Month: April 2016

An interview about my book with Allison Peters

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I was so thrilled to have this deep conversation with Allison Peters over at one my stomping grounds, Michigan Quarterly Review, about my book, The Refusal of Suitors. We talked about the book, the nature of the city, anxiety, lifecourse, and what it means to work and love. She chose wonderful lines and asked astonishing questions. Read the entire interview here. Here’s a quick clip of her introduction:

The lyric ruminations Ryo Yamaguchi offers in his debut book of poetry, The Refusal of Suitors (Noemi Press, 2015), sink deeper than the ink on the page—and they rise up higher than the oxygen masks in the overhead compartment of the plane I was on as I read this impressive first book for the first time.

The Refusal of Suitors is a collection of poems that speaks to the you who’s on a level you’re hardly aware of—to the you who’s under there, somewhere, wondering what it’s all for and how. Ryo’s words unfold like music, his language both sharp and soft, his poems altogether dreamy in their fleeting effervescence, like city lights blinking through city smoke. (“Ode #1” ends: “This is the boulevard smudged with vacancies.”)

Reading Ryo’s poetry, it’s as if trapdoors open to hidden heart-caves between the lines, each poem glowing like an intangible peach. The words summer, flowers,and memory echo throughout the collection, melodically painting “the anxiety of landscape” with a brush of precious promiselessness.

These poems take a chance at impermanent transcendence, and it’s worth it. “What we call the beginning,” Ryo writes in “Post,” “is really just / the first thing we have recorded.” The Refusal of Suitors exists now as its own kind of record, presenting an exciting debut for the poet.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Ryo about his book. (Editor’s note: you may have already met Ryo via his essays for MQR.) We discussed poetry, philosophy, anxiety, cities, love, and dreams—and about his hopes for the future.

 

Sound and Light: A Quick Tour of Recorded Poetry Archives

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I’ve always found the idea of the archive startling. This is to distinguish the archive from the library in a crucial way—the archive being a preservation of ephemera: letters, ledgers, and other bureaucratic documents; marginalia, fragments, and chit-chat. This is in contrast to the library’s ordered rows of lovingly bound volumes, objects materially and commercially deemed memorable, whose memory is automated by the machinery that distributed it in the first place. The archive is memory compelled, memory deliberated, held onto, preserved like a kind of wildlife—memory forced into being.

There is a politics to this, but there is also an aesthetics—the after-effect of the force of the archive is a kind of ghosting: it hints too uncannily at history reified, at history returned to the present. The voice is physically indexed, it leaves a residue in a way it simply can’t in the ordination of the library. Nowhere can one feel this than in the archives of poetry read aloud, that most ephemeral event. In this short post, I wanted to share some of the marvelous archives of poetry readings that are available. Perhaps many of these places will be familiar to you, but here they are gathered in one place, in a brief recognition of the important work put toward the preservation of the reading. . .

Read the feature at Michigan Quarterly Review.

Book Review: “Some Versions of the Ice”

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Reading the surrealist essays in Adam Tipps Weinstein’s Some Versions of the Ice, one is quick to make comparisons. The most obvious is to magical realist writers such as Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, but there are many other resonances. His essay “The False Pigeon: A History”—a fictional account of a natural history museum—reads like it dropped straight from the pages of George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and the deceptively straightforward expositional tone that he employs throughout—which Michael Martone mentions in his wonderful blurb as a “hyper-rational empiricism [running] stoically and joyfully amok”—often echoes Lydia Davis.

These are, of course, imperfect comparisons, and any reader might have his or her own. If there is one comparison I would be steadfast to make, it’s to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project for the way that it anchors itself in a sprawling and impressively synthesizing collection of quotes. In Weinstein’s case, these range from Aristotle to Agamben, a choice that Weinstein explains in his afterword with yet further quotations, notably from William Gass: that citation “is an attempt to use a phrase, a line, a paragraph, like a word, and lend it further uses, another identity, apart from the hometown it hails from.” He goes on to explain that his quotes can be “borrowed, quoted, misquoted, or appropriated.”

I belabor these side-points because they really cast the book’s central quality in stark relief: these are essays of extraordinarily convincing exposition and erudition—nearly rapturous in their historical, material, or textual analysis—yet we can never be fully certain what exactly is true and what is false. Weinstein slips so effortlessly between the real and the fantastic that we often don’t realize how mired in confabulation we are until it’s too late, until we have accepted his version of the world and really, in some ways, can’t mentally go back. . . .

Read the review at NewPages