I couldn't quite keep up tonight in terms of getting my hand raised in time to contribute to a certain line of discussion, but as usual, I found myself appreciating the book even more than I already did by the time we closed.
Some thoughts I had during the discussion:
—often when poetry isn't immediately lyrical/musical (in the way we tend to think of Poetry), it's easy to dismiss it or describe it as "detached" but I think here, while it definitely has a detached atmosphere, it feels so purposeful that it's almost intimate, as if the speaker is showing us something about her and her inner life by doing so.
—related to that, she reserved her level of detail for the sections that were about the installations and performances, describing, as someone mentioned, in an ekphrastic way, almost pure description, while also sharing with us, as if a museum tour guide, some of the historical backgrounds of the artist and/or the pieces themselves. She forges relationship with the reader this way, I think, like she wants to say: look, look at what I can't stop looking at, or thinking about.
—the most intimate things in her life we only get bits of, as talked about in class, her mother's death, her boyfriend's illness (is it physical or psychological/mental, or both? is one causing the other?); in that way that what we notice says so much about who we are as creatures/human, the relaying of information, in that journalistic sense, is almost a kindness. By creating a clear image, she's allowing us to soak in the "facts" of it all.
—the little haunts we get of her mother's death and Chris's illness (two of the several personal threads just as examples) carry so much more emotion as they permeate the scenes/poems that come after and accumulate as we go forward
—in that way, I think there is an arc, or maybe a kind of circular one or a spiral (not a downward one)
—a note on the reading experience: I found myself reading each poem with all the accumulation that came before it, while also trying to imagine that I'd come upon the poem without having read any of the others (though she does call it, in the McSweeney's conversation, a book-length poem). It was interesting to frame the poems that way; some held up more than others.
—and, lastly, her withholding of personal information, the elusive way she referred to her partner and other people in her life, even her Jewishness and her Alaska-ness, is what pulled me through the book... wanting more reveal, and there's always a little tiny bit more.
A poem I'm sharing based on the prompts Sean gave us off of the Mannheimer book.
PUTTING MY POEM INSPIRED BY THE MANNHEIMER PROMPT HERE (SEAN, PLEASE MOVE IT IF THIS ISN’T THE RIGHT SPOT! AND FELLOW GROUP MEMBERS, I WELCOME YOUR FEEDBACK AND PLEASE POST YOUR OWN WORK TOO!)
Lake Owasso
The forked road ended where the railroad went
closer to Canada than the Gulf,
marshy enough for herons and gulls.
From their inlet, it would open to a larger lake
fed by invisible streams.
Their coffee was so lousy you had to bring your own supplies,
and then again mom liked too much mayonnaise
in her spreads at cocktail hour eighty pounds ago when she liked to eat.
Why would anyone share their feelings like that, dad asked me last time
when What Can Be Held Briefly came up.
You could go out on their porch in the summer
until the mosquitoes came out
and watch John throw sticks for Lena to fetch
or as Bud did before he died—
wrecking the plans for tending to mom while dad napped.
Through long and drifting winters, with snowplows and shovels,
Bud would have been there and take mom shopping.
He kept his own company, dog, hotplate, TV,
even as he whispered about world revolution,
what with Karen and John down the stairs and all, leading.
I didn’t sign up for the reading group, but I read the book, and just want to say thanks for all the comments above, which are helping me to understand it (and my reaction to it).
A couple more thoughts about Mannhiemer's book: After finishing Earth Room and thinking about Louise Glück's forward, I realized that the writer is actually attempting to write anti-poetry. In "Dusseldorf" (p. 43), Rainer is quoted as striving in dance for "No rhythm, no emphasis, no tension,/no relaxation." The poet accentuates the difficulty in reacting against traditional form when she explains how Rainer had to start with the smallest movement of the eyes. Mannhiemer leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for us to understand what she is reaching for. In "New York" (p. 75), her account of the reservations they held at the restaurant were confused by leaving out part of Chris(tian)'s name, which brings into question the meaning of a person's existence with the subtle absence of formality. Her self-reflexive humor manifests in "Chicago" (p. 36), the review of the unnamed ceramicist, "We are left, in short, with some dark thoughts/about the fate of high art/in the California sun" as she debases poetic form and subjugates it to the anti-poetic trudging of her poems. Another explanation is in "Ithaca" (p. 50), when she writes that David Medalla "claimed" a rejected mound of dirt as his art installation. Her work is a slog to read, devoid of poetic craft and form that usually give the work the waves that carry a reader through; although in some pieces, she falls into imagery and symbolism, (examples are "Tivoli," p. 42, and "Germantown," p. 44), and gives us a false sense that the poetry will revert back into a recognizable style. Not only does it take great effort to read, I get the sense that the writer must have worked intensely to manage to abstain from poetic craft.
My second thought is how Mannhiemer presents Chris as emasculated and worrisomely sensitive, undermining gender expectations and the predictive nature of her previous relationships with men who presented as expressing male power and dominance. What is interesting about the Chris character as he screams at seeing her ghost, has difficulty carrying the boat, struggles in her sister's house, and lays his head on the speaker's chest to be comforted. Chris always seems weak and needy and sensitive to the point of being half non-existent, like his half-name in the restaurant, mentioned above. Chris is a waif of a man who looks constantly for external comfort in the speaker who spends more time focused on her previous relationships than on Chris and points out that she doesn't think her relationship with Chris is any more important the the ones from her past. Nevertheless, this half-person, Chris, is the most endearing and lovable for me. He far surpasses the machismo-expressing men of the speaker's history or the speaker herself. She reveals herself to be calloused, insensitive, and even depraved and ugly, while Chris is so vulnerable he is upset when the speaker insults the mountains in "Germantown" (p. 68). Although it is courageous to forthrightly reveal the speaker's character defects, Chris, for me, is the lasting, albeit ghostly, character who holds the beauty of his weakness, his vulnerability, and the best parts of being human.
Below is a rough draft poem of my response to the writing prompt, which I pulled from the question: "What does the expression, 'Where are you from' mean?"
Where Are You From?
Remember the trees? The few of them, elms,
the elm trees your grandad planted? And the corn
that stiffened in the field, the so soil, thick and pungent,
a clod crumbled in your hand?
How you hid for hours, there, in the long rows,
before the boys would come to beat you
or toss you down or run past and ignore you?
Remember the beetles in the branches
where you held yourself over the cars
and tops of heads that didn't know you
were there? Or Mama called you down
for supper in the summer heat or thunderstorms
rolled in around you? How you braced yourself
in the crook of branches or skid the bark down?
How when you went inside and dark came,
how you slept on your cot beside the bathroom,
how you watched the light of the highway
dance on the wall above you, how you knew the cows
would return at summer's end, how they held there,
sometimes mooing, how they held there the subject
of the next attention, and winter's end would call them
to the house of slaughter, and you survived another year,
the cows taking your punishment, the cows martyr
themselves, another god to save you, and the family
gathers at the small table, the gravy passes for white
bread, and the hamburger meat the spoils of Mama's work,
P.S. I really appreciate all the comments shared on this thread. You all give me something to think about deeply (as if I didn't already have enough to process in Mannhiemer's work--ha, ha!). Thank you.
Yippee! I received my copy of Earth Room today, just as expected. I'm now starting to read it, and I'll be privileged to bring our discussion to my reading.
I'm thinking about the writing prompt, which seems to resonate best for me in Sean's question for us as readers: "What does the expression 'Where are you from' mean?" I write (and paint) work that is firmly grounded in place, as in my childhood home, but I find this question to be very provocative, so if thinking about this question prompts a poem, I'll share it here, later. Otherwise, I might share one I've already written, but that would be a missed opportunity to write another piece.
I'm sorry, I can't remember who brought up the D. H. Lawrence poem, "Snake," which I had never read, so I looked it up today and was astonished at that poem's beauty, and I was bereft I had gone so long through life without ever having encountered such a gorgeous work of art. It is a profoundly affecting poem, life changing in its sensitivity and oblique criticism of society and education. So thank you to the person who suggested it.
I attended an online poetry reading tonight sponsored by Brookline Booksmith, and all the "young" writers were excellent, but one reader, Natalie Wee, surpassed the others for me. She has real talent and skill, to use understatement. Her book in progress is Immigrant Aubade, if anyone is interested. She's written several books and has won enviable awards. . . . but I digress.
I've also been watching Pina Bausch's dance--jarring and elegant. Alas, I haven't been able to watch the Wim Wenders documentary. Maybe later.
Okay, I just wanted to check in. I'll peek back in after awhile.
I found myself wanting to talk too much yesterday. And the zoom format does make it a bit challenging to know when one can step in and speak--especially if someone else hasn't finished there thoughts. Sorry if I was stepping on others last night!
A few of the things I was about to say!
Sean was talking about the Berlin poem as did Bruce--with the provocative last line that seems like what she is really struggling with through the poem. But what I wanted to add to that discussion when we moved on to a different poem is that the whole poem seems like an interruption of a conversation she has been having with Dan (it starts "Maybe Dan was right." She doesn't say "right about what?" She leaves us guessing.). And then it moves immediately to her observations of paintings. What was Dan right about?--I think it is the question at the end. Dan had been telling her she should be getting over her mother's death because so much time has passed. And she is having an internal debate about that--a debate enriched by all the paintings of mothers and children that are permanently affixed to a museum wall.
And I noticed too that her sharp interjections of dramatic scenes come in some of the oddest places. For example the fifth stanza of the second poem starts out about people feeling invisible in cars (the poem called Los Angeles, where Pina's staging a work about America and how they were sheparded around in LA, sort of trapped but getting to go bowling, is the subject of the second stanza--one is almost whipsawed back and forth from the Tanztheater to LA and back through this poem where one place is free and "open" and the other is claustrophic/stifling). Smack in the middle of that fifth stanza after she says "In high school, in Anchorage (first introduction of Anchorag in the poem), driving my dad's mercury I often sang expressively...." Then this: "and when home from college, I learned that Dan had slept with my best friend, I drove and park and howled and beat the dashboard with real strength." Then more: " This is what women do onscreen. It was instinctual." And again wow/what?!.... "There in the seat next to me I'd taken his virginity the year before. "
This is such an intense paragraph I feel like we could talk about just it for 2 hours! She has packed everything into this but in such an odd matter of fact tone that seems like she's analyzing herself from a distance as if in a movie she is watching about herself (the theme of reality/distance perspective, freedom in and out of relationships, relationships in general and specifically--i.e. what women do in movies, what she learned to do in movies and then she turns the tables in that last line by "taking his virginity" which seems like general role reversal--she is telling us she isn't just the victim here but who is she? She doesn't feel her feelings--she narrates her feelings in such an interesting way as if she's the curator of her feelings too along with all the performance pieces.
Then in the next pararagraph she's talking about the reality of movies....
As I said before there is so much here I feel like we could talk about this poem and what she is saying and what we take from it all year.
One thing I didn't mention about myself last night too is that I'm Jewish and grew up in Minnesota. And with my last name of Redleaf, I'm sometimes (mis)taken for a Native American. My husband was a refusnik who grew up in Russia. So many of those themes about displacement and being an odd duck in a place where one doesn't exactly feel at home in this condensed narrative are so resonant for me.
I do want to go meet Rachel Mannheimer. And maybe I can. I'll be living in New Haven from Janaury through May and so this is something I definitely will try to do. (I have fantasies now in my head that she'll be excited to meet my daughter-in-law who's an ancient Hebrew scholar who teaches classes like "Gender and the Bible" and they'll become besties. Maybe that's a poem in the making about this poem....). Diane
Unfortunately, my copy of Mannheimer's book will be arriving tomorrow, so I've only had the chance to read the poems shared digitally in the email link. (Thank you for providing those pieces). Nevertheless, I am struck by the confessional approach of Mannheimer's poetry, in the vein of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and other feminist poets, in that she writes in a colloquial, direct language devoid of artifice. In this spirit, each poem stands on its own, but as an entire manuscript, they pull together an overarching epic confession of the speaker's change through the passage of large swaths of time. Her style seems almost archaic in contemporary poetry fashions that emphasize a much more disjointed approach to form, breaking traditional syntactical, rhyme, and meter expectations, yet, her work defies predictable thought patterns, focusing on the daily conveyance of mundane stories, interspersed with painful, personal anecdotes. Another factor that ties the overall manuscript together, is that it is one long (made up of shorter) ekphrastic work that reveals the speaker's psyche by the choices she makes as to what details and stories to include. Mannheimer reveals her own approach to art while describing Pina Bausch's aesthetics in dance: "These theatrics might seem intended as populist, promoting legibility, but the actual effect can be unsettling." Maybe the artist compares herself to Tuffi who jumped from the train car into the river and survived--an example of the very (figurative) theatrics the poet herself is pulling off. I look forward to reading and mulling over more of Mannheimer's work and attempting to place it in the canon of literature and poetry.
I found this book incredibly challenging and provocative and unsettling on every level. I started to take notes but it got overwhelming (I did for the first two poems but gave up...). The opening with the virtual reality setting, the shifts from place to place, the tenses of past present future, the fade in and out to a very specific picture to the broadest generaliization. She starts with Chris seeing the exhibit on a day he's sick. He can't answer her question because he has nausea. The poems about places are not about those places necessarily (like the Washington DC poem--she never goes there, it is just the place that decisions are made).
The poem has taken me to places that I didn't know about. I did see Wim Wenders film Pina years ago and loved it. But I didn't know about Robert Smithson's Spiral Getty. The book seems to cohere because of the characters, the recurring places (sometimes), the call backs to something Dan or her dad or someone did. The girl at the end interests me--is she in the book earlier? I wasn't sure.
It seems too like a journey in itself through a museum of performance pieces. A long interlocing Ekphrastic poem about these avant garde futuristic pieces tied to memories and present day observations that are both extremely specific and extremely general.
There are parts of the poem that are completely mystifying it me. Like the last stanza of the first poem. Take the italicized section at page 46. Huh? I was saying that to myself quite often.
I feel like we could talk about this poem for a year and only scratch its surface.
Thanks for these thoughts Diane. I was nodding my head "yes" often while reading. I was moved by the last stanza of the first poem, the one that starts "Outside my studio window dirty snow is piled up " The mood is suddenly present , I'm right there with RM, and the scene seemed very touching, for reasons I can't totally make into an explanation --the 2 men on opposite sides of the ice, both shining headlights that meet on the ice, the 2 "visitors" who "tenderly, and not with their full weight" . . test the ice and what seemed to me the heart of this part of the poem "The moon is far away\for all to see. . " Seemed like this scene is about humans sharing the moon with each other (not exactly that) or, human connection in the moonlight, human connection with the moon. The scene and feeling is all the opposite of RM's virtual reality experience of the moon which she said was "hateful" and left her feeling cut off, made her feel cut off, abandoned, and didn't seem shared even with her partner Chris who was right next to her the whole time
So interesting and it seems you have hit on an explanation of sorts that was eluding me. But I don't get the same tender feeling you do at this--yes, this seems very real life, with the moon far away, not at hand (like the princess's moon), but the snow is dirty, its unclear when the darn ice is freezing or unfreezing or when that's happening (given the shifting tenses there) and yes, she might be sharing the moon with these people but we don't even know who they are--I wasn't sure if there were two men or four people --there are two cars (something seems ominous wiht the headlights across the ice to me--it seemed almost like a lunar scene on earth though without donkeys or dinasaurs) and there are two visitors and I just don't know if she feels like she is sharing the moon with them or not....because it's now far away, to be glimpsed or not (and written about or not) by Chris, perhaps.
To add a bit to my earlier comment, although I think genre distinctions ultimately don’t matter so much, I might have found the book easier to enter if it had been presented as a lyric essay with quasi-haibun elements. In any case, I found the McSweeney’s interview interesting with respect to Mannheimer’s comments about emotion; likewise a remark (in one of the reviews) about her resistance to the epiphanic ending.
What gives her voice authority? I think, (if I understand the question, and I'm not confident that I do), its partly at least that her words, her "vibe" seem to me very matter-of-fact, in that she tells facts about her life and the world, (as opposed to making up imaginary characters or tales or landscapes) and also her language seems very matter-of-fact. So, for example she tells us lots of facts about her life, the life of Rachelle Mannheimer, like she's from Alaska (it says so on p 81) and Jewish (I'm Jewish and I believe her right away on this) and her partner's name is Chris (her Acknowledgements). But she also tells us very intimate, sometimes very moving or beautiful things in the same not fancy way , things that can't be fact-checked and yet, I keep on believing her ( for ex, looking at the moon shining on a skating pond in the making, noticing how people she trusts are all having babies, missing her mom as much as she ever has, though mom's been dead for some time, feeling both dazzled and disgusted by her moon VR experience. . .)
At this very early point I have to say that the book doesn’t grab me. Others whom I respect have the highest praise for it, so I assume that this failure of appreciation is due to my limitations. Sean, you say the poems are very well crafted, and I look forward to learning about why you think so. I think the poet succeeds in creating and sustaining a (sometimes deceptively) quiet, relatable voice across the poems, and I have enjoyed tracing the Hansel and Gretel–style breadcrumbs that the speaker has scattered about. But if I had randomly picked this book up in a bookstore, I would not have taken it home. Let’s just say that I admire this conceptual project more than I like it, though I am open to enlarging my perspective.
How did she do it?! Yes, that's what I'd love to know. Each place-titled poem opened up so many windows in my head, some intimate shots of Mannheimer, (her childhood memory, her feelings about her partner, about her dead mom, about growing up Jewish in Alaska), some views of America, i(ts genocidal history, its car-driven culture, its mass killings, its non-support for artists), some, (lots) whole little word-films about Pima Bausch, Bruce Nauman, Noguchi. . And somehow all the themes, windows, whatever the word is, are woven together so I feel she's talking to me, in regular conversational words and phrases. It's a wonderful book, however she did it. I guess that's what you (Sean) will help us look into more thoughtfully (and dispassionately) this afternoon! (I'm sure Ms. Mannheim would not approve of my exclamation mark, but what the f)
I couldn't quite keep up tonight in terms of getting my hand raised in time to contribute to a certain line of discussion, but as usual, I found myself appreciating the book even more than I already did by the time we closed.
Some thoughts I had during the discussion:
—often when poetry isn't immediately lyrical/musical (in the way we tend to think of Poetry), it's easy to dismiss it or describe it as "detached" but I think here, while it definitely has a detached atmosphere, it feels so purposeful that it's almost intimate, as if the speaker is showing us something about her and her inner life by doing so.
—related to that, she reserved her level of detail for the sections that were about the installations and performances, describing, as someone mentioned, in an ekphrastic way, almost pure description, while also sharing with us, as if a museum tour guide, some of the historical backgrounds of the artist and/or the pieces themselves. She forges relationship with the reader this way, I think, like she wants to say: look, look at what I can't stop looking at, or thinking about.
—the most intimate things in her life we only get bits of, as talked about in class, her mother's death, her boyfriend's illness (is it physical or psychological/mental, or both? is one causing the other?); in that way that what we notice says so much about who we are as creatures/human, the relaying of information, in that journalistic sense, is almost a kindness. By creating a clear image, she's allowing us to soak in the "facts" of it all.
—the little haunts we get of her mother's death and Chris's illness (two of the several personal threads just as examples) carry so much more emotion as they permeate the scenes/poems that come after and accumulate as we go forward
—in that way, I think there is an arc, or maybe a kind of circular one or a spiral (not a downward one)
—a note on the reading experience: I found myself reading each poem with all the accumulation that came before it, while also trying to imagine that I'd come upon the poem without having read any of the others (though she does call it, in the McSweeney's conversation, a book-length poem). It was interesting to frame the poems that way; some held up more than others.
—and, lastly, her withholding of personal information, the elusive way she referred to her partner and other people in her life, even her Jewishness and her Alaska-ness, is what pulled me through the book... wanting more reveal, and there's always a little tiny bit more.
Looking forward to next book,
LD
A poem I'm sharing based on the prompts Sean gave us off of the Mannheimer book.
PUTTING MY POEM INSPIRED BY THE MANNHEIMER PROMPT HERE (SEAN, PLEASE MOVE IT IF THIS ISN’T THE RIGHT SPOT! AND FELLOW GROUP MEMBERS, I WELCOME YOUR FEEDBACK AND PLEASE POST YOUR OWN WORK TOO!)
Lake Owasso
The forked road ended where the railroad went
closer to Canada than the Gulf,
marshy enough for herons and gulls.
From their inlet, it would open to a larger lake
fed by invisible streams.
Their coffee was so lousy you had to bring your own supplies,
and then again mom liked too much mayonnaise
in her spreads at cocktail hour eighty pounds ago when she liked to eat.
Why would anyone share their feelings like that, dad asked me last time
when What Can Be Held Briefly came up.
You could go out on their porch in the summer
until the mosquitoes came out
and watch John throw sticks for Lena to fetch
or as Bud did before he died—
wrecking the plans for tending to mom while dad napped.
Through long and drifting winters, with snowplows and shovels,
Bud would have been there and take mom shopping.
He kept his own company, dog, hotplate, TV,
even as he whispered about world revolution,
what with Karen and John down the stairs and all, leading.
Karen always cared so much for the helpless.
I always wondered how to manage silence.
The lake was nearly always calm,
especially at dusk.
Lena adjusted like the waves
that churn up so briefly and then subside.
–Diane L. Redleaf, posted 10-7-22
I didn’t sign up for the reading group, but I read the book, and just want to say thanks for all the comments above, which are helping me to understand it (and my reaction to it).
Cool! thanks
A couple more thoughts about Mannhiemer's book: After finishing Earth Room and thinking about Louise Glück's forward, I realized that the writer is actually attempting to write anti-poetry. In "Dusseldorf" (p. 43), Rainer is quoted as striving in dance for "No rhythm, no emphasis, no tension,/no relaxation." The poet accentuates the difficulty in reacting against traditional form when she explains how Rainer had to start with the smallest movement of the eyes. Mannhiemer leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for us to understand what she is reaching for. In "New York" (p. 75), her account of the reservations they held at the restaurant were confused by leaving out part of Chris(tian)'s name, which brings into question the meaning of a person's existence with the subtle absence of formality. Her self-reflexive humor manifests in "Chicago" (p. 36), the review of the unnamed ceramicist, "We are left, in short, with some dark thoughts/about the fate of high art/in the California sun" as she debases poetic form and subjugates it to the anti-poetic trudging of her poems. Another explanation is in "Ithaca" (p. 50), when she writes that David Medalla "claimed" a rejected mound of dirt as his art installation. Her work is a slog to read, devoid of poetic craft and form that usually give the work the waves that carry a reader through; although in some pieces, she falls into imagery and symbolism, (examples are "Tivoli," p. 42, and "Germantown," p. 44), and gives us a false sense that the poetry will revert back into a recognizable style. Not only does it take great effort to read, I get the sense that the writer must have worked intensely to manage to abstain from poetic craft.
My second thought is how Mannhiemer presents Chris as emasculated and worrisomely sensitive, undermining gender expectations and the predictive nature of her previous relationships with men who presented as expressing male power and dominance. What is interesting about the Chris character as he screams at seeing her ghost, has difficulty carrying the boat, struggles in her sister's house, and lays his head on the speaker's chest to be comforted. Chris always seems weak and needy and sensitive to the point of being half non-existent, like his half-name in the restaurant, mentioned above. Chris is a waif of a man who looks constantly for external comfort in the speaker who spends more time focused on her previous relationships than on Chris and points out that she doesn't think her relationship with Chris is any more important the the ones from her past. Nevertheless, this half-person, Chris, is the most endearing and lovable for me. He far surpasses the machismo-expressing men of the speaker's history or the speaker herself. She reveals herself to be calloused, insensitive, and even depraved and ugly, while Chris is so vulnerable he is upset when the speaker insults the mountains in "Germantown" (p. 68). Although it is courageous to forthrightly reveal the speaker's character defects, Chris, for me, is the lasting, albeit ghostly, character who holds the beauty of his weakness, his vulnerability, and the best parts of being human.
Below is a rough draft poem of my response to the writing prompt, which I pulled from the question: "What does the expression, 'Where are you from' mean?"
Where Are You From?
Remember the trees? The few of them, elms,
the elm trees your grandad planted? And the corn
that stiffened in the field, the so soil, thick and pungent,
a clod crumbled in your hand?
How you hid for hours, there, in the long rows,
before the boys would come to beat you
or toss you down or run past and ignore you?
Remember the beetles in the branches
where you held yourself over the cars
and tops of heads that didn't know you
were there? Or Mama called you down
for supper in the summer heat or thunderstorms
rolled in around you? How you braced yourself
in the crook of branches or skid the bark down?
How when you went inside and dark came,
how you slept on your cot beside the bathroom,
how you watched the light of the highway
dance on the wall above you, how you knew the cows
would return at summer's end, how they held there,
sometimes mooing, how they held there the subject
of the next attention, and winter's end would call them
to the house of slaughter, and you survived another year,
the cows taking your punishment, the cows martyr
themselves, another god to save you, and the family
gathers at the small table, the gravy passes for white
bread, and the hamburger meat the spoils of Mama's work,
and all of us taking communion?
P.S. I really appreciate all the comments shared on this thread. You all give me something to think about deeply (as if I didn't already have enough to process in Mannhiemer's work--ha, ha!). Thank you.
Yippee! I received my copy of Earth Room today, just as expected. I'm now starting to read it, and I'll be privileged to bring our discussion to my reading.
I'm thinking about the writing prompt, which seems to resonate best for me in Sean's question for us as readers: "What does the expression 'Where are you from' mean?" I write (and paint) work that is firmly grounded in place, as in my childhood home, but I find this question to be very provocative, so if thinking about this question prompts a poem, I'll share it here, later. Otherwise, I might share one I've already written, but that would be a missed opportunity to write another piece.
I'm sorry, I can't remember who brought up the D. H. Lawrence poem, "Snake," which I had never read, so I looked it up today and was astonished at that poem's beauty, and I was bereft I had gone so long through life without ever having encountered such a gorgeous work of art. It is a profoundly affecting poem, life changing in its sensitivity and oblique criticism of society and education. So thank you to the person who suggested it.
I attended an online poetry reading tonight sponsored by Brookline Booksmith, and all the "young" writers were excellent, but one reader, Natalie Wee, surpassed the others for me. She has real talent and skill, to use understatement. Her book in progress is Immigrant Aubade, if anyone is interested. She's written several books and has won enviable awards. . . . but I digress.
I've also been watching Pina Bausch's dance--jarring and elegant. Alas, I haven't been able to watch the Wim Wenders documentary. Maybe later.
Okay, I just wanted to check in. I'll peek back in after awhile.
I found myself wanting to talk too much yesterday. And the zoom format does make it a bit challenging to know when one can step in and speak--especially if someone else hasn't finished there thoughts. Sorry if I was stepping on others last night!
A few of the things I was about to say!
Sean was talking about the Berlin poem as did Bruce--with the provocative last line that seems like what she is really struggling with through the poem. But what I wanted to add to that discussion when we moved on to a different poem is that the whole poem seems like an interruption of a conversation she has been having with Dan (it starts "Maybe Dan was right." She doesn't say "right about what?" She leaves us guessing.). And then it moves immediately to her observations of paintings. What was Dan right about?--I think it is the question at the end. Dan had been telling her she should be getting over her mother's death because so much time has passed. And she is having an internal debate about that--a debate enriched by all the paintings of mothers and children that are permanently affixed to a museum wall.
And I noticed too that her sharp interjections of dramatic scenes come in some of the oddest places. For example the fifth stanza of the second poem starts out about people feeling invisible in cars (the poem called Los Angeles, where Pina's staging a work about America and how they were sheparded around in LA, sort of trapped but getting to go bowling, is the subject of the second stanza--one is almost whipsawed back and forth from the Tanztheater to LA and back through this poem where one place is free and "open" and the other is claustrophic/stifling). Smack in the middle of that fifth stanza after she says "In high school, in Anchorage (first introduction of Anchorag in the poem), driving my dad's mercury I often sang expressively...." Then this: "and when home from college, I learned that Dan had slept with my best friend, I drove and park and howled and beat the dashboard with real strength." Then more: " This is what women do onscreen. It was instinctual." And again wow/what?!.... "There in the seat next to me I'd taken his virginity the year before. "
This is such an intense paragraph I feel like we could talk about just it for 2 hours! She has packed everything into this but in such an odd matter of fact tone that seems like she's analyzing herself from a distance as if in a movie she is watching about herself (the theme of reality/distance perspective, freedom in and out of relationships, relationships in general and specifically--i.e. what women do in movies, what she learned to do in movies and then she turns the tables in that last line by "taking his virginity" which seems like general role reversal--she is telling us she isn't just the victim here but who is she? She doesn't feel her feelings--she narrates her feelings in such an interesting way as if she's the curator of her feelings too along with all the performance pieces.
Then in the next pararagraph she's talking about the reality of movies....
As I said before there is so much here I feel like we could talk about this poem and what she is saying and what we take from it all year.
One thing I didn't mention about myself last night too is that I'm Jewish and grew up in Minnesota. And with my last name of Redleaf, I'm sometimes (mis)taken for a Native American. My husband was a refusnik who grew up in Russia. So many of those themes about displacement and being an odd duck in a place where one doesn't exactly feel at home in this condensed narrative are so resonant for me.
I do want to go meet Rachel Mannheimer. And maybe I can. I'll be living in New Haven from Janaury through May and so this is something I definitely will try to do. (I have fantasies now in my head that she'll be excited to meet my daughter-in-law who's an ancient Hebrew scholar who teaches classes like "Gender and the Bible" and they'll become besties. Maybe that's a poem in the making about this poem....). Diane
Unfortunately, my copy of Mannheimer's book will be arriving tomorrow, so I've only had the chance to read the poems shared digitally in the email link. (Thank you for providing those pieces). Nevertheless, I am struck by the confessional approach of Mannheimer's poetry, in the vein of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and other feminist poets, in that she writes in a colloquial, direct language devoid of artifice. In this spirit, each poem stands on its own, but as an entire manuscript, they pull together an overarching epic confession of the speaker's change through the passage of large swaths of time. Her style seems almost archaic in contemporary poetry fashions that emphasize a much more disjointed approach to form, breaking traditional syntactical, rhyme, and meter expectations, yet, her work defies predictable thought patterns, focusing on the daily conveyance of mundane stories, interspersed with painful, personal anecdotes. Another factor that ties the overall manuscript together, is that it is one long (made up of shorter) ekphrastic work that reveals the speaker's psyche by the choices she makes as to what details and stories to include. Mannheimer reveals her own approach to art while describing Pina Bausch's aesthetics in dance: "These theatrics might seem intended as populist, promoting legibility, but the actual effect can be unsettling." Maybe the artist compares herself to Tuffi who jumped from the train car into the river and survived--an example of the very (figurative) theatrics the poet herself is pulling off. I look forward to reading and mulling over more of Mannheimer's work and attempting to place it in the canon of literature and poetry.
I found this book incredibly challenging and provocative and unsettling on every level. I started to take notes but it got overwhelming (I did for the first two poems but gave up...). The opening with the virtual reality setting, the shifts from place to place, the tenses of past present future, the fade in and out to a very specific picture to the broadest generaliization. She starts with Chris seeing the exhibit on a day he's sick. He can't answer her question because he has nausea. The poems about places are not about those places necessarily (like the Washington DC poem--she never goes there, it is just the place that decisions are made).
The poem has taken me to places that I didn't know about. I did see Wim Wenders film Pina years ago and loved it. But I didn't know about Robert Smithson's Spiral Getty. The book seems to cohere because of the characters, the recurring places (sometimes), the call backs to something Dan or her dad or someone did. The girl at the end interests me--is she in the book earlier? I wasn't sure.
It seems too like a journey in itself through a museum of performance pieces. A long interlocing Ekphrastic poem about these avant garde futuristic pieces tied to memories and present day observations that are both extremely specific and extremely general.
There are parts of the poem that are completely mystifying it me. Like the last stanza of the first poem. Take the italicized section at page 46. Huh? I was saying that to myself quite often.
I feel like we could talk about this poem for a year and only scratch its surface.
Thanks for these thoughts Diane. I was nodding my head "yes" often while reading. I was moved by the last stanza of the first poem, the one that starts "Outside my studio window dirty snow is piled up " The mood is suddenly present , I'm right there with RM, and the scene seemed very touching, for reasons I can't totally make into an explanation --the 2 men on opposite sides of the ice, both shining headlights that meet on the ice, the 2 "visitors" who "tenderly, and not with their full weight" . . test the ice and what seemed to me the heart of this part of the poem "The moon is far away\for all to see. . " Seemed like this scene is about humans sharing the moon with each other (not exactly that) or, human connection in the moonlight, human connection with the moon. The scene and feeling is all the opposite of RM's virtual reality experience of the moon which she said was "hateful" and left her feeling cut off, made her feel cut off, abandoned, and didn't seem shared even with her partner Chris who was right next to her the whole time
So interesting and it seems you have hit on an explanation of sorts that was eluding me. But I don't get the same tender feeling you do at this--yes, this seems very real life, with the moon far away, not at hand (like the princess's moon), but the snow is dirty, its unclear when the darn ice is freezing or unfreezing or when that's happening (given the shifting tenses there) and yes, she might be sharing the moon with these people but we don't even know who they are--I wasn't sure if there were two men or four people --there are two cars (something seems ominous wiht the headlights across the ice to me--it seemed almost like a lunar scene on earth though without donkeys or dinasaurs) and there are two visitors and I just don't know if she feels like she is sharing the moon with them or not....because it's now far away, to be glimpsed or not (and written about or not) by Chris, perhaps.
To add a bit to my earlier comment, although I think genre distinctions ultimately don’t matter so much, I might have found the book easier to enter if it had been presented as a lyric essay with quasi-haibun elements. In any case, I found the McSweeney’s interview interesting with respect to Mannheimer’s comments about emotion; likewise a remark (in one of the reviews) about her resistance to the epiphanic ending.
What gives her voice authority? I think, (if I understand the question, and I'm not confident that I do), its partly at least that her words, her "vibe" seem to me very matter-of-fact, in that she tells facts about her life and the world, (as opposed to making up imaginary characters or tales or landscapes) and also her language seems very matter-of-fact. So, for example she tells us lots of facts about her life, the life of Rachelle Mannheimer, like she's from Alaska (it says so on p 81) and Jewish (I'm Jewish and I believe her right away on this) and her partner's name is Chris (her Acknowledgements). But she also tells us very intimate, sometimes very moving or beautiful things in the same not fancy way , things that can't be fact-checked and yet, I keep on believing her ( for ex, looking at the moon shining on a skating pond in the making, noticing how people she trusts are all having babies, missing her mom as much as she ever has, though mom's been dead for some time, feeling both dazzled and disgusted by her moon VR experience. . .)
At this very early point I have to say that the book doesn’t grab me. Others whom I respect have the highest praise for it, so I assume that this failure of appreciation is due to my limitations. Sean, you say the poems are very well crafted, and I look forward to learning about why you think so. I think the poet succeeds in creating and sustaining a (sometimes deceptively) quiet, relatable voice across the poems, and I have enjoyed tracing the Hansel and Gretel–style breadcrumbs that the speaker has scattered about. But if I had randomly picked this book up in a bookstore, I would not have taken it home. Let’s just say that I admire this conceptual project more than I like it, though I am open to enlarging my perspective.
How did she do it?! Yes, that's what I'd love to know. Each place-titled poem opened up so many windows in my head, some intimate shots of Mannheimer, (her childhood memory, her feelings about her partner, about her dead mom, about growing up Jewish in Alaska), some views of America, i(ts genocidal history, its car-driven culture, its mass killings, its non-support for artists), some, (lots) whole little word-films about Pima Bausch, Bruce Nauman, Noguchi. . And somehow all the themes, windows, whatever the word is, are woven together so I feel she's talking to me, in regular conversational words and phrases. It's a wonderful book, however she did it. I guess that's what you (Sean) will help us look into more thoughtfully (and dispassionately) this afternoon! (I'm sure Ms. Mannheim would not approve of my exclamation mark, but what the f)