Classics: Salesman and Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London (Redwood/Stanford University Press). His essays and short stories have appeared in Brick, Lapham’s Quarterly, Sight & Sound, Film Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Guernica, and other magazines. He currently serves as a Nonfiction Editor at New England Review and teaches at VCUarts.

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

February 1, 2021

Sarah Audsley photo by Anne Skidmore — Sarah Audsley, photo by Anne Skidmore

Do poets always feel envious of painters? Do painters ever envy poets? “Field Dress Portal” (NER 41.4) was not begun out of envy but out of admiration for the painting Field Dress by Lauren Woods. However, I would be lying if I did not admit to often being envious of my friends who are painters. With layers of color from an invented palette, the artist’s perception of the world is realized; sometimes, it seems like an easier task than the poet’s. I am making assumptions. Of course, I do not believe that either the painter or the poet ever endeavors because it is an easy task. Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

The ekphrastic poem has always eluded me. In graduate school, I failed to respond to a writing prompt by one of my favorite mentors. I never really tried again until this poem because, I think, the ekphrastic poem intimidates me. At its heart, I understand that ekphrasis—defined by The Oxford Classical Dictionary as “the rhetorical description of a work of art”—is supposed to describe and respond to a work of art beginning with the poet’s description. But how does one adhere to the mode’s expectations and, possibly, transcend the pitfall of mere description?

My response to Woods’s painting evolved over time, almost along with the artist’s reworking of her canvas. I watched the pictures of her progress on social media, the painting morphing over the course of several months. Revisions of the poem did not exactly follow the changes the painter made, but I reworked many drafts from August 2019 to the final proof for NER.

I wanted to step into the painting—to feel the tree limbs underfoot, to imagine inhabiting the lighted landscape the painter created, to understand the forest in a new way. A painting is 2-D, but how can words make it 3-D? I hope this poem enlivens the painting, creates a portal for the reader, encourages looking up the original artwork, and for the question the poem asks to be worthy of the leap. Also, I am aware that I cannot use the phrase “dead doe” without evoking “Dead Doe” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, which, in my opinion, is inimitable—I bow down before her and her genius. Perhaps Woods’s painting reminded me of Kelly’s poem. And, in that regard, Noah Stezer’s poem “For All the Deer” in Sixth Finch provides another lens to ruminate on deer poems.

Most importantly, though, I consider myself a “rural poet.” What I mean by that self-designation is that I claim belonging in the rural landscape—Vermont, specifically—as a Korean American adoptee. Seeing someone like myself represented in a rural or wild landscape was not common when I was growing up. I claim the pastoral. The poem’s speaker’s identity is not disclosed, but it is important for the “I” to take up the rural descriptions, to walk through the painting, to make my own portal of belonging with words.

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

November 23, 2020

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

A serendipitous moment in Scotland sparked NER poet Shara McCallum to answer, in her poems, the questions What is our responsibility to the past? What are the whole truths of our inheritance? What choices do each of us face and make, within the circumscription of history?

Where history ends is where literature and the imagination often begin. No Ruined Stone, the book from which the poems in this issue are drawn, emerges out of history’s omissions and silences. It uses the lyric and dramatic modes of poetry to reconstruct and reinhabit a speculative account of the past.

The book was in some sense born of a chance encounter. On my first visit to Scotland in 2015, having just come off the train in Edinburgh with my husband and our then young daughters and climbing a million stairs with bags in tow, we stopped at a candy shop off the Royal Mile before even reaching our hotel. The owner of Lickety Split was an artist and, as with so many Scots I would come to meet over the next five years of returning, open and easy with conversation. She also shared one of my children’s names, and we got to talking. On learning I was a poet and from Jamaica originally, Naomi announced, “You must know the story of Robert Burns and Jamaica, then?” I didn’t.

Late in the summer and into the fall of 1786, it turns out, Scotland’s great bard had actively made plans to migrate from Scotland to Jamaica. He’d contracted himself to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation on the island’s north coast—though “bookkeeper” in this context is linguistic misdirection. Were it not for his ultimate abandonment of his plan, Burns would’ve been responsible for daily overseeing and managing the work performed by enslaved Africans.

At the time I learned of this fork-in-the-road in Burns’ life, I was living with my family in London, feeling the layers of history beneath my feet and everywhere I turned. For months I carried this story around with me, like a sore in the mouth one’s tongue keeps finding. Walking the city that winter, a question entered my mind and took up residence: What would have happened had he gone?

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond. Doing so, led me to archives and travels in Scotland and Jamaica, into the pages of biography, literary and cultural history, and back to Burns’s poems, prose, and songs. It returned me with full force to some of my earliest and ongoing obsessions and vexations, including with Romanticism and the Enlightenment’s ideals and occlusions.

What resulted is a book-length sequence voiced primarily by two figures: Burns, transplanted to Jamaica for the last ten years of his life, and his granddaughter Isabella, a black woman born into slavery at the start of the nineteenth century, who migrates to Scotland and passes for white. The book dwells not only in the question that prompted it but in the many that persist for me as a writer. What is our responsibility to the past? What are the whole truths of our inheritance? What choices do each of us face and make, within the circumscription of history?

Shara McCallum, originally from Jamaica, is the author of six books published in the US and UK. The poems in this issue are from her forthcoming verse sequence, No Ruined Stone, a speculative account of Scottish poet Robert Burns’s migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Her previous book, Madwoman (Alice James, 2017), was winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. McCallum is a professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program.

New England Review