Donna Stonecipher reading in Budapest

September 1, when I wrote to praise Donna Stonecipher’s Souvenir de Constantinople, Noah Eli Gordon sent a note to the comments stream that read:

Her book The Cosmopolitan (just out from Coffee House) is wonderful, by far one of the very best things I read all summer – all the more impressive because it’s markedly different from the one you mention here.

Having now read The Cosmopolitan, I’m pleased to agree with Gordon. The Cosmopolitan is a terrific book & in many ways it is quite a bit different from Constantinople. One way in which it’s not is that both books engage the novel. Which is to say narrative framing in the broadest conceivable sense. There are contexts in which I’m sure somebody reading this book and something recent by David Markson would be more apt to identify The Cosmopolitan as the novel.

The Cosmopolitan consists of 22 sections, each of which is entitled “Inlay” followed by a number & then, in parentheses, the name of a source, ranging from Walter Benjamin to Plato to Thomas Mann. Kafka turns up three times, Elaine Scarry & Ralph Waldo Emerson twice. Each of the 22 inlays consist of a series of numbered sections, almost entirely one paragraph long, ranging from nine to fourteen per inlay. Each inlay also contains one paragraph that is a quotation & is situated somewhere in the middle, centered on the page. In many of these inlays, the quotation is the one apparent appropriation from the source. It is, in fact, what is inlaid.

Each paragraph is pretty much a perfect vignette or tableaux. The sections accumulate toward an indeterminate, but coherent whole, tho there does not seem to be any great sense of narrative building from one inlay to the next. More than anything, The Cosmopolitan demonstrates just how much power is available to the writer who trusts indeterminacy, who believes that things add up, but not to the zero sum game of vulgar narrative. It’s a perpetually impressive feat. Here is “Inlay 8 (Claude Lévi-Strauss)” just to underscore my point.

1.

He was born in Kaya, Burkino Faso, but now he’s living abroad. She was born in Frankfurt, Germany, but now she’s living abroad. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, but now she’s living abroad. He was born in Vancouver, Washington, but now he’s living abroad.

 

 

2.

And if she ran the city through a sieve, as she sometimes imagined doing, would she be left with only the natives, pedigreed and pure? Everybody, eventually, goes down the Philosophenweg, gaping at hieroglyphic heirloom roses and beetles with supersvelte legs.

 

 

3.

He’s like me, he said. He has an inner map of hotels all over Europe. And it was true: if we met a man from Cologne, he’d get a faraway look in his eyes and eventually work the conversation around to say, “. . . and tell me, do you know the marvelous Hotel Dom?”

 

 

4.

As for me, I would choose to infiltrate foreign territories via the spice route rather than the silk route. Nutmeg, mint, cinnamon, aniseed, turmeric, cardamom, the hotel, the parliament. I sat in the reproduction victoria thinking about the myth of the bequeathal of the family house.

 

 

“I hate traveling and explorers.”

 

 

5.

She was born in Montpellier, France, but now she’s living in London. He was born in Miramar, Argentina, but now he’s living in Tokyo. He was born on an island in the Caribbean, but now he’s living in Paris. She was born in Bangalore, India, but now she’s living in L.A.

 

 

6.

“Bloom where you are planted,” read the inspirational poster tacked up in her childhood classroom. She remembered the school’s aquarium glowing dimly in the main hallway, and how the fish fulfilled some edifying dictum she could never, tiptoeing by, definitely figure out.

 

 

7.

But she had long since shed that skin, and that skin and long since shed her: the school no longer existed, except as an album of crumbling images in a small number of non-commemorative minds. Oh, there’d been so many worms – back when one was an early bird.

 

 

8.

The Pizzeria Inez became the Curry House Inez became the Sushi Inez, and all the while Parisians hurried past on their way to cafés recently overtaken by Chinese immigrants. Everyone goes down the Passage d’Enfer eventually, hushed by the shuttered windows and doors.

 

 

9.

From the airport alone, you could fly to Geneva, Fez, Malta, Alicante, Berlin, San Francisco, and Luxor. We’ll do that one day, he said. We’ll arrive at the airport with one suitcase each and fly to the destination that seems to us to hold the greatest promise of annihilation.

Anyone who has read Tristes Tropiques, will recognize the Lévi-Strauss quotation, which may seem odd given his background & profession (and given his place within his profession). But when he describes – at length – the experience of walking through the streets of India, overwhelmed by the suffering of poverty, with money in his pocket, the disparity between his role in the world & that of a third-world beggar invokes a whole host of issues that make his hatred of travel palpable, even reasonable. Travel is guilt, tourism borders on genocide. No wonder, say, San Franciscans so despise Fisherman’s Wharf, or residents of New Orleans shun the French Quarter. Behind every Potemkin Village…. Lévi-Strauss’ lone sentence cast against this globe-trotting sequence of images is like a knife that cuts through whatever might seem fashionable.

Indeed, I think Stonecipher is at her best here when her sources are, like the anthropologist, extra-literary. In those instances, these pieces engage the world in ways quite unlike anything else I’ve read in poetry – Cole Swensen might be the most approximate kin to Stonecipher as a writer, tho I have no way of know if they’ve ever met. (They also, by pure coincidence, sit side-by-side on my bookshelves, compliments of the alphabet.)

To have two great books in less than two years is almost obscenely ostentatious. I’ve learned, I should note, that it took a long time for Souvenir de Constantinople to come to print – editors found its indeterminacy threatening – so it may not be that Stonecipher is some demigod capable of writing twin masterpieces in one season. But she certainly has announced herself as one of our major talents. Further evidence that this is a great time if you happen to love poetry.

Donna Stonecipher’s Souvenir de Constantinople is a terrific little book (94 pages, tho it reads quickly & feels roughly half that length), one that for me has sustained multiple readings over the past year & which still leaves me excited, wanting more. Neither novel nor memoir, tho it has echoes of both, Souvenir is an old story, the eroticized tourist abroad¹, captured here in glimpses, segments, so that the focus ultimately is not on the tale but the telling. Hence a series of poems, the serial poem, a project conceived precisely as a book.

What convinces & excites me most is Stonecipher’s writing, particularly in sections or pieces mostly if not entirely composed of couplets that are, in the same moment, quite precise & yet deliberately awkward. They remind me of the ungainliness of Ronald Johnson’s early work (The Book of the Green Man, The Valley of the Many Colored Grasses). Viz:

The traveller harbors
a tale she cannot

tell: a tale
kept in the secret

drawer of
the told – (there is

an opium-smoker
lying

behind a photograph of
an opium-smoker)

(awled
to filigree – )

and the pearl hidden inside
the pearl

hidden inside the shell
fortifies the sexed

surrender – white-hot
memorandum

(radiating
note) faintly

cognizant
was the traveller in her amazed

night – I bore off
no trophy

for all my gold
deeds in the darting

forest. (The one
photograph I had of

him I tore
into bits.) In the luggage within

the luggage secure
in my hand (oh curio,

curio, curio)
I have salted away my true

new belongings –
(some postcards

and some fool’s
gold) – nevertheless –

I know the opium-
smoker will eventually waste

down to a gentle
reminder of the unfriendliness

of bones.
(Or will he one day feel

the sole souvenir
at last pierce the massed

clouds and speed
him back to the clamoring

street?) – And what desired
weight is this,

threatening
to smash my fragile

holding of sovereign
state? One day soon I must go

home. There
someone will ask for

photographs and
a story. And

to remain
the traveller, I will open

my valise, and open
my mouth, and

tell:

This is the section, or poem, in its entirety. It’s not some Zukofskian gemstone of condensed signifiers & the book is, deliberately I think, devoid of the sort of dazzlers that are perfect for quoting in reviews to persuade readers to become buyers. But the effects here are cumulative & by the time you reach this section, not quite halfway through the book, each word carries quite a bit more weight than what it actually denotes on the page, until this reader anyway is fairly jumping with excitement thinking about what might come next.

The poem-as-book or book-as-poem is a creature as different from, say, the longpoem as it is, say, from the novel, let alone the book as collection of individualized, disjunct poems. What makes Constantinople work as well, maybe even better, than most of the other examples of this emerging genre, is Stonecipher’s refusal to tie up threads into a single overarching conclusion that in turn defines (or maybe redefines) every prior meaning. Stonecipher permits complexity for its own sake, and ambiguity & indeterminacy, even as she never strays far from the perception that all good ideas are simple. The multiple stays multiple, fragments don’t “heal.” This is a book as rich with multiplicity on the fourth reading as it was on the first. Bravo!

 

¹ How exactly does the female version of this narrative trope differ from the middle-aged male sex tourist trolling the go-go bars of South Asia in search of “willing” 12-year-olds? Obviously there are differences relating to gender & power (& money), but the versions are both extrapolations of an imperial set of a presumptions. Stonecipher knows this & most of her source materials are specifically male: Marco Polo, Rudyard Kipling, Bernal Diaz. But Stonechiper’s “voice” is unmistakably her own & it’s impossible to read these as anything other than as explicitly female texts.