First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979, Marilyn Hacker (365 Books, Day 342)

Read August 6th.

Marilyn Hacker has been one of my favorite poets for a very, very long time. She has the voice that I enjoy most in poetry, the voice which combines formalism and vernacular speech so thoroughly that she is the only writer I know who has perpetrated stealth sestinas. I mean it. There are poems of hers I knew and knew well for years before I noticed they were actually sestinas. She writes forms not usual in English, also: canzone (really! without cheating!), pantoum, rondelet. And she writes them so well that they stick. She adds to the emotional vocabulary of the heart.

I love her early work the most, because it is where I see this fusion best of her technique and content. Later she rhymes less. But her earlier work is harder to locate. So though there are many pieces in this collection which I have met in one context or another, there are also many which were new to me. And what was new to me also is the throughline, since this is the entirety of her first three collections printed in publication order. When you see the individual poems in anthologies you do not realize how much you can tell about her biography by seeing them in order, that there are so many poems dedicated to a particular love affair, a particular friendship. I knew her spectacular 'Geographer', an elegiac poem for a friend and sometime lover which evokes grief so sharply I can't read it very often-- ( here is the first stanza-- )

-- with its incredible long crescendo build that ends quietly in 'Now you have visited too many cities'. I didn't know she'd written another poem for him a long while earlier, when he was still alive, called 'City', about travel and freedom and the prospects they have being young together and the ways old hurts still hurt. Running across the two, published in two different books and now not many pages apart in the same one, is a blow, and a sharp-edged thing that makes you remember time: those pages are years.

There is something, maybe, to reading a writer chronologically.

Some of these poems are of course minor, and a few are outright juvenilia (I wish my own work before twenty looked like that). At her worst Hacker is discipline without content, a person sitting down and saying 'I will write a sonnet' without having anything to write a sonnet about; there is at least one poem in here that is exactly and precisely that, and admits to it, it says so right there in the sonnet. She is sometimes as cryptic and allusive as a poet writing about the current events of her own life is entitled to be, which makes for frustration for a later reader. She will go to any lengths of syntax to avoid cheating in those canzones, and I think it is all grammatical but I would hate to have to parse it, meaning it takes a few blinking look-back-overs when the verse is in a particularly awkward interval.

At her best she is incandescent, indelible, clear without losing layers, rhythmic without losing real speech. Her phrases hang in the memory: 'To get this far, just this far/ we have become precisely what we are.' She is a brilliant poet of grief, a good one of the blazingly erotic, and a cheerfully silly one on her daughter's fifth birthday and when faced with a light-up letterboard that can't do certain letters. I am delighted to have these three books in one, to hand, away from that limbo marked Dead Out Of Print.

( Oh, here, have an entire poem. This one I managed to notice was a sestina upon first acquaintance. )

First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979, Marilyn Hacker (365 Books, Day 342)

Read August 6th.

Marilyn Hacker has been one of my favorite poets for a very, very long time. She has the voice that I enjoy most in poetry, the voice which combines formalism and vernacular speech so thoroughly that she is the only writer I know who has perpetrated stealth sestinas. I mean it. There are poems of hers I knew and knew well for years before I noticed they were actually sestinas. She writes forms not usual in English, also: canzone (really! without cheating!), pantoum, rondelet. And she writes them so well that they stick. She adds to the emotional vocabulary of the heart.

I love her early work the most, because it is where I see this fusion best of her technique and content. Later she rhymes less. But her earlier work is harder to locate. So though there are many pieces in this collection which I have met in one context or another, there are also many which were new to me. And what was new to me also is the throughline, since this is the entirety of her first three collections printed in publication order. When you see the individual poems in anthologies you do not realize how much you can tell about her biography by seeing them in order, that there are so many poems dedicated to a particular love affair, a particular friendship. I knew her spectacular 'Geographer', an elegiac poem for a friend and sometime lover which evokes grief so sharply I can't read it very often-- ( here is the first stanza-- )

-- with its incredible long crescendo build that ends quietly in 'Now you have visited too many cities'. I didn't know she'd written another poem for him a long while earlier, when he was still alive, called 'City', about travel and freedom and the prospects they have being young together and the ways old hurts still hurt. Running across the two, published in two different books and now not many pages apart in the same one, is a blow, and a sharp-edged thing that makes you remember time: those pages are years.

There is something, maybe, to reading a writer chronologically.

Some of these poems are of course minor, and a few are outright juvenilia (I wish my own work before twenty looked like that). At her worst Hacker is discipline without content, a person sitting down and saying 'I will write a sonnet' without having anything to write a sonnet about; there is at least one poem in here that is exactly and precisely that, and admits to it, it says so right there in the sonnet. She is sometimes as cryptic and allusive as a poet writing about the current events of her own life is entitled to be, which makes for frustration for a later reader. She will go to any lengths of syntax to avoid cheating in those canzones, and I think it is all grammatical but I would hate to have to parse it, meaning it takes a few blinking look-back-overs when the verse is in a particularly awkward interval.

At her best she is incandescent, indelible, clear without losing layers, rhythmic without losing real speech. Her phrases hang in the memory: 'To get this far, just this far/ we have become precisely what we are.' She is a brilliant poet of grief, a good one of the blazingly erotic, and a cheerfully silly one on her daughter's fifth birthday and when faced with a light-up letterboard that can't do certain letters. I am delighted to have these three books in one, to hand, away from that limbo marked Dead Out Of Print.

( Oh, here, have an entire poem. This one I managed to notice was a sestina upon first acquaintance. )

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami (365 Books, Day 343)

Read August 7th. Via B., who has been suggesting I read some Murakami for uh some time now, and who wanted me to start with Wild Sheep Chase but figured this was reasonable.

This was a very odd book for me, because at least one and possibly two of my favorite anime series swiped elements from it wholesale, and in the more impressive case they admit it. The map and tone of one of the threads here (although, and this is major, not the metaphysics or character development or What Is Actually Going On) turned into Haibane Renmei (the director says so), and as the End of the World is a place/complicated spoilery concept, I cannot help thinking of Revolutionary Girl Utena. This made the tone of the book read strangely in ways I am sure were not intended by the author.

However, those of you who are not interested in anime will still find this a very good book; for those of you who are, it's an interesting resonance.

There are two threads going on here: one is set in the Hardboiled Wonderland, and one in the End of the World. In the first, the protagonist is a technician whose brain has been modified to enable him to do a specific kind of unbreakable data encoding, and he's facing confusion from things up to and including a mad scientist and his beautiful granddaughter; the people who want to steal the data; a kind of kappa he's never heard of previously who live underneath Tokyo and are vaguely Lovecraftian; and the people he works for, who aren't so nice either. This is a slightly cyberpunky but actually pretty realistic Tokyo with a tech level just a notch above ours, and a lot of pop culture references to things that do exist, which makes its mad plunge through the tropes of Golden Age SF and some horror extremely entertaining.

In the second, the protagonist is in a town surrounded by a Wall, where he has become the Dreamreader, who reads old dreams at the town library and cannot bear the light of day. The town is full of abandoned industry, quiet people, afternoon streets, and unicorns. The Wall watches. So do the Woods. He had to leave his shadow behind to come into the town, and he would like to find a way to get it back before it dies in prison.

The threads alternate chapter-by-chapter, and Murakami is good at finding places to break off and switch that do not make me want to throttle him. I mean he is not addicted to end-of-chapter cliffhangers, and both threads are sufficiently involving that you enjoy seeing the people again when you get there. This is unusual. Much of the time I hate multiple-thread books, because the author is always jerking you away from people you find interesting to people you do not. This one never jerks. It eases.

The question, of course, is how the threads are related, and whether they have the same protagonist, and so on. The possible answers to this are even more impressive, interesting, and complicated than I had been expecting. This is one of those books where the aesthetic resolution is the glorious profusion of metaphysical and other possibilities that could be implied by what happened, although I suspect people will also find it a satisfying enough ending on more usual terms.

In short, this is just very good, well-woven, compelling, likable, referential to other things without being obnoxious about it, beautifully translated by a translator who clearly had fun (acronym! so many bonus points for the acronym!). I look forward to more Murakami in future, and to seeing what elements of this are things that crop up in his work over and over and which are one-offs, as B. says he's one of those writers where things recur in slightly different forms and permutations throughout his entire body of work.

Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami (365 Books, Day 343)

Read August 7th. Via B., who has been suggesting I read some Murakami for uh some time now, and who wanted me to start with Wild Sheep Chase but figured this was reasonable.

This was a very odd book for me, because at least one and possibly two of my favorite anime series swiped elements from it wholesale, and in the more impressive case they admit it. The map and tone of one of the threads here (although, and this is major, not the metaphysics or character development or What Is Actually Going On) turned into Haibane Renmei (the director says so), and as the End of the World is a place/complicated spoilery concept, I cannot help thinking of Revolutionary Girl Utena. This made the tone of the book read strangely in ways I am sure were not intended by the author.

However, those of you who are not interested in anime will still find this a very good book; for those of you who are, it's an interesting resonance.

There are two threads going on here: one is set in the Hardboiled Wonderland, and one in the End of the World. In the first, the protagonist is a technician whose brain has been modified to enable him to do a specific kind of unbreakable data encoding, and he's facing confusion from things up to and including a mad scientist and his beautiful granddaughter; the people who want to steal the data; a kind of kappa he's never heard of previously who live underneath Tokyo and are vaguely Lovecraftian; and the people he works for, who aren't so nice either. This is a slightly cyberpunky but actually pretty realistic Tokyo with a tech level just a notch above ours, and a lot of pop culture references to things that do exist, which makes its mad plunge through the tropes of Golden Age SF and some horror extremely entertaining.

In the second, the protagonist is in a town surrounded by a Wall, where he has become the Dreamreader, who reads old dreams at the town library and cannot bear the light of day. The town is full of abandoned industry, quiet people, afternoon streets, and unicorns. The Wall watches. So do the Woods. He had to leave his shadow behind to come into the town, and he would like to find a way to get it back before it dies in prison.

The threads alternate chapter-by-chapter, and Murakami is good at finding places to break off and switch that do not make me want to throttle him. I mean he is not addicted to end-of-chapter cliffhangers, and both threads are sufficiently involving that you enjoy seeing the people again when you get there. This is unusual. Much of the time I hate multiple-thread books, because the author is always jerking you away from people you find interesting to people you do not. This one never jerks. It eases.

The question, of course, is how the threads are related, and whether they have the same protagonist, and so on. The possible answers to this are even more impressive, interesting, and complicated than I had been expecting. This is one of those books where the aesthetic resolution is the glorious profusion of metaphysical and other possibilities that could be implied by what happened, although I suspect people will also find it a satisfying enough ending on more usual terms.

In short, this is just very good, well-woven, compelling, likable, referential to other things without being obnoxious about it, beautifully translated by a translator who clearly had fun (acronym! so many bonus points for the acronym!). I look forward to more Murakami in future, and to seeing what elements of this are things that crop up in his work over and over and which are one-offs, as B. says he's one of those writers where things recur in slightly different forms and permutations throughout his entire body of work.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Bury Me Deep, Megan Abbott (365 Books, Day 344)

Read August 8th. Author via coffeeandink.

Gorgeous, delicious noir which both upholds the conventions of the genre perfectly and is quietly subversive on questions such as who has agency in the story. The prose is amazing.

This novel is based on a real murder which made the tabloids in 1931, one of those crimes which became a nationwide scandal but has by our day faded into the background for everyone except those who encounter it in an academic context. In 1930, Marion Seeley, twenty-one, doctor's wife, finds herself alone in Phoenix, Arizona working at a tuberculosis clinic. Her drug addict husband, de-licensed, has gone to Mexico to work as a mining company doctor, his last desperate hope at cleaning up and making some money so they can have a life together. Marion, by herself in the big city, is taken under the wing of one of the other nurses at the clinic, Louise; Louise is supporting a tubercular roommate, Ginny, and the two of them hold parties which are attended by all the wealthy men of the city. Sex and liquor and drugs flow freely, and at one of the parties Marion, an innocent abroad, meets one of the town's most influential businessmen, and falls instantly into lust for him.

The core of the book is the quadrangle formed by the three women and this (inevitably married) man: the women bound to him by economics and desperation, because they could maybe make rent and food on their salaries, but not medicine, and not parties, nothing that might be fun for girls in their early twenties who know they are one step away from homelessness and will do anything not only not to take that step, but to forget it for a little while; the women, bound to each other by friendship and love and the sexual currents between them that cannot be openly spoken about (even when acted on); the man who is not worth a smudge on one of their shoes, and who is rich beyond counting, and who doesn't think he's bound to anyone by anything.

It goes badly. It does not go badly in any of the ways one might instantly expect it to go badly, given the setup. It is worse. You need a certain gore tolerance, for this book, with its beautiful, nightmarish descriptions.

The thing that's amazing is that you never lose sympathy for Marion, Marion who starts as unforgivably naive, a girl who can't believe what's going on around her, and who at first is only having what comes naturally, an affair that fills her life with fire, something to look back on when she's old. But it slips beyond that and beyond that and beyond that, until even she doesn't know where the line ought to have been drawn, only that it ought to have. There is no line, that's the problem, it all feels inevitable although it can't have been; the important thing, though, is that there is a point where Marion looks around and says to herself, I am still here, I will still be here, and no one can take me from me, and that's a moment I can't recall ever seeing in noir before, film or novel. For a woman. In the movies they'd have made one of these women into a femme fatale. God knows the tabloids did. Of course, scratch the surface of the femme fatale and you find a woman who'd like to get off her feet, get off the street, and get her rent paid for the next six months solid. This book knows that.

There's a section at the end, after the novel proper, where the author tells you about the real murder, and what the newspaper coverage of it was like, and what we can and cannot know about it, and what she has done to extrapolate. It's a fascinating and sensitive reflection on what it means to be writing about other people's real, though historical, pain. I wish more novels based-on-a-true-story had sections like it.

I am also not going to get over the prose of this anytime soon. It's an amazing combination of hard-boiled, rhythmic, and sensual, the lushness of one of those thirties movie boudoirs turned mean (not that those rooms weren't vicious already). It's the sort of language that makes me want to read the entire thing aloud, except that for content reasons I really don't. I highly, highly recommend this.

Bury Me Deep, Megan Abbott (365 Books, Day 344)

Read August 8th. Author via coffeeandink.

Gorgeous, delicious noir which both upholds the conventions of the genre perfectly and is quietly subversive on questions such as who has agency in the story. The prose is amazing.

This novel is based on a real murder which made the tabloids in 1931, one of those crimes which became a nationwide scandal but has by our day faded into the background for everyone except those who encounter it in an academic context. In 1930, Marion Seeley, twenty-one, doctor's wife, finds herself alone in Phoenix, Arizona working at a tuberculosis clinic. Her drug addict husband, de-licensed, has gone to Mexico to work as a mining company doctor, his last desperate hope at cleaning up and making some money so they can have a life together. Marion, by herself in the big city, is taken under the wing of one of the other nurses at the clinic, Louise; Louise is supporting a tubercular roommate, Ginny, and the two of them hold parties which are attended by all the wealthy men of the city. Sex and liquor and drugs flow freely, and at one of the parties Marion, an innocent abroad, meets one of the town's most influential businessmen, and falls instantly into lust for him.

The core of the book is the quadrangle formed by the three women and this (inevitably married) man: the women bound to him by economics and desperation, because they could maybe make rent and food on their salaries, but not medicine, and not parties, nothing that might be fun for girls in their early twenties who know they are one step away from homelessness and will do anything not only not to take that step, but to forget it for a little while; the women, bound to each other by friendship and love and the sexual currents between them that cannot be openly spoken about (even when acted on); the man who is not worth a smudge on one of their shoes, and who is rich beyond counting, and who doesn't think he's bound to anyone by anything.

It goes badly. It does not go badly in any of the ways one might instantly expect it to go badly, given the setup. It is worse. You need a certain gore tolerance, for this book, with its beautiful, nightmarish descriptions.

The thing that's amazing is that you never lose sympathy for Marion, Marion who starts as unforgivably naive, a girl who can't believe what's going on around her, and who at first is only having what comes naturally, an affair that fills her life with fire, something to look back on when she's old. But it slips beyond that and beyond that and beyond that, until even she doesn't know where the line ought to have been drawn, only that it ought to have. There is no line, that's the problem, it all feels inevitable although it can't have been; the important thing, though, is that there is a point where Marion looks around and says to herself, I am still here, I will still be here, and no one can take me from me, and that's a moment I can't recall ever seeing in noir before, film or novel. For a woman. In the movies they'd have made one of these women into a femme fatale. God knows the tabloids did. Of course, scratch the surface of the femme fatale and you find a woman who'd like to get off her feet, get off the street, and get her rent paid for the next six months solid. This book knows that.

There's a section at the end, after the novel proper, where the author tells you about the real murder, and what the newspaper coverage of it was like, and what we can and cannot know about it, and what she has done to extrapolate. It's a fascinating and sensitive reflection on what it means to be writing about other people's real, though historical, pain. I wish more novels based-on-a-true-story had sections like it.

I am also not going to get over the prose of this anytime soon. It's an amazing combination of hard-boiled, rhythmic, and sensual, the lushness of one of those thirties movie boudoirs turned mean (not that those rooms weren't vicious already). It's the sort of language that makes me want to read the entire thing aloud, except that for content reasons I really don't. I highly, highly recommend this.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.