Thursday, February 29, 2024

Compulsive Reader Newsletter March

The March Compulsive Reader Newsletter is now on its way to inboxes around the world.  This month features a new interview with Kin's Marina Kamenev along with a bunch of reviews of books such as Notorious in Nashville by Phyllis Gobbell, Stephen Davenport's Ninety-Day Wonder, Rambles by Beatriz Copello, An Unshared Secret and Other Stories by Ketaki Datta, and Ask Me About the Future by Rebecca Jessen to name just a few. We also have two new competitions, a big February news round-up, and loads more.  If you can't wait for it to arrive (please whitelist my email address so I don't end up in your spam!), you can view it in your browser.  To sign up for free just visit http://www.compulsivereader.com 




Books in HCRO Dorm Library" by C G-K is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Compulsive Reader Newsletter - February


The Feb 24 Compulsive Reader Newsletter has now been sent out to inboxes everywhere.  This month's issue includes  12 new reviews from authors like Jennifer Maiden, Patrick Süskind, Sarah Maclay, and Deborah Blume as well as a conversation between poets Mary Pacifico Curtis and Tiffany Troy. A new giveaway for a copy of The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays by Maddie Norris, as well as our great big news roundup for the month of January.  

If you haven't received yours or want to check it out you can grab a copy from the archive here

To subscribe for free, visit: http://www.compulsivereader.com

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Compulsive Reader Newsletter January

 

The January Compulsive Reader Newsletter has now gone out and is on its way to inboxes everywhere.  This month's issue includes 14 new reviews including One River by Steve Armstrong, the new translation of The Iliad by Emily Wilson, Thieves by Valerie Werder, and The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia.  We also have a new giveaway for a copy of The China Shelf by Jennifer Maiden, the usual literary news roundup and an exclusive interview with Valerie Werder at the podcast here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/compulsivereader/episodes/Valerie-Werder-on-Thieves-e2cqfr0

If you can't wait or somehow aren't getting it you can grab a copy in the archive here.

To sign up visit http://www.compulsivereader.com


Thursday, November 30, 2023

Compulsive Reader Newsletter Dec

The December Compulsive Reader Newsletter has just gone out.  As always the issue is chock-full of new book reviews and interviews including The Lady in The Bottle by Rozanna Lilley, Aboard the Time Line by Bastian Gregory, The Unreal City by Mike Lala, See What I Mean by Charles Rammelkamp, A Brilliant Life by Rachelle Unreich, and lots more as well as 2 new book giveaways, interviews and much more.  To read it online visit: Compulsive Reader Newsletter archive.  To sign up visit: http://www.compulsivereader.com

Happy reading!  

Friday, November 10, 2023

New York Surrealism: On Alice Notley's How to Really Get an Apartment

Here is my third ModPo essay this year. Unfortunately I cannot find the source poem online to link to and I don't want to reproduce here in case of copyright issues so I'll just say that the source poem is from the book At Night the States, published 1987 by Yellow Press, Chicago and is well worth checking out if you can. The book is available on Scribd https://www.scribd.com/document/652772575/alice-notley-at-night-the-states-1 so if you have a subscription as I do, you can view it on page 49 at the link above.  And just for fun, you can read the much longer title poem of the book here if you're wanting more Alice or can't get to the book on Scribd: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50834/at-night-the-states

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Alice Notley’s “How to Really Get an Apartment” is, in many ways a classic New York School poem. It has all the hallmarks. The setting of course which is probably the most defining feature given the name - the apartment with its buzzer, the landlord, even the sense of the importance of having secured a rental property - its preciousness in the city.  There are the cultural references - the name dropping of Jack Kerouac and the republican salt - one assumes that the line in quotation marks is a slogan in use at the time, and the sequencing from passing by an apartment to securing it - all happening in the present tense and progressing in a seemingly orderly way from one step to the next with multiple uses of the ampersand to indicate the next step forward in a way designed to be intentionally conversational and visual.  There is also the abbreviation of apartment to apt and the four em dashes that create a visual sense of motion in the work. 


The conversational quality here is one that mirrors the breathlessness and easy quality of a discussion you might have with someone over a drink - the intimacy that begins with starting the work with ellipses and a reference “the same building”, as if we had already been talking about the building, and takes on the cadence of a narrative that melds present tense with reminiscence and digression, as if this were an anecdote told to the reader as addressee. This is partly indicated by the title which is a kind of recipe or even a hook - read this and you’ll find out something you need to know, which is humorous because it’s not a standard logic and shaking salt at a landlord and calling it wine will not get you a coveted apartment in New York City.  Besides, it negates itself at the end in the classic New York School way of calling into question the overall tenet of the poem.  


The surrealism here is one that Notley is famous for - her use of dream sequencing.  In this instance that dream logic is in play where each image gives rise to the next one - and the relationship does not have to be the kind we are used to in daily life or “plain time”.  Instead we have building to Kerouac to buzzer to salt to wine to access.  It’s a progression that works perfectly from a grammatical and linear point of view but has a subverted semantics where salt and wine can be synonymous, and where the desire to really obtain an apartment is a desire for what is already there.  The symbolism here is one that has a sonic quality - using free association of sound, including subtle alliteration and repetitions such as “girl” with the repetitions of “get”, the multiple instances of salt, the alliteration of “w” as the poem progresses through the latter part of the poem - “whenever”, “walks”, “Would”, “wine” and the multiple variations on “you” and “your”.  All of these sounds combine to create a gentle motion forward that mimic the progression of walking, forming a small but perfectly formed New York poem. 

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Compulsive reader Newsletter November

Happy November!  The latest Compulsive Reader newsletter has now gone out.  If you missed it you can grab a copy in the Compulsive Reader archive.  This month's issue features fantastic new reviews of authors like Jared Harel, Robbie Couch, Shoshanna Rockman, LJ Sysko and many more plus interviews with incredible multi-talented creatives like Kathleen Rooney, Samuel Lucas Allen, and Eugen Bacon.  If you're a subscriber it will come right to your inbox.  If you'd like to subscribe for free, visit: http://www.compulsivereader.com and just pop your email address in the upper right hand corner.  

"Books" by shutterhacks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Darkinfested: sensate and visceral (on "Subliminal" by Lorine Niedecker)

This is my second ModPo 2023 essay on Lorine Niedecker's "Subliminal". I've been on quite the Niedecker kick lately and coming across this sequence, which I hadn't read before, has increased the kick.  The bit below is all I wrote the message on but I recommend the full sequence which cannot be found online (I won't paste from my book which I don't think is legal), but the book with the full sequence is Harpsichord & Salt Fish which I now have but which you could very likely get from your local library if you want to read it in full (highly recommended).  The essay specifically asked us to explore how this poem engages with the principles of Imagism

“Subliminal” by Lorine Niedecker is a five-poem sequence, but for the purpose of this essay I will only be close-reading the first section.  In classic Niedecker style, the poem is condensed and spare, its meaning arising as much from the structure and spaces in the work as from the semantics.  The short lines of each of the four couplets begin with two or three words indented as the first part of the couplet, describing what is mostly sensate and visceral - embodied in alliterative and sometimes sibilant sounds that evoke an immediate response in the reader. The second lines of the poem are more descriptive and slightly longer - an attempt perhaps at qualifying the sensation of the first line. For example, a reader might approach the first couplet with the question “what is Sleep’s dream” and the answer ‘a nerve-flash in the blood”.  The poems structure with those even indents create a visual impression of a double helix twist - perhaps hinting that there is something inherited here - that tall, torment of the mother, the repeated use of the word “nerve”.  

There are many elements of this extract that align with imagism.  All of the sonic and structural elements of the poem described above do seem to suggest something other than a "direct treatment of “thing,” one of Imagism’s key tenants, however it is also fair to say that the poem may well be the direct treatment of a dream, rendering the elements of the dream (rather than the mother, or the sensations themselves) in a direct way.  It is also possible to define the object as the mother, the most concrete image in the poem, rendered with a crispness as ‘tall, tormented’ both fairly straightforward words and an absence of metaphors, as is often the case with Niedecker.  I do think that would be a simplistic reading of the poem though, as there is much that could be taken as symbolic. While the poem feels internally complete and not referential and the words are, in the main, not decorative, there is that final word, ‘darkinfested’ - which comes right at the end of the extract as a portmanteau (two words combined) which wouldn’t appear in common speech that way.  Linking the deep interiority of a dream with all that sensation, and then using that final, powerful portmanteau to end the extract, gives the poem a symbolic and even surrealistic quality which hints in a very non Imagistic way, at the unconscious, and the traumas we might carry, and less about the dream itself, or even the mother who appears here as an ominous presence.  There’s a certain dynamism here that is brought in with the combination of these sensual images - the nerve-flash and cold sensation and the structure of the helix which suggests inheritance, along with the seductive, sibilant musicality of the sound.  While it is true that Imagism seeks new rhythms, there is, in this condensation, much in the way of symbolic and intense power not in keeping with the fixed object of an Imagistic approach but rather much more open, and subject to multiple interpretations, readings and ways of experiencing.