#lit387

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For my Contemporary Lit and Culture class: a full book review on Tyehimba Jess and "Olio". I have just under two weeks before it's due but I need to familiarize myself with "leadbelly" first. Winter Term is almost over!

[lit387]

Newspaper Book Review: Proxies by Brian Blanchfield

   “So.  Visiting, Poet?”    The above are the first words spoken by Edmund, father of the author’s significant other, John, upon their first meeting in the essay “On Tumbleweed.”  Those three words, so heavily weighted on their own, hang like a stone when they come through Edmund's mouth, so much, so the implication of the weight is felt on the page.  These three words, with their unspoken judgment attached to them, eloquently sums up the pages within Proxies.  Brian Blanchfield is a poet turned essayist for his book, and it shows.    There appear to be several themes going on over the course of the essays, which are laid out like random points on a map, but if you draw a straight line, they all interconnect.  First, finding academic work as a poet is harder than anyone might think.  In “On Tumbleweed,” Blanchfield describes the term visiting poet as a volatile term, term after term, yet this does not stop him from trying, again and again, seemingly all over the country, to locate and keep steady work.  Academic terminology runs past the reader like billboard signs on the side of the road:  visiting faculty, Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry, Visiting Poet, Senior Lecturer.  There is nothing secure in the words, although Blanchfield tries to anchor down the reader with a memory of childhood in the South, a random, almost unbelievable reference to Juice Newton.        Scattered about the essays, in symmetry with the various teaching positions mentioned, are past boyfriends, who often fell to the clause of the working academic:  I have to go, there’s a position in Montana.  This yearning of leaving, having nothing to pack up because there was nothing to set down.  Movement is prevalent within the structures of the essays.        In “On Confoundedness” there is family, youth, learning disabilities, and a description of what confoundedness is, so there is no confusion for the reader.  Alas, there is the disclaimer on the very next page, “For a long time nothing went here, in this essay, which is trying to locate its subject.”  Then we are treated to a paragraph about Primitive Baptists.  The back and forth between family history, employment struggle and boyfriends can keep the reader enthralled as the pages go by because you can’t help but ask, “Well, what happened next?”    There is a pretentiousness within the writing:  Blanchfield is a card-carrying poet, and there is a question about his use of white-space.  Does he dare fill in the blanks with his mother’s disappointment of how he turned out to be both gay and a poet, his step-father’s sublime ability to not engage, or an entire chapter on his experience with AIDS? Granted, unless the reader was alive (and old enough) back in those days to witness the social and political onslaught of this new disease, the lessons taught in “On Frottage” will be lost.      The maudlin is tossed out the window, however, with “On the Near Term,” an essay which, like wrapping paper and twine, enshrouds all of the ideas, experiences, objects, and employment possibilities told in the previous 147 pages.  Not unlike a light at the end of a tunnel, but not like it, either.  As it is the last essay, the placement within the selections could be questionable due to the subject matter, but it proves not outdone by claiming the end-spot as the glory of all read beforehand.  We are handed a neat package at the end, which not only gives clarity to the struggle on the previous pages but solidifies the writer as the poet as an essayist.

[lit387]

Pre-Publication Book Review Project #2

The Woman Who Wasn’t There by Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr.

           The Woman Who Wasn’t There details the story of Tania Head of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network.  Her personal stories of survival and loss elevated the Survivors’ Network to celebrity status; her survival from the 78th floor (at the impact line); the death of her fiancé in the other tower, the injuries sustained. This narrative created by Tania Head included her into the long list of names of people who were directly affected by the tragedy, allowing her access to a counter-narrative of a connection to something larger than ourselves, fame, and maybe even hero-worship.    The Woman Who Wasn’t There adds another layer of the counter-narrative prevalent in our Post 9/11 society: inclusion to be a part of the tragedy, to have the ability to commiserate with those affected by allowing a dialogue of personal tragedy that did not happen.  Tania Head was a hoax, and once discovered, she vanished.  The sadness left behind isn’t one of betrayal, as she did nothing illegal, but of her lack of truth behind her story.  Her personal survival narrative gave hope and rest to so many who were directly affected by the tragedy, and to discover it was all a lie allowed for a disconnect for looking at the bright side of things. The book is not about the writing or structure or form but is about the lengths an individual will go to create their counter-narrative where they originally had none.

[lit387]

Pre-Publication Book Review Project

Look by Solmaz Sharif

“Look” by Solmaz Sharif is a vivid, scattered fragment of poetic verses, lines, and ideas of the effects of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by US Armed Forces on civilians.  Military words of the Department of Defense Military Terms Dictionary describe the continual struggle against the notion that all involved/related to the supposed War on Terror should be obliterated.  The terminology is effective yet uninspired as if Sharif is incapable of applying modern as well as civilian language to account the terror she describes. Sharif uses the past as well as the present to give readers a word-laden account of the struggles during the war as the bombs were falling from the sky as well as after when a US Judge wanted to make sure they pronounced a prisoner’s name correctly.  “My job is to agitate and make again and again alive and wife and, well, free the languages we live by”, says Sharif, yet the words used to describe the imageless images tells a small portion of the events. The voices used does not give a direction as to who is speaking, or who is spoken to.  The white spaces left on the pages due to the word structure is plenty and silent as if the reader is merely experiencing a mere fragment of events, similar to watching the evening news, and there is so much more not being described in the fragments of sentences and verses.  The last work, “Coda” is a colon-heavy, period-less work with visuals of bomb shelters, graves, fingers with no hands and newly acquired habits that use white-space the best to signify the end has not ended.