Forest on Many Stems (eBook)

Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, teacher and editor. She is author of thirteen collections of poems and three novels. Her most recent collections include a book of poems You Envelop Me (Omnidawn 2017), a novel Periodic Companions (Tinderbox 2018) and short fiction in two editions, one French, and one English in The Book of Moments (Presses universitaires de rouen et du havre, 2018). Her honors include a 2014 Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award (2007) for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award (2005) for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Catalan. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.

CONTENTS:





Introduction— The Poet’s Novel: A Form of Refusal



I . Verse Novel

“Poetry tells me I’m dead; prose pretends I’m not”— Alice Notley (39, Culture of One)

“You Cannot Count That You Should Weep For This Account:”

Aurora Leigh and the Problem of Math

by Anne Boyer

Cane in the Classroom: Jean Toomer’s Classic

by Julie Patton

The Monster in the Rotunda: Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red

By Sasha Steensen

Muse X : Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota: A Short Russian Novel

By Julie Carr

Down in the Dump: The Abject in Alice Notley’s Culture of One

By Laura Hinton



II. Genre Mash-Ups

Composite, Cut-Ups, Review, Sci Fi, Writer as Detective

“The images set off down the road and yet they never get anywhere, they’re simply lost, it’s hopeless, says the voice—and the hunchback asks himself, hopeless for who?.” (Bolaño, Antwerp, 18)

The Cornucopia is Mapped with a Slipping Venn-Diagram and a Möbius Strip: William Carlos Williams and his The Great American Novel

by Sarah Vap

Friendship as Method in Ashbery & Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies

By Geoffrey G. O’Brien

A Greater Greatness: Max Brand’s Twenty Notches becomes Ted Berrigan’s Clear the Range

By Edmund Berrigan

Lying in Wait: On Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp as a Poet’s Novel

By Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Obituary of the Many: Gail Scott

by Carla Harryman

Kevin Killian’s Epic Poem of Happiness

By Brandon Brown

Dark Light: Paradox & Subversion in Laura Moriarty’s Ultraviloeta

By Brent Cunningham

A Ghostlike Interference: Jack Spicer’s Detective Novel

By Daniel Katz



III. Interior Lyric / Displacement/ Cartographic Time146

“She wanted to climb through walls of no visible dimension”

— H.D. (Hermione, 7)

Hilda Hilst’s The Obscene Madame D: A Derelict Reader’s Guide

by Traci Brimhall

Narrating the Financialized Landscape: The Novels of Taylor Brady

By Rob Halpern

Structure as Philosophy in Inger Christensen’s Azorno

By Denise Newman

The Point of Robert Creeley’s The Island

By Marcella Durand

Attention and Attunement in Forrest Gander’s As A Friend

By Susan Scarlatta

Out of Marsh and Bog: “H.D., Imagiste” and the Poeisis of HERmione Precisely

by Jenn Scappetone

Message in a Bottle: A Brief Introduction to Radical Love: 5 Novels by Fanny Howe

By Kazim Ali

The School of Fears: Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

By Brian Teare



IV. Prose Poem / Concatenation / Novel Borders

“An ambulatory fig tree strolled down a street crowded with seminarians, streetwalkers, and geometry professors—a thousand aging gentlemen, dirty collars, sticky fingers.” (Adán, 26)

Impressions of Martin Adán’s The Cardboard House

By Mónica de la Torre

“What Am I to Do with All of This Life”: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha

by Julia Bloch

“A Book” and Other Fractured Pages: Nicole Brossard’s Early Novels

by Angela Carr

To Seek Air: Barbara Guest’s Inter-layered Fiction

By Karla Kelsey

Carnal Knowledge: Carla Harryman’s Gardener of Stars: A Novel

by Lee Ann Brown

Rereading Emmanuel Hocquard’s AEREA dans les forêts de Manhattan

By Norma Cole

“The Greek Fragment”: Irreal Salvation in Mina Loy’s Gnostic Text Insel

By Kimberly Lyons

Gertrude Stein and the Poet’s Novel, Thank You.

By Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Fidelity and Form: Rosmarie Waldrop and the Poet’s Novel

By Elizabeth Robinson



V. Portrait / Documentary / Representation / Palimpsest 303

“I’ve read many stories of revenants and apparitions, but my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them.” (Keith Waldrop, 11)

Etel Adnan’s Paris, When It’s Naked

by Brandon Shimoda

“Mme Wiener,” the French Novelist and her Masks – Reading Stacy Doris’s Two French Novels by Vincent Broqua

Thalia Field’s Ululu (Clown Shrapnel): A series of detonations

by Jena Osman

Turning Poetry into Prose: Not Without Laughter and Langston Hughes

by W. Jason Miller

NourbeSe Philip by Sonnet L’Abbe

Coming through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje’s Buddy Book

by C.D. Wright

“Light” in Light While There Is Light: An American History

by Laura Moriarty

“I’M ALL IN THE DIRD AND ON FIRE OR SOMETHING, GET ME OUT OF HERE.”

The novels of Phillip Whalen, You Didn’t Even Try and Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head by Norman Fischer



VI. Metamorphic / Distance / Aural Address / Wandering

“Everything in the poem was in transition”

— Peter Waterhouse

Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet

by John Keene

Malina, Murder

Death in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Writing

by Mette Moestrup (translated from Danish by Mark Kline)

Two Sources of Poetry in Carroll’s Writing

by Aaron Kunin

A Space for Bhanu Kapil

by Laura Mullen

Circumambulation: Cowrie Shells, Bottle Caps and Balloons in Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate

by Tyronne Williams

“the equal instant space of action”

On Leslie Scalapino’s Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom (2010)

by Judith Goldman

The Tattered Labyrinth: On W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

by Dan Beachy-Quick

“The Terrible I”: On Peter Waterhouse ‘s Poem Novel

Language Death Night Outside

By Donna Stonecipher



VII. Identification / Dissolution / Polemic / Bildungsroman 459

“She says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live.”

—Cha (141)

“I Got This Under the Bridge” / Notes on Audre Lorde’s Zami

by C.S. Giscombe

On Amiri Baraka’s Six Plus One Persons “a longish poem about a dude”

by Aldon Lynn Nielsen

Thersa Cha’s Eroticism

By Jeanne Hueving

A Fragmented Whole for Renee Gladman’s Toaf

By Danielle Vogel

Three Ways to Sunday: The Mandarin by Aaron Kunin

by Brian Blanchfield

Romantic Substance: Reading Ben Lerner’s

Leaving the Atocha Station with the Künstlerroman

by Lynn Xu

Stupendous Lore: Poet’s Novels by Tan Lin & Pamela Lu

by Patrick Durgin

The Doors of Perception in Eileen Myles’ Inferno

Cedar Sigo

Jacques Roubaud’s poet’s prose

By Abigail Lang

Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation thinks wit(h)ness)

by Rachel Zolf