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Gillian McCain, Connie Deanovich, and Brenda Coultas
Gillian
McCain
Tilt
Hard Press (The Figures)
P.O. Box 184
West Stockbridge, MA 01266
86 pgs, $10.00 Connie
Deanovich
Watusi Titanic
Timken Publishers, Inc.
225 Lafayette St.
New York, NY 10012
76 pgs, $12.00
Brenda Coultas
Early Films
Rodent Press
available through:
Small Press Distribution
1814 San Pablo Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702-1624
77 pgs, $10.00
The poetry known as New York School continues to exert
a widespread influence on contemporary American writers.
From its beginning, New York School poetry focused on the
chaos, intensity, and disjunctiveness of daily life,
particularly as it was and still is lived in New York
City, where at any given moment there's too much going on
to absorb. While it has a strong sense of immediacy and
personality, New York school poetry can be readily
distinguished from confessional poetry, which limits its
investigations to the "personal" life of a
given poet, often without much awareness of anything
outside the typical family romance. Also, while
confessional poetry usually intends to impart great and
even melodramatic significance to its endless tales of
parents, marriages, and children, New York School poetry
usually flattens even its most flamboyant stories into a
casual offhandedness. These are just the things that I've
been doing, it seems to shrug--make of them what you
will. In seeing itself as part of the flow of
experience rather than as a call to self-obsession, New
York School poetry avoids the aggrandizing postures that
so often mar confessionalism.
Thankfully, the tradition of New York School poetry,
which has been with us for fifty years now (even more if
one counts precursors like Edwin Denby, who started being
offhand some time in the late 30s, early 40s), continues
to change as new writers find value in it. Three recent
books, two of poetry and one of fiction, show how the
influence of the New York school can be extended to
different concerns and environments while still remaining
lively and contemporary.
With its casual conversational tone and engaging
personality, Gillian McCain's Tilt is in some
senses a classic book of New York School poetry, although
filtered through the environment of a young woman living
at a time when hostility and prices are higher than ever.
McCain is also the coauthor of the recent Please Kill
Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, and the
prose poems in Tilt feature a similarly ironic
chattiness, one that is a turns charming, suspicious, and
angry. Like almost all New York School work, the
sensibility of Tilt is irrepressibly
contemporary. But in this case, that's not because McCain
necessarily wants it to be. [ Click to Order McCain's Tilt (soft $) ]
In fact, one of the remarkable things about Tilt
is that it calls into question the value of the new in a
way that New York School poetry has rarely done. In Tilt,
the new has become more likely to be an advertisement, or
an anti-depressant that doesn't work, than a life lived
more fully or authentically. Pound's "make it
new" may have been the cry for much poetic
innovation in this century, but in McCain's world it's a
phrase that any salesman can bark, as the poem
"Self" shows:
Scenic railway dividers. When the content of a
whim or
impulse fails to be modified by stable aims it becomes
primitive
and bare, and tends to shift erratically. The lines
disconnected
or diverged. It would be superfluous to quote any
specific
examples. Lurking within every tourist is the same point
of
departure: the nose (21).
Here, the "content of a whim or impulse," so
often the basis of a poem by the New York School's
legendary Frank O'Hara, has turned into simply another
method of creating alienating products that claim to be
"scenic" when they're really
"superfluous." In such an environment, intimate
contact with the flow of experience, however chaotic,
simply isn't the answer:
It was necessary for me to detach in order to
become reattached.
And what makes you think you're any different?
Reciprocating
motion, separating us into compartments. Then the
tunnel... (21)
Rather, the poet (and what makes you think you're any
different?) requires an alienating detachment in order to
feel anything at all, although the effort is just as
likely to leave everyone stuck in compartments.
A further element of such problems is that those
moments in Tilt that have the kind of intimate
details most characteristic of the New York School are
perhaps the most alienated: "Zeke in slow motion.
Winds of change had fallen upon him, and he didn't dig it
one bit" (36). "I can't come. It's these
anti-depressants" (43). But McCain still manages
never to sound like the whiny narrator of some
self-proclaimed new Prozac nation. Rather, the
distancing, anti-immediacy of the poems, working in
tension with the offhanded immediacy of their tone,
reveal a rather formidable social criticism, which one
might almost miss because they seem so casual.
"I prefer the old world but that's just me,"
McCain writes in the book's last poem, "Cup,"
and the line comes as a kind of shock (84). There are few
greater heresies in contemporary literature than to claim
a fondness for the past, yet it's said with the same
casual irony that makes every statement in Tilt
call the world around it into question. What she actually
prefers remains unclear, perhaps because it's irrelevant,
perhaps because nostalgia is as phony, really, as
anything else: "I managed to relocate to a kiosk
with a Grover's Corner atmosphere" (84). In fact, a
desire to pin down whether McCain always means what she
says is itself a kind of phony nostalgia, in a world
where sincerity has no relation to past or present. Tilt
seems an accurate dissection of all that's not as present
as it would like to be, while at the same time offering a
chance for what seems real conversation, never pointless,
although it may not get us anywhere. For myself, I'm
happy just to listen to her.
[ Click to Order Deanovich's Watusi Titanic (soft $) ] Another example of phony nostalgia would be the idea
that the influence of New York School poetry can only
extend to New York poets. Chicago area poet Connie
Deanovich dismisses this idea with gentle but firm irony
in her first full-length collection, Watusi Titanic.
Deanovich's poems are generous and large-spirited, and
while the world around her seems at times as
claustrophobic as that of Tilt, Deanovich's
poetry strives to find, and to create, a space where
human interchange remains lively, like that of the bar
scene that opens "Athletic Competition":
"There's a lot of glamour here tonight,"
Carnell said
And there was
The bar that on Tuesday held an urban softball team
on Saturday was the haunt of lesbians too glamorous
to throw the ball (21)
Deanovich's irony has a truly admirable ability to
respond to, and accept, the foibles of others, while at
the same time she is not willing to let serious
limitations go unchecked. Thus, "Athletic
Competition" is both large-spirited and critical,
sentimental in a compelling way because it never avoids
ugly realities, as the end of the poem shows:
I return from these
scenes of glamour
in name only
speckled with wisps
of glamourous mud from the Wheel of Fortune
status symbol of the dirt road
that leads to paths of glory (21)
One must understand, that is, that Deanovich calls
"these scenes" glamourous only because they so
obviously are not. But in so doing, she does uncover a
life really being lived, despite the fact of its
subjection to media notions of glory.
Watusi Titanic is full of the casual
reflections on daily life that are the hallmark of the
New York School, but here those reflections have been
displaced to a Midwestern city obsessed with the White
Sox and Cubs, family restaurants, and questions like
whether it can have real punk rockers. Maybe, Deanovich
muses in "Xylophone Luncheonette," it's time to
move out to the highway:
We'll own this place
and paint a sign for I-90:
Free Coffee and Donut
to Honeymooners (30)
In the hands of a less subtle poet, these lines might
read as typical urban mockery of country folk. But
Deanovich's generosity shows up the limitations of such
urban conventionality, while at the same time poking fun
at white flight fantasies. By the time the poem reaches
"You're my lucky penny/got me off the highway
crew," Deanovich has done something more
astonishing, which is to make even the worst urban snobs
feel that perhaps the Xylophone Luncheonette offers
something that their own lives don't--a chance to achieve
with the help of others some measure of
self-determination, however ironic and limited.
Ultimately, in poems like "The Clothes of the
Sick and the Dead" and "Old Shawneetown
Illinois 1810-1960," Deanovich reaches beyond a
concern with the daily to incorporate a historical sense:
"From the thrift store/we wear the clothes/of the
sick and the dead" (66), "Because it once
haughtily refused Chicago a loan because/it thought it
too puny/ Shawneetown died" (72). But even these
poems don't abandon her love for, and criticisms of
dailiness; rather, the reader is always aware how history
impacts the present moment, as immediately as one wears
the clothes of someone who lived another life.
By the book's closing poem, "The Narrator,"
which leaves open the question of whether Deanovich
herself is "a woman in a red blouse/blushing to have
to admit my/glowing autumn moon/has left the large
backyard" (75), Deanovich's insistence on dailiness
has opened us to a world that is both wondrous and
degrading, often at the same time. It is a world that can
be, at turns, frighteningly closed and suddenly open.
Brenda Coultas' collection of formally innovative
fictions, Early Films, seems like McCain and
Deanovich to be influenced by the casually flat tone of
New York School poetry, but also like them in wanting to
use that tradition for new ends. Coultas also shares with
Deanovich a concern for ordinary middle American folks.
But where Deanovich treats her characters with generous
irony, Early Films is gloriously vicious. This
is not a book for the faint hearted. Indeed its concerns
with pathology, murder, and all sorts of country bumpkin
(and urban bumpkin) grotesquerie reminds me most,
perversely, of the cheap thrills of a horror genre writer
like Joe Lansdale.
In fact, Coultas can stay with Lansdale chop for chop
in the realm of misogyny, racism, perverse sexualities,
violence, and brutality. But where Lansdale does it for
the titilation of a decidely white male audience that
enjoys coming face to face with its own bankruptcy,
Coultas reaches deeper, going for the heart of the
perverse psychology that makes her stories seem
ultimately not horror thrills but social realities, as in
this incident from "Falcon":
Two girls named Polly and Molly went too far. They
were found in
a drainage ditch. On their way home from a pj party, they
met two
boys in a park, who drank beer and fucked them. The boys
killed
Polly and Molly afterwards so they couldn't tell. A girl
shouldn't
tell said all the girls in her group. No one should
squeal on anyone. (21)
The irony here is that it isn't clear whether this
particular anecdote, set off in italics from the rest of
"Falcon," is meant, within the story, to be
something that actually took place, or is simply a
campfire horror tale told to reinforce misogynistic
social norms as a way of keeping girls from having sex.
In either case, the way the tale is told certainly has
the function of reinforcing such norms, while at the same
time indulging its listeners in the grotesque fantasy
world such norms help create.
In such an environment, even mutually consenting
sexuality becomes ambivalent at best, as in the one
paragraph story "car," quoted here in full:
I got into a car with a stranger. He asked me to
blow him. I
said, "Okay, for a Coke." This didn't seem
strange to me at the
time even though what I really wanted was a Pepsi. (30)
Coultas provides no clue whether to read this
narrator's experience as an attempt to achieve some
sexual freedom, or as simply a further extension of the
pathologically repression of sexual freedom. Perhaps it's
both, perhaps neither; perhaps it's misguided even to
give such a reading to a narrator who claims only to be
thinking about soda.
The height of the carnage in Early Films
comes from "basketball story," fourteen pages
of gruesome anecdotes, all of them easily a match for the
horrors in Lansdale's books like Mucho Mojo. Yet
Coultas weaves such horrors in and out of a broader
social landscape, the end result being the exposure of
violently repressed social fantasies, rather than their
indulgence.
Taken as a whole, the stories in Early Films
raise a number of significant social questions. How does
repression act on the human psyche? What consequences are
there when a rural culture becomes a suburban one? What
role does a film industry devoted to misogynistic
violence play in structuring the fantasy life of
Americans? Is there any sexuality in America not marred
by violence? Yet to say that Coultas raises such
questions by no means turns her into simply another
moralist social critic. The wonder, duplicity, and
impressive contradiction of her book is that, like
Lansdale, she really is revelling in this stuff, while at
the same time showing readers, unflinchingly, where all
the ugliness comes from.
Guest Reviewer: Mark Wallace
This review previously appeared in The Washington Review.
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