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wendyimmiller · 5 years ago

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The Wife, The Flu, and the Ecstacy of Entering a Gardening Dream State

Cincinnati, Ohio

January 23, 2020

Dear Marianne,

What a treat it was to receive your letter dated January 22nd. And so publicly too! What fun.

Despite myself, I somehow got caught up in flights of fantasy borne from your descriptions of your bucolic existence in the benevolent hills far enough west of D.C. to be out of the gridlock and yet still within the outer rings of its wealth. You have a good life there by the fireside with your Jack Russell, your garden (which I imagine to be picture perfect), and your former marine (whom I imagine is likewise).

Here’s our dog. He’s a spastic, old, not so smart and mostly blind mutt at the end of a long line of people handing him off to other people, but he has a heart of gold.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of how different things are here in the bitter, gritty, gloomy, and surly Midwest. The temperature has been oscillating here so violently that it has cracked buildings. Even our six-story skyscrapers! Yet, it’s always gray. Gray, leaden, heavy, oppressive, American gray, English grey, depressing as hell, and a daily kick in the gut gray. And the rivers are all flooding. There’s worry the levy might break and wipe out the trailer park. Currently I’m cut off from my nearest source of a Big Gulp by high water. Oh, and everyone I know, including me, is sick.

This weekend, Michele, who is never sick, got the flu. Started Saturday while she helped me move brush and branches from around the yard to the driveway. She’s usually such a good sport, but she was kind of lagging and losing focus. I was getting irritated, because I’d been pruning like a maniac and the yard was starting to look like a log jam. Eventually, we had gotten it all into a big pile by my old, rusty truck that won’t start, being sure to make it is as unsightly as we could and plainly visible to any county official that happens to drive by. Next thing I know, she’s practically passing out. And I had hoped she would cook that night.

As you mentioned, Michele has a sweet smile, an amazing smile. And she was so innocent when we got married that I had to instruct her on how to use it with police officers, bouncers, and the occasional asshole boss. But, when we both finally got in bed Saturday night, it was like that mouth had never smiled before ever. All it knew how to do was cough on me like I was in the first wave of liberators trying to come ashore and it was a germ machine gun.

A glimpse at that sweet smile. Taken last year during better times.

To my amazement, I awoke Sunday still feeling okay, but had to make an escape. It’s been a winter of working nights and weekends putting together PowerPoints, articles, and forever trying to get caught up at work. Michele’s mom died after a quick illness in December. My mom has pinged and ponged from home to hospital and now to a rehab center, and I too have been bouncing around between home and a dentist for a fourth try at a new crown and between various doctors trying to figure out why my left ear has been ringing off the hook. This included a horrible outpatient MRI, which required that I be totally still in an absolutely claustrophobic situation for what seemed like hours, even, as I’m quite sure, the staff were making fun of my crotch. Fortunately, the MRI didn’t find any of the tumors they were looking for in my noggin, so, yes, they examined my head and found nothing. Just chronic sinus infections. Two rounds of heavy antibiotics later, and my digestive system is so out of whack that I’m willing to promise anyone anything if it means I no longer have to live with myself. And now Michele had the flu and I was probably going to get it.

The garden beckoned, and I followed the call.

My mossy path brings me joy all through winter.

As does Epimedium stellatum’s spectacular winter foliage. (BTW, I could have moved that stick and some of the leaves, but in the interest of journalistic integrity, I left them there.

So Sunday there I was, gardening again like a lunatic. Finished cutting down a Japanese Raisin Tree that was causing three of my own seed-grown Katsura to lean right and starting to shade out the Arborvitae that are screening my neighbor’s shed. A bit of a bitter pill, because I had also grown the Raisin Tree from seed. In fact, I had germinated this species, planted it out, and lost it over winter three times until a friend I won’t mention had—under potentially dubious circumstances—gotten me seed that was supposedly from a cold hardy provenance from somewhere out there in the world that best remains unnamed. Well, bingo, this seedling survived every winter, grew like a son of a bitch, started shading out other stuff, and, at best, could be described as boring. It was probably too big for me to take down myself, and I wound up actually proving that when it fell just off target and stripped about half the branches of my Halesia diptera ‘Magniflora.’ This was a favorite tree of mine. Such is the lot of the impulsive gardener with a chainsaw and not a lot of money.

A pile of brush ready to go to the County composting lot. This includes an entire Japanese Raisin Tree, and parts of various Katsura, Gingko, Yellowwood, Poliothysis, Chinese Lilac, several Viburnum, Halesia diptera ‘Magniflora,’ three or four Japanese Maples, Cucumber Magnolia, Bigleaf Magnolia, ‘Yellow Bird’ Magnolia, Dawn Redwood, Parrotia, various Hornbeams, and more. It’s like a freakin’ arboretum blew up.

Aftermath of a massacre.

After bucking the Raisin Tree, I patched up the Halesia as best I could. The branching structure was about as squirrelly as they come without any help by me; now I feel I just sculpted in a way to empower it to show off its true self. Well, anyway, that’s what I’ll tell people.

But as the afternoon progressed, I reached that magical state where my entire existence became about the task at hand. No extraneous thoughts. Just focus. So insanely rare. The ringing in my ear was forgotten. My mother’s care plan, put aside. Michele suffering in the house somewhere, only strayed into my thoughts, when, on occasion, I would look up to see yellow wisps of coronavirus fog leaking out of small cracks in the siding of our house. Achieving this state of oblivion, this full immersion in my work, it was like an injection of jet fuel into my heart and soul!

By the time I had finished, I had greatly added to the pile in the driveway, I’d dug up a stump, and transplanted into that hole a tall, skinny, and surprisingly heavy Chamaecyparis of some species and selection I’ve long forgotten, lugging it clumsily but quickly across the yard like it was an 80 pound, 3’ x 12’ human organ that needed to go immediately into a patient.

The Chamaecyparis in its new home.

Then I replanted a couple patches of Epimedium and Corydalis which happened to get “outed” when the stump got grubbed out and the Chamaecyparis got moved. Eventually, I even found a little time to admire some blooms of hellebores, snowdrops, Iris reticulata, and a witchhazel.

Spring is just waiting to be unleashed! Sure sign of this is Iris reticulata coming into bloom.

Sedum and a Thyme chomping at the bit.

Monday, Michele’s doctor said she had the flu and by that evening I had a bad cough. Yesterday I got worse and woke up this morning with every nerve ending signaling that every cell in my body was at Defcon Five Crisis Mode and each of my many coughs felt like a demon carpenter was going at my throat with a rasp. An appointment with my doctor this afternoon put me on two new meds, including a new round of antibiotics. Great.

When I got home, it was almost sunny and relatively warm, so I visited the hellebores, snowdrops, Iris, and witchhazel. Sure, they are in a sea of mud with errant plastic plant tags, fresh stumps, a winter’s worth of dog poop, a pool cover full of dirty water and leaves, a plastic bucket or two, a rusty pickup, and a mile high pile of brush all trying to photo bomb every picture I take, but despite that frustration they sure are a much needed tonic. As much or more so than Tamiflu.

So anyway, thanks for the letter. I’ll pick up on some of your other themes next time. In particular, I want to go after those sourpus types you mentioned that throw shade on all the new gardeners who are not “pure” enough. But, for now, some chicken soup and bed.

Yours,

Scott

The Wife, The Flu, and the Ecstacy of Entering a Gardening Dream State originally appeared on GardenRant on February 19, 2020.

The post The Wife, The Flu, and the Ecstacy of Entering a Gardening Dream State appeared first on GardenRant.

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turfandlawncare · 5 years ago

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The Wife, The Flu, and the Ecstacy of Entering a Gardening Dream State

Cincinnati, Ohio

January 23, 2020

Dear Marianne,

What a treat it was to receive your letter dated January 22nd. And so publicly too! What fun.

Despite myself, I somehow got caught up in flights of fantasy borne from your descriptions of your bucolic existence in the benevolent hills far enough west of D.C. to be out of the gridlock and yet still within the outer rings of its wealth. You have a good life there by the fireside with your Yorkies, your garden (which I imagine to be picture perfect), and your former marine (whom I imagine is likewise).

Here’s our dog. He’s a spastic, old, not so smart and mostly blind mutt at the end of a long line of people handing him off to other people, but he has a heart of gold.

I couldn’t help but reminded of how different things are here in the bitter, gritty, gloomy, and surly Midwest. The temperature has been oscillating here so violently that it has cracked buildings. Even our six-story skyscrapers! Yet, it’s always gray. Gray, leaden, heavy, oppressive, American gray, English grey, depressing as hell, and a daily kick in the gut gray. And the rivers are all flooding. There’s worry the levy might break and wipe out the trailer park. Currently I’m cutoff from my nearest source of a Big Gulp by high water. Oh, and everyone I know, including me, is sick.

A glimpse at that sweet smile. Taken last year during better times.

The garden beckoned, and I followed the call.

My mossy path brings me joy all through winter.

As does Epimedium stellatum’s spectacular winter foliage. (BTW, I could have moved that stick and some of the leaves, but in the interest of journalistic integrity, I left them there.

Aftermath of a massacre.

The Chamaecyparis in its new home.

Spring is just waiting to be unleashed! Sure sign of this is Iris reticulata coming into bloom.

Sedum and a Thyme chomping at the bit.

Yours,

Scott

The Wife, The Flu, and the Ecstacy of Entering a Gardening Dream State originally appeared on GardenRant on February 19, 2020.

The post The Wife, The Flu, and the Ecstacy of Entering a Gardening Dream State appeared first on GardenRant.

from GardenRant https://ift.tt/3bX9Ywv

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lucretiars · 5 years ago

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Cherry by Nico Walker

“The taste comes on first; then the rush starts. And it’s all about right, the warmth bleeding down through me. Till the taste comes on stronger than usual, so strong it’s sickening. And I figure it out: how I was always dead, my ears ringing.” I’m standing in the confines of a gorgeously-lit, delicately-balanced bookstore in the second story of the historic Fine Arts Building in the heart of downtown Chicago, light pouring in from the early-autumn golden hour, the crisp and clean pages of this novel jutting smooth and warm in my hands. At the lazy hour of 3:00 pm I’ve got the place to myself; the setting surrounding me a complete juxtaposition of the content my eyes are scrolling through—and this is the line that hooks me. Sober, save for the lingering coffee buzz that gently gripped hold just a few hours ago, I am suddenly hurtled into the body of a war veteran, addicted to heroin, riding a high and planning his next bank robbery. This is the world of Cherry, Nico Walker’s debut semi-autobiographical novel written over the course of several years from the Federal Correctional Institute in Ashland, Kentucky.

Cherry exposes the wrath of Walker’s unnamed narrator, leading readers down a walk through hell, a tender spectacle, an absurd dream, an intimate terror, a candid gut-reaction. There is a bleak disillusionment in the narrator’s trajectory, which allows readers to directly experience the grueling effects of PTSD and addiction. In our narrator, we meet the rough and tattered exterior of a deeply introspective and sensitive person. Mimicking Nico Walker’s literal state behind bars, his created main character wears the façade of the contrast between a metal jail cell trapping a living, breathing human inside.

The foreword of the novel drops you directly in the drug-addled, reality-grappling lives of our narrator and his partner Emily. Coalesced between discussing the plan of that day’s impending bank robbery and ruminating on how they imagined their recently adopted dog would help them get their lives together but now they’re merely “dope fiends with a dog”, the narrator takes a particularly large hit of their vice of choice and wakes up to Emily stuffing ice cubes into his underwear to shudder him awake. The narrator, though a bit disheveled, makes a crude joke about his hygiene and brushes the experience off like nothing, insisting to Emily to hurry up and get her hit in before she’s late for class. While there are glimpses of true affection and observations so saccharine and resonating, Emily and the narrator are distorted in an enabling and detrimental relationship; the kind of relationship that makes you understand the sheer power of denial.

Continuing in the foreword, still written through a backwards-told “ending at the beginning” tactic, our narrator is trudging swiftly yet lightly through the alleyway veins of an unidentified Midwest city after completing a robbery for the umpteenth time. Police sirens gradually piercing louder and louder to symbolize their looming arrival, the narrator unexpectedly finds a moment of contentment in the chaotic purgatory that is the life he knows now and the fate he is yet to endure. He finds a calm pocket of time to marinade on the simplistic hidden beauty of the dreadfully mundane reality around him, remarking, “The sirens are coming up Mayfield now, and the grass is like a teenage girl. And the stoops!—the stoops are fucking wondrous! That’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage—look at them go! This is the beauty of things fucking with my heart. I wish I could lie down in the grass and chill for a while, but of course this is impossible, the gun in my hat could be a little obvious, the money sticking out of all my pockets too.” Through these scattered musings, I found myself reflecting on those past moments that suddenly, when we fear something actually really fucking bad may be about to happen, or we fear the possibility of reality becoming so twisted and wrong, we suddenly find gratitude in the minuscule speckles of beauty around us. And through Walker’s brutal, tender, and grippingly honest narrative, these bare slices of time—the impossible-to-name fleeting moments of life that keep us from completely losing it all when everything is falling apart—are unraveled through Cherry.

To be frank, the largest appeal of the book when I first picked it up was the process in which it was created. Nico Walker, still currently serving an 11-year sentence for robbery, crafted Cherry over four years behind bars. In his acknowledgements, Walker outlines the severely manual process of communicating with his publisher, Matthew Johnson. Each edit and recommendation given to Walker was expressed through weekly allotted phone calls. Unable to bring even a pen or paper along for documentation, their discussions were to be memorized and then divulged back in his cell. Walker writes, “The manuscript wasn’t so much a manuscript as it was a plastic bin full of paper. Every page has been rewritten one hundred times over. There was no Word file. It had all been done on a typewriter.” Somehow, this seemingly insufferable feat emerged with such power. Walker’s dialogue is crafted with such rhythm and realism that it mimics an old friend spouting the tales of their life to you at a party, drunk with grace and ease. But buried in the nature of what Walker is actually spouting to us is deep unease.

At the start of the novel, Walker introduces two widely juxtaposing quotes. The first, by Elizabethan playwright Thomas Nashe from his 1600’s play Summer’s Last Will and Testament reads:

“Such use these times have got, that none must beg, but those that have young limbs to lavish fast.”

And, by popular country singer Toby Keith from his Americana southern anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”:

“And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you.”

Though worlds apart, these contrasting lines set the stage for Walker’s approaching journey. Initially used by the army in attempts to indict inspiration and patriotism in its soldiers, the fake plastic spectacle of the red-white-and-blue vomit becomes a comment on the brainwashed nature of American pride. Walker’s inclusion of Mr. Keith’s phony lyric at the start of his novel exposes a harsh reality to this otherwise overplayed tune. Often referring to it merely as “that Toby Keith song”, the narrator is resistant to the patriotism of his fellow soldiers. In an already hollow and alienating battleground, this further detaches him from his surroundings.

Intermixed with code-heavy language in the Iraq scenes, the authenticity of Walker’s war scenes will surprise you. Mingled in the muddles of mechanistic day-to-day routine, our narrator faces harrowing sights and experiences that force him to dig into the reality of who he is at the core. A la Full Metal Jacket, the army scenes are at times darkly comedic and other times so shrewdly acerbic, exposing each comrade our narrator interacts with as a true individual so nuanced that there’s no way they weren’t real. Amongst them are Specialist Grace who looked like Jean-Michel Basquiat and had an 18-year old wife waiting for him at home, Sergeant Bautista, to which our narrator gets stuck in the almost dull routine of draining the abscess on his ass every night while he plays Madden, and a man who was only referred to as “Arnold”, who had dreams of being a computer genius and “bringing down Bill Gates”. It’s disclosed that all three of these men will not be alive when the narrator goes home, and Walker writes with such viscous detail as if to honor their memory.

Sprawled across six parts: “When Life Was Just Beginning, I Saw You”, “Adventure”, “Cherry”, “Hummingbird”, “The Great Dope Fiend Romance”, and “A Comedown”, readers are rapt along the narrator’s tour through love, violence, crime, and everything in between. The novel’s trajectory mimics a drug’s high—the initial excitement, the hidden fear, the gentle roller-coaster crescendo, the exhilaration, the subdued serenity, the banality, the regret, the car-crash decrescendo, the reality.

Walker writes with such an unexpected tenderness that even though his experiences were nothing short of foreign to me, I was catapulted into the perspective of the narrator’s psyche. Chapter Fifty-Two, the entirety spanning one long paragraph (Walker’s chapters range from quietly sparse to compressed and bursting) begins and ends with the sentence, “There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin.” In-between the graphic and miserable terrors the drug wracked on the narrator and Emily, Walker’s prose delicately weaves in the joy, bliss, and wildness they both experienced, reminding me of Mark Renton and his crew in Trainspotting. I believed Walker’s narrator felt paradise and passion in the transitory moments of his addiction. That harsh truth illuminated through these pages transform “The Great Dope Fiend Romance” from merely a staggered semi-autobiographical account of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to a stark observation of the reality that is the opioid epidemic. And as a part of the whole that is Cherry, this honesty becomes even more heartbreaking sandwiched between the terrors of going to a war way too young and naïve and resorting to crime as a means of coping. Walker writes about the emergence of the narrator’s newfound vice: “I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation. Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit. With robbery it’s a matter of abasement. Are you abased? Careful then. You might rob something.”

In a brief wholesome moment after treating his dog to a Wendy’s cheeseburger, Walker remarks through his narrator, “She reminded me of myself, insatiable.” In this fleeting reflection towards the close of the novel, I began to understand the gravity of the narrator’s losses and residual search for meaning. After experiences in combat stripped so much of himself away, the blissful yet impossibly impermanent highs he continued to chase with drugs, love, and crime were simply insatiable. Everyone can relate to experiencing the act of yearning, and I think that Cherry illustrates the simple notion of yearning for middle ground. Between the mundane and the chaos there is harmony, and without explicitly expressing it, the narrator pines for something solid to hold on to. The voraciously unquenchable lust for purpose.

Cherry feels like a process of dehumanization, but dispersed through even the bleakest moments, there are searing glimpses of human fragility and vulnerability. Through Walker’s narrative, I followed his character down a slowly sinking spiral, floating between some warped sense of hope only to find it disguised in obscurity. I was left wishing, grasping for a light at the end of the tunnel; but sometimes, there is no light. For Nico Walker, maybe there will be. But to write with purpose is to write the truth, and in his echoing honesty there is beauty.

“I was feeling melancholy, but it was a calming melancholy. Life was fucked but I was good. This was what I knew. And fate was fate. My heart was full and life was precious.”

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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DAVID BIESPIEL IS a Portland-based poet and critic with roots in Boston, Houston, Iowa, and Ukraine. The award-winning author of five collections of poetry, Biespiel is a prolific critic who is a regular contributor to The Rumpus and had a long-running column in the Oregonian. From the dense expressionism of his early poetry to the wry, intimate connections he makes between individual Americans and forgotten moments in our landscape and history in his latest collection, Biespiel’s poetry has always been concerned with rhythm, form, and sensuality. His criticism, some of which was recently collected in the volume A Long High Whistle (2015), is passionate, erudite, and refreshingly accessible. Now, The Education of a Young Poet, a memoir about Biespiel’s early life in poetry — his journey toward the art and practice of poetry — has recently been released by Counterpoint Press.

In short, fragmented chapters that move around in time, Biespiel recounts pivotal experiences in his early life and the lives of some of his ancestors, revisiting the places where he discovered poetry, where the impulse to be a poet and learn the work of poetry occurred. The book begins with the arrival of Biespiel’s great-grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from present-day Ukraine, to a tiny town in Iowa. Solitude is an important theme in the book as are the joys and distractions of community, and Biespiel introduces them here by imagining his great-grandfather’s loneliness as he waits 10 years for the arrival of his wife and children, who are stuck in Europe after the Russian Revolution. Biespiel’s grandfather is a teenager when the family is reunited, and imagining his struggles with the English language allows Biespiel to introduce another important theme — the search for meaning and the pleasures of that search, however elusive. “Why should things be easy to understand?” Biespiel has his grandfather wonder as he listens to this new language, which Biespiel imagines sounding like a “loud chime in a silent house […] ‘Not every puzzle is intended to be solved.’”

Biespiel then moves to his college years in Boston in the ’80s, where we see the deepening of his political and cultural interests, his growing embrace of liberalism and the literary world. His early life in Houston is, at first, a mystery — like many writers who come from the suburbs, Biespiel seems to have some regrets about his origins, which, in his case, included athletics (he was a competitive diver in high school and college). But he eventually returns to fill in some of the gaps, especially the story of his father, who suffered an aneurysm when Biespiel was 12 and never fully recovered his ability to speak, accelerating Biespiel’s awareness of the powers and mysteries of language — what it can do and what it can’t, what it reveals and what it hides. “I was given,” he says of his attempts to communicate with his father afterward, “an opportunity to learn that the unknowable must be comprehended every day.” Tragic, no doubt, but also fertile ground for poetry.

After this, the book moves back and forth between Boston and Houston, interrogating further experiences in Biespiel’s childhood and early adulthood — a recurrent childhood dream, an inspirational Latin teacher, a transformational drive across the country — for what they contributed to his formation as a poet. He finally ends up in a solitary house in a small town in Vermont where he’s gone to teach high school and compose what will be his first published poems.

Along the way, with that capacious energy of the best American writing, Biespiel chronicles a range of seemingly disconnected things — screaming nighthawks, Boston bookstores, the Roman poet Catullus — all of which teach him something about poetry and show us some of his talents on the page. At times, his prose is reminiscent of the Beats, which is a little odd since he’s writing about the ’70s and ’80s, but it’s a good way to express the wonder of breaking out into the larger American landscape.

In his short, brilliant meditation The Hatred of Poetry (2016), Ben Lerner talks about thinking, when he was younger, that poetry looked better when it was quoted in prose, and Biespiel does some of that here — weaving lines and couplets into youthful scenes of friendship and discovery, which gives us a palpable sense of how poetry existed in his early life. Biespiel also memorializes some of the poets who were influential in his development by quoting them at length — Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Bly, Rich, and Creeley (among others), but especially Whitman, whose democratic ideals and sense of civic duty are key for Biespiel. Unfortunately, the book is over-rich with these quotes, which can be distracting. The demands of reading poetry are different from the demands of reading prose, and it’s difficult, at times, to make the switch.

The book is comprised of 17 short chapters, and many of them are dense with poetic prose. Biespiel writes well about people and places — his Latin teacher, his diving coaches, the Midwest, a semi driver in Montana. His language is often expressionistic, with the unexpected word choice and syntax of poetry. A girl sits down to seduce him, and “her exposition was tender.” A group of friends smoking hash at a wedding party “became suspended and unfolded and iridescent.” About his father, after the aneurysm, he says, “Words blew out of his mouth like ash.” Above all, Biespiel loves metaphors, and his metaphors are often memorable because he doesn’t just make them, he dives in and flushes them out. As a result, a number of scenes flow breathlessly across the page: an intimate but confusing encounter with a girl who’s been reading too much Derrida and is talking, but not really to him; a sweet riff on the pleasures of hanging out with friends and testing out your voice as a young person, a riff in which Biespiel gives us a taste of what that really sounds like — it’s spot on.

In one of the book’s best chapters, Biespiel is in training in Florida, for what will be his last diving competition, but he’s more interested in the letters he’s secretly writing to a girl in Boston. Writing seems tense, fraught, impossible, but also increasingly compelling, and he cautiously moves toward it by parsing out the similarities between diving and writing. Both involve a great deal of preparation; both involve time under water, out of sight, in some murky world of the unconscious; both carry a high risk of failure; in both, despite your training, you’re always starting over. Diving also reminds us of the primal story of his family’s arrival in Iowa: “[B]ounding off the three meter diving board or leaping from the ten meter platform is like entering the foreign language of the air. You learn its accents, you figure out its currency, you develop the cadences of a native, but you are always a foreigner.” When he tells his coach during a discussion of an upcoming dive, “I’m just going to figure it out in the air,” we know the shift — to poetry, to solitude — has occurred.

I’ve long been interested in writers, like W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, and Elena Ferrante, who inhabit that nebulous area between fiction and nonfiction, and I’ve recently been reading some contemporary authors who are experimenting with the boundaries between poetry and prose — writers like Maggie Nelson, Rivka Galchen, and Claudia Rankine. I like how you can trace, in Nelson and Rankine in particular, the way the writing shifts from poetry to prose and how the resulting text interacts with the fragmented structures that contain it. I started thinking of these as the “little” books since they are mostly short and fragmented, a strategy that seems apt for the distracted times in which we’re living and the genre-shifting possibilities these writers are exploring. Biespiel, I knew, had experimented with poetic form, including the sonnet and epistolary poetry, so when I opened The Education of a Young Poet and saw the short, fragmented chapters and the dense, poetic writing, I felt like I’d found another writer who had jumped into the fray.

But the writing in the “little” books is, for the most part, consistent, which gives readers a sense of cohesion despite the structural fragmentation, whereas Biespiel moves uneasily among several disconnected forms — poetic prose, personal narrative, and an awkward strand of magic realism. One form gives way to another, often within the same section, in a way that can be inexplicably abrupt. Poetic prose is sometimes followed by a looser narrative, which looks shabby in comparison. Symptomatically, Biespiel overuses transitions like “suddenly” and makes unnatural juxtapositions that might work better if he were writing poetry.

About the magic realism: When he writes about his family’s arrival in Iowa, and in several other sections of the book, Biespiel imagines that he is there with them; he and his grandfather sometimes float around like figures (as he says) from Chagall. There is a poetic truth to this, of course. By placing himself alongside his ancestors, Biespiel expresses his longing for a connection to the past, for someone to witness his solitary quest “to uncover, to recover, what the words are hiding,” for, perhaps, a father figure. He’s also playing with the idea of epigenetics, the idea, most recently explored in the television series Transparent, that you can inherit trauma from your ancestors. I have a lot of sympathy with this notion, but it’s never clear if Biespiel is inventing his ancestors’ thoughts or sharing family stories, and the way the magic realism interacts with the more poetic and narrative moments in the memoir is, for me, at least, unconvincing.

It’s hard to blend genres, tricky to risk fragmentation, and Biespiel’s failure to bring the strands of his text together in an organic way speaks to the challenges of hybridization. The strongest sections of The Education of a Young Poet convey a sense of mystery, suggest unexpected connections, evoke emotional riches the language does not directly express, all of which are important characteristics of poetry. Biespiel may have given it up a long time ago, but he still likes to dive, is still entranced by the murky world beneath the surface, would rather be searching than to have found, and in that sense, I think, he’s more a poet than a memoirist.

Lisa Fetchko has published essays, fiction, reviews, and translations in a variety of publications, including Ploughshares, n+1, AGNI, and Bookforum. She teaches at Mount Saint Mary’s and Orange Coast College.

The post Figuring It out in the Air: On “The Education of a Young Poet” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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