Page 636 – Electric Literature

Sex with Shakespeare: Kink and Secrecy in Singapore

Posted on June 17, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

Most nights, after work, I went out for drinks with Nikolai, the director of Macbeth. “You look distracted,” he said one evening. “What’s on your mind?”

I winced. I knew exactly what was on my mind. Ever since Oman, where some women in the Shakespeare class had introduced me to bootlegged DVDs of The O.C., I’d been a huge fan of the pulpy teen drama. By the time I moved to Singapore, however, the show had been canceled and the Internet had given me something even better: The O.C. spanking fan fiction. It exists, it is awesome, and it, as usual, was on my mind that evening. Nikolai was innovative, artistic, and nonjudgmental. If I had been fantasizing about Angelina Jolie in a black leather catsuit — in other words, the “sexy” stereotype of BDSM — I probably would have shared the fantasy. Nikolai would have laughed. But it’s one thing to be edgy; it’s quite another to fantasize about Sandy Cohen, with the epic eyebrows, spanking Ryan Atwood. So, no, my boss didn’t need to know what was on my mind.

But it’s one thing to be edgy; it’s quite another to fantasize about Sandy Cohen, with the epic eyebrows, spanking Ryan Atwood.

“I’m not thinking anything,” I said, too loudly. “Let’s drink.”

We did. We drank so much that, before long, we were drunk. Nikolai and I stumbled out of the wine bar and danced down a brick path near Robertson Quay, a posh stretch of restaurants, bars, and clubs along the river. A loose brick jutted out from the path.

“Get it!” Nikolai urged. “Pull it out!”

Giggling with the rush of being bad, I pulled the brick out of the path and threw it in the river. (I regret this. As a guest in Singapore, I had a responsibility to behave better.)

Then we ran.

“We’re in trouble now,” Nikolai joked. “They’re going to cane us!” (As the world was reminded during the 1994 Michael Fay controversy, when an American eighteen-year-old was sentenced to receive four cane strokes on his bare buttocks, the Singaporean judicial system employs corporal punishment.)

“Not me,” I teased. “Singaporean courts don’t cane women. Only men.”

“Really?” Nikolai said. I nodded.

“Trust me,” I slurred. “I know everything there is to know about judicial caning.” (Remember all those middle-school book reports on corporal punishment?)

Nikolai grinned.

“Since we’re being naughty tonight, shall we be really naughty?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Always,” I replied.

Section 377A of the Singaporean Penal Code states: “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or abets the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years.” In other words, the Singaporean penal code criminalizes homosexuality.

Nikolai is gay.

“Let’s go to a gay bar,” he suggested.

“Do you know where to find one?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied.

Nikolai didn’t just know where to find one — he knew them all. So we went on a pub crawl that night, walking from nondescript bar to nondescript bar. The more I drank, the less it felt like we were breaking a law. What at first had felt naughty felt, in no time, normal.

“Are you scared the government will come after you?” I asked the owner of one club.

He shrugged.

“Not really,” he said. “They leave us alone.”

I imagine that with regard to unenforced prohibitions, Singapore is a bit like Shakespeare’s England. During his life, homosexuality was technically punishable with harsh laws. But those laws were rarely enforced. As Bruce Smith pointed out, during the combined forty-five years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the twenty-three years of James I’s reign, there was only one sodomy conviction — and that was for sex with a five-year-old boy, so it would be more accurate to call it a rape conviction.

I imagine that with regard to unenforced prohibitions, Singapore is a bit like Shakespeare’s England. During his life, homosexuality was technically punishable with harsh laws.

King James — yes, the same one who sponsored the King James Bible, and the patron for whom Shakespeare wrote Macbeth — may have even been gay or bisexual himself. (But it’s important to remember that, at that period, those terms didn’t exist. It’s possible that people then understood sexuality as something more fluid. A lot of how we understand our identities is culturally and historically specific.) James had a wife and three children, but he also spoke quite candidly about his passionate love for men, especially George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. “You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else,” said James to his Privy Council in 1617, in what some scholars believe was an early defense of same-sex love. “I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.” And in 1624, during his last illness, James sent Buckingham a telling letter, begging him to come to his bedside:

I cannot content myself without sending you this billet,

praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting

with you, and that we may make at this Christenmass a

new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for God so love

me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and

that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with

you, than live a sorrowful widow-life without you. And so

God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye

may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

Although most surviving literary references to homosexuality from this period refer to same-sex attraction between men, writers were also aware of lesbian attraction. In one remarkable poem, John Donne — a poet and cleric in the Church of England — imagined sexual desire between women:

My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two,

But so as thine from one another do,

And, O, no more: the likeness being such,

Why should they not alike in all parts touch?

Hand to strange hand, lip to lip none denies;

Why should they breast to breast, or thighs to thighs?

Shakespeare’s own possible homoerotic interests have also been the subject of debate. Although he married Anne Hathaway and fathered three children with her, some readers cite the sonnets as evidence of Shakespeare’s bisexuality. Twenty-six of the sonnets are addressed to a married woman, who has often been called the “Dark Lady.” But one hundred and twenty-six of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) seem to be addressed to a young man, often called the “Fair Lord” or “Fair Youth.” (Sonnet 20 explicitly bemoans the fact that this young man is not female.) Some scholars theorize that this young man might be the same

“Mr. W. H.” to whom the sonnets were addressed. Maybe Shakespeare was bisexual. Others reject that theory; after all, there’s no reason to assume the sonnets are autobiographical.

What the Singaporean bartender had told me that night seemed true. No one in the club acted worried about an imminent raid. Despite their clandestine nature, the bars we visited did not feel shrouded by fear. I glanced around the room, pausing to wave hello to Antonio from The Merchant of Venice. Patrons laughed and flirted. Everyone seemed to be having a good time.

Maybe this wasn’t so bad.

Then I saw a familiar face.

One man wasn’t having fun.

I had met Edwin, a Singaporean friend, at a mutual friend’s beach party on Sentosa Island. We had bonded over our mutual long-distance relationships: my boyfriend was in New York; his girlfriend was in Kuala Lumpur. After that, Edwin and I ran into each other at parties or dinners every few months. He was smart and funny. I liked Edwin, though we didn’t share political views.

“It’s not biblical,” Edwin told me once when same-sex marriage came up. “It’s perverse.”

Tonight, in a secret gay bar with no sign on the door, Edwin sat alone. He gazed around the room, both hands on a glass of beer. His eyes were hungry and sad.

“It’s not biblical,” Edwin told me once when same-sex marriage came up. “It’s perverse.”

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” begins Macbeth’s most famous incantation. Everything in the play is double. Macbeth and Banquo are like “cannons overcharg’d with double cracks,” who “doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.” When King Duncan stays at the Macbeths’ castle, where he will be murdered, it is “in double trust,” and Lady Macbeth promises that their care of him will be “in every point twice done and then done double.” Later, Macbeth tries to kill Macduff in an attempt to “make assurance double sure,” only to discover that the witches have toyed with him in “a double sense.”

Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head by Johann Heinrich Füssli

Macbeth is a play about doubles. But there is a twist.

In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the hero (or antihero) often has a “double,” or voice — a secondary character who speaks for the central figure, linking him to the real world and to the audience. Marjorie Garber describes these sidekicks as “someone on the stage who encounters things and verifies [that what seems] impossible or unbearable [is], nonetheless, true.” In Hamlet, Horatio fills that role: at the end of the play, Horatio is the one who promises to tell Hamlet’s story. In King Lear, that voice is Edgar. (“I would not take this from report. It is, and my heart breaks at it,” he says at one impossibly sad moment.)

Macbeth’s obsession with equivocation speaks to this idea of double voices. The word equivocation itself comes from the Latin word æquivocus, which means “of equal voice.” In Macbeth, where even the fundamental premise of the play demands verification — are the witches “real,” or merely a product of Macbeth’s imagination? — that double voice is more important than ever. At first, Banquo fills that role. He links Macbeth (and Macbeth) to the audience. Indeed, Banquo seems to speak for us. “Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?” he asks, after the weyard sisters first appear. We know Banquo saw the sisters, too. Unlike the dagger that Macbeth sees (or imagines) before he kills King Duncan, Banquo’s voice verifies for the audience — and, indeed, for Macbeth himself — that these sisters do exist.

But Macbeth has a twist that sets it apart from every other Shakespearean tragedy: Macbeth murders his voice. Mad with fear that Banquo’s heirs will seize the throne, Macbeth has Banquo killed. After that, our antihero is on his own. There is no one left to verify what is real and what is not. Macbeth sees — or imagines — Banquo’s ghost at a feast, and from then on, there is nothing good left in his life. In fact, the night that Banquo dies is the very last time we see Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who previously had the strongest marriage in the Shakespearean canon, speak to each other. When Macbeth’s voice dies, everything else disappears, too. Macbeth is alone.

When Macbeth’s voice dies, everything else disappears, too. Macbeth is alone.

He can’t survive that way. No person can.

In the bar, I lowered my face and walked over to Nikolai.

“We have to leave,” I muttered. “My friend is here.” I had invaded a safe space. Edwin didn’t want to be seen.

Nikolai chugged the rest of his drink and hopped to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said. We slipped out of the club.

Whenever Singaporean friends tried to defend 377A, they always emphasized the fact that it is rarely enforced.

“Homosexuals can do whatever they want,” a colleague once told me. “They just have to keep it private.”

“Privacy” is one of the most potent and insidious weapons a sexual majority can use against people with nonnormative sexual identities.

But the look on Edwin’s face that night told me a different story. I recognized the expression. “Privacy” is one of the most potent and insidious weapons a sexual majority can use against people with nonnormative sexual identities. “Privacy” sounds good. It sounds responsible and mature. But “privacy” is tied up with isolation and shame. It drives people underground. It puts people in danger.

“Privacy” palters with us in a double sense.

Sexuality doesn’t just appear at age eighteen. Like everyone else, kinky kids grow up with questions about our emerging sexualities. The difference is that, unlike people who grow up with normative sexual orientations, we can’t turn to pop culture for answers. There are almost no books, TV shows, or movies that show people like us, or relationships like the ones I craved, in a healthy or positive light. Our fear and shame doesn’t just come from negative messages; it comes from the lack of positive ones. When culture insists that people keep their “private” lives “private,” those who fall outside the norm fall through the cracks. We have no way to learn how to explore our fantasies safely.

One thing we do have is the Internet. Sexual minorities feel “private” online.

Predators feel “private” online, too.

When my friend Beth was sixteen, she met a fifty-four- year-old sadist on an Internet message board. His name was Logan. Beth was exactly like me at that age: obsessed with spanking and desperate to connect. She talked to Logan because she had no one else. After a few months of emails, Logan drove to Beth’s boarding school. She was nervous, but felt obligated to meet him. She didn’t want to be rude. He had made hotel reservations. So Beth got permission to leave school grounds for the weekend.

Beth was exactly like me at that age: obsessed with spanking and desperate to connect.

Beth was a virgin. She had never even been kissed. (For obvious reasons, her story hits close to home with me.) She didn’t want to have sex with Logan; she just needed to explore her masochistic impulses. But Beth was a good girl. She knew that she was supposed to keep her private life private. So she didn’t tell any of her friends where she was going that weekend. She didn’t tell anyone whom she was going to meet. Her only safety precaution was to leave a sealed envelope on her desk, with all the information she knew about Logan, just in case.

It was Friday. No one expected her back at school until Sunday night. If Beth disappeared, her friends would not find the envelope until a few days later.

“I was a rational, levelheaded kid,” Beth told me. “But the desire for it was more important than not getting murdered.”

To respect Beth’s privacy, I’ll leave out the rest of her story. Rest assured: no one had to open that sealed envelope. Beth went on to graduate school, became a top professional in her field, and eventually found healthy, safe, loving ways to explore her fetish with wonderful partners. In the end, things worked out. But the point is that when a kink is lifelong, innate, and unchosen — as it is for people like me and Beth, and many others — it mixes with stigma and “privacy” into danger.

We take risks because the isolation and emptiness of the alternative is worse.

I was lucky. I met John. He and I made mistakes — big ones, in some cases — but I stayed, for the most part, safe. Stories like Beth’s are common, but I was the safe one.

Think about that: I dropped out of high school, moved to a foreign country, and let a drug dealer whip me bloody before I had even learned about safe words — and compared to dozens of other stories I’ve heard, mine was the “safe” path.

Without sexual privacy, discretion suffers. Without sexual transparency, people suffer.

My “privacy,” unlike Edwin’s, was, for the most part, not the product of institutionalized government oppression. (That being said, fetishists can and do lose jobs, security clearances, or child custody battles because of our consensual orientations; in some places, consensual kink is explicitly illegal.) The biggest thing choking me was me. I’d been force-fed stigma for so long, I had lost the gag reflex to resist. If the men and women of Pink Dot, a grassroots Singaporean movement for LGBT equality, could challenge their government, I had no excuse to cower behind my own shame.

The biggest thing choking me was me. I’d been force-fed stigma for so long, I had lost the gag reflex to resist.

Nikolai and I said good night and I walked home. I lived on the forty-fourth floor of a skyscraper on Cantonment Road, in an apartment I shared with three flatmates. One entire wall of my bedroom was a huge window. I sat on my bed and remembered the expression on Edwin’s face. The city skyline sparkled before me.

I thought I’d been so honest with David, but that wasn’t true. I had doubled myself up so many times that I was more tightly folded than any origami crane. It would be impossible for anyone to read what had been written on my page. I was so repressed I couldn’t breathe.

The façade of honesty is more dangerous than a lie. I was that equivocator. I was the fiend who lies like truth. The two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art both had my face.

The Hiddleston Man: On the Competing Masculinities of ‘High-Rise’

Posted on June 17, 2016January 16, 2024 by 007595

He was constantly aware of the immense weight of concrete stacked above him, and the sense that his body was the focus of the lines of force running through the building, almost as if Anthony Royal had deliberately designed his body to be held within their grip.— J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

J.G. Ballard’s vertical-living dystopia, High-Rise is oppressively preoccupied with the body as both flesh and metaphor. Early on in the novel, which is narrated by three different male voices (that of the building’s architect, Anthony Royal; new tenant, Dr. Richard Laing; and lower-floor resident, Richard Wilder), we are given perhaps the most explicit acknowledgement of Ballard’s urban planning metaphor. Having been lured into a social gathering at one of his new neighbor’s apartments, Dr. Laing is listening intently to a description of the building “as some kind of huge animate presence.” “There was something in this feeling,” Laing informs us: “the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridor were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurons of the brain.”

The narrative of High-Rise centers on the very disintegration of this imagined body politic. Neurons falter, arteries begin to clot, and eventually all that’s left is a thirst for destruction. The claustrophobic hierarchical structure of the building is transformed into an anarchic environment, its inhabitants giving in to their worst impulses — a Lord of the Flies of the skyscraper era. That’s where Ballard opens, exposing us, with his devilishly dark comedic wit, to the rotting body of the eponymous community at the novel’s center: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog,” the book begins, “Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

A stylish (every)man, out of time and place amidst a ravaged civilization.

Borrowing this striking and disconcerting imagery for his filmic adaptation of High-Rise, director Ben Wheatley opens with Dr. Laing (Tom Hiddleston) — wearing impeccably well-fitted slacks with his shirtsleeves rolled up — petting and then roasting a German Shepherd. I’m sure I was supposed to be taken aback by the barbarity of the situation, and yet I was mostly engrossed by Hiddleston’s wardrobe. Even after he’s butchered the dog (off-camera) the blood-splattered shirt remains effortlessly elegant, less a sign of his downward spiral than a suggestion that he remains in control. I couldn’t help but gawk at the actor’s lithe build, accentuated by this curious if telling costume choice — a stylish (every)man, out of time and place amidst a ravaged civilization.

Not even ten minutes later, Wheatley gives us a scene in which Laing luxuriously sunbathes in the nude on this very same balcony. We’ve been sent back in time, in order to account for the “unusual events” that had taken place three months prior. Blissfully unaware of his surroundings (as in the novel, the doctor enjoys the privacy the high-rise affords him, an imagined solitary confinement within an expansive and faceless community), Laing is startled awake by a crash. A bottle, it turns out, has been dropped from even higher above. We get what is likely to be the most GIF-ed moment from the entire film: a startled Laing hurriedly getting up, forcing the actor to hide his privates under the book that had been resting on his crotch. It’s a brief moment, underscoring Dr. Laing’s lack of privacy, but it also gives us one of the last glimpses of that clean-shaven compact body. Never again will Laing offer himself up to such scrutiny.

As the film continues, Hiddleston’s body will become inviolate, impenetrable, his suit and tie an armor that will keep him from falling into the type of lunacy that presumably afflicts his neighbors. Tellingly, his dual sex scenes — with two different neighbors who seem to find his Byronic posturing alluring, despite the chaos — show even less of the doctor than the brief moment on the balcony, in direct contrast to Richard Wilder (Luke Evans). In the book, Ballard describes Wilder as the strongest man in the building, with a “barrel-like chest” which he shows off “with some pride.” Laing, we’re told, “noticed that he was continually touching himself, for ever inspecting the hair on his massive calves, smelling the back of his scarred hands, as if he had just discovered his own body.” And while Wheatley’s film doesn’t quite push Wilder far enough (in the novel he eventually lives up to his name, shedding all his clothes, branding himself with makeshift tribal markings, devolving into an incomprehensible language) we are nevertheless encouraged to focus on his coarse and imposing body.

Luke Evans as Richard Wilder in ‘High-Rise’ (2015)

While Laing always looks like he’s just stepped off a GQ spread, Wilder is earthy and unequivocally tied to the film’s period. His bushy and messy sideburns match his unruly hair, while his denim shirt barely conceals the hirsute body that is always threatening to burst out, hinting at the simmering violent streak which eventually undoes him. Since Wheatley cuts back on the role of the architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons, playing with his signature imperiousness a character emasculated by the very community of women he’s inadvertently fostered), the film must instead rely on Wilder and Laing to give us two competing visions of contemporary masculinity.

Wheatley’s adaptation dismantles the sexist humanist language at work in the author’s rhetoric.

Considering that High-Rise eventually enshrines Laing — or rather, finds in his clean and muted aesthetic the only male role model worth letting survive — we might read it as a repudiation of Wilder’s masculine excess (“Our lives are too messy, Richard!” his wife complains), one which drives him towards senseless and barbaric violence (“He’s raping people he’s not supposed to and, to top it all off, he shat in Mercer’s attaché case,” a character yells). Laing’s charming swagger, by comparison, embodied by Internet boyfriend Hiddleston, emerges as a welcome palliative, though it also feels like an aspirational twisting of Ballard’s character.

The Laing of the book was openly ruthless in his self-survival, happy to live in incest in order to secure his sister’s apartment, a tenant in his building conspicuously absent from the film. Hiddleston’s Laing, on the other hand, is a dispassionate vision of tame masculinity. “You’re an excellent specimen,” he is told by Charlotte (Sienna Miller) when she discovers him sunbathing. The women of the high-rise eventually if implicitly anoint him de facto leader of their broken community, a new surrogate father figure for young Toby (Louis Suc), Charlotte’s son, who occupies the very last frame of the film. Looking like a curious young version of Laing — with the suit and tie to match — nerd Toby is tipped as the imagined future in Wheatley’s film world.

If the appeal of the high-rise in Ballard’s novel lay in the fact that it “was an environment built not for man, but for man’s absence,” Wheatley’s adaptation dismantles the sexist humanist language at work in the author’s rhetoric. We are left instead with a masculine body inviolate, epitomized by a hapless but cunning child and a roguish gentleman who exude non-threatening postures of masculinity, and who remain devoted and dependent on the women around them.

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: My Guilt

Posted on June 17, 2016January 16, 2024 by 007595

★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)

I always try to keep a pleasant disposition, even in the face of people talking during a movie, but the truth is, I have a lot of guilt that can get me down.

There’s the guilt I feel for the time as a child that I tore off the wings of a monarch and glued them to my back to try and fly. That poor butterfly was still alive while I jumped around like an idiot. Or the time I told my nephew that Santa Claus was real, and then when my nephew learned the truth, he gave me the dirtiest look and didn’t speak to me for 12 years. One of the things I feel most guilty about is how I handled my wife’s funeral.

The point is I’m holding onto over 80 years of compounded guilt. Each year of my life brings more and more guilt. I’ve tried to balance it out by doing good things just for the sake of it. Like when I see a person pulled over with a flat tire, I will always stop and tell them how to fix it, even if they say they don’t need my help. People can be prideful and stubborn about accepting help.

Another way I try to alleviate my guilt is to compare my misdeeds to the misdeeds of others. An old colleague of mine recently tried to end her life by driving herself and her entire family into a pond. Everyone survived but she must live with the guilt of ruining the car and getting everyone soaking wet. She can never undo that.

Sometimes at night my guilt will wake me up in a cold sweat. That’s why I keep a towel next to my bed, to wipe the guilt away. If I can’t quickly locate the towel in the dark I grow panicked and start screaming, “Get this guilt off of me! Get it off!”

There’s one thing I feel very guilty for that I’ve never told anyone about, but I think it’s time I got it off my chest. Last year I adopted an orphan through a Russian website, and after transferring the $75,000 fee via something called Bitcoin, they put him on a plane to America. But I chickened out and never went to pick him up. I have no idea what happened to him. He might still be waiting for me. If you see a lonely Russian child standing at the airport with a pile of luggage, please take him home. He’s already been paid for.

Admitting my mistake will likely cause this article to go viral and make me the ire of people around the world. I’ll be known as the guy who abandons orphans. I’m willing to accept that. What I did was wrong, but at my age, adopting someone is irresponsible. I could die tomorrow and then he’d be an orphan all over again and he might have to dispose of my body. My guilt in the afterlife would have been too much to bear.

BEST FEATURE: All the guilt-sweat means my body gets rid of a lot of toxins.
WORST FEATURE: The slow, gnawing away of my insides.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a can of tuna.

Finding a Brazilian Stranger in a Quiet Creature on the Corner

Posted on June 17, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

Approaching a translated book is like drawing near a tamed animal. There is the nature of the beast at its core — the original language, the other, the scary place that one doesn’t understand the connotations and nuances of — and the facade that the beast wears of a domesticated animal, trained by the translator into the language one knows well, is familiar with, feels safe in. But tamed animals are at their most beautiful and vivid in the moments of wildness, where their nature takes over and one is swept away — maybe into danger, maybe merely into adventure, certainly into something mysterious.

[T]he reader is capable of more than even she thinks.

The best translators, I find, are the ones who allow for the rhythm of that wildness to remain rippling below the surface for the reader to find at unexpected moments. This means also allowed for confusion, for occasional misunderstanding, for the possibility of fear, but there is something trusting in that act, in believing that the reader is capable of more than even she thinks. Adam Morris, translating the words of Joao Gilberto Noll in Quiet Creature on the Corner is one of these fine translators. And perhaps because of this, I cannot quite wrap my head around the book itself.

It’s important to put the book into context. Noll is a well regarded Brazilian writer whose work has only selectively been translated into English, and he has been a visiting scholar at various international universities. This book came out originally in 1991, a year after I was born, when Brazil was going through the turmoil of transitioning to a democracy after many years of military dictatorship with nominal and symbolic yet utterly meaningless elections. This background is crucial to understanding — rather, to attempting to understand — the novel.

On its face, the plot is quite simple. An unnamed narrator, a poet, lives with his mother in a squat in Porto Alegre. One night, for unknowable reasons, he rapes a girl. The next day, his mother leaves to go live with her sister in another city. The rape victim apparently reports the crime and the narrator spends a night in prison. He then hallucinates or dreams up a whole life in which he and the girl he raped, Mariana, live harmoniously together on a farm and have a child. He wakes up in a clinic that has given him books and paper to write on. Why he is in this clinic, what kind of clinic it is, is a mystery that remains unsolved. Soon, however, he’s whisked away by a man named Kurt to a mansion where he is to spend his days in the company of Kurt himself, Kurt’s wife Gerda, another man, Otavio, and a servant, Amalia. He embarks on an affair with the latter, watches Gerda die beneath him during intercourse (and ejaculates into her dead body), and has a one night stand with a black woman, an apparent longtime fantasy of his, before writing his last poem ever and quite possibly living in Kurt’s manor forever.

But who among us hasn’t dreamed of having every want and need fulfilled — of having endless space and time in which to write?

But the plot, strange and surreal and inexplicable, almost seems secondary to the nature of the book. It reminded my of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, in that the narrator has a detachment from the world around him and seems to lack empathy or even much interest in others. Seeing the world through his lens is bleakly egotistical, yet there’s something forbidden and alluring in that viewpoint, one that is rare to adopt in real lives. But who among us hasn’t dreamed of having every want and need fulfilled — of having endless space and time in which to write — where one’s faintest and most urgent bodily needs are fulfilled without any need to worry about the consequences to others? Maybe in a world full of turmoil, when the social norms are crumbling in the face of a hope that is too terrifying to truly grasp, self serving is the only way to be.

As in The Stranger, perhaps the narrator isn’t one hundred percent heartless, for he takes pains to write to his mother from the manor and to tell her that he won’t be in touch for a long time but that she shouldn’t worry. The narrator confesses to being a bad liar in person, but, he says, “since I was writing someone a lie that I had the feeling they were ready to believe, I got swept up in euphoria, as if I were close, very close, to a state that would represent for me, just maybe, a kind of emancipation.” Having gotten away with rape and being given the space and time to write, it seems that indeed the narrator achieves this freedom.

Is he maybe speaking of a larger freedom?

Is he maybe speaking of a larger freedom? Is the transition to democracy meant to be paralleled in the narrator? I feel unequipped to answer this question and fear that I may be reading too deeply into this. But this is where the translation can only do what it does — give me language with which to infer, to assume, rather than the cultural knowledge to assert those assumptions with confidence.

Reading Books Makes You Hotter (At Least According to a Dating App)

Posted on June 16, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

The UK-based student-matching app MyBae has declared with (relative) confidence: “The more you read, the more attractive you are to potential partners.” The app — which has sought to rid itself of the stranger danger risks of dating apps like Tinder — matches young people based on a cross section of personality traits and interests. These factors take the shape of hashtags, allowing the app to pool and track data. Essentially, MyBae has analyzed the aggregated tags and matches to reveal something potentially intriguing: 21% of all matches on the app had the tag #reading in common. Even more, 11% of the app’s users try to match with someone whose tags imply avid reading. Comparatively, music is the second highest interest with 7%.

Beyond the broad hashtag #reading, “Romance” was shockingly (or not?) the most matched book tag. It is hard to believe, however, that MyBae users weren’t flocking toward #thevictoriannovel. It doesn’t get much sexier than the moors and metaphysical longings of a Jane Eyre or the delirium and omnipresent decay of something like Confessions of an English Opium Eater, now does it? Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but at the very least #modernist(fore)wordplay should have made a top-three tags appearance.

Regardless, it is reassuring to have hard, statistical proof (from one British student-matching app) that the many hours spent reading on couches, beds, beaches and the like have done wonders for my “attractive[ness] to potential partners” and not what I thought they’d done, which was transform me into a lonely vampire (shout-out Bram Stoker).

15 Thought-Provoking Quotes from Literature: An Infographic

Posted on June 16, 2016March 22, 2019 by 007595

The best quotations are succinct nuggets of wisdom or humor; they stick in our brains and grace the front of our coffee mugs. From Alice in Wonderland to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Readers.com has made an infographic with some of the most memorable lines from literature. What quote would you add?

Martin Seay’s The Mirror Thief Is about Mirrors and Cities and Cities in Mirrors

Posted on June 16, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

In the eighth volume of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, World’s End, there’s a brief story of a man who becomes trapped in the dreams of a city. World’s End features many of these brief tales: the book takes Chaucer’s device of having characters trapped in an inn, telling stories to one another to pass the time. The teller of this tale ends it by describing his meeting with Robert, the man who escaped the city’s dreams:

‘If the city was dreaming,’ he told me, ‘then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping, stretched out unconscious around their rivers and estuaries, like cats in the moonlight. Sleeping cities are tame and harmless things.’

‘What I fear,’ he said, ‘is that one day the cities will waken. That one day the cities will rise.’

Martin Seay’s debut novel The Mirror Thief takes the city as its subject — the city as it exists on the ground and in the characters’ minds and memories; the city as it is reflected in other cities. The narrative is split among three disparate locations and time frames: Las Vegas in 2003, in the lead-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq; Venice Beach, California in 1958, home to an enclave of Beat poets; and Venice itself, both at a distinct historical moment — the late 16th century, a time when the city held a monopoly on the mirror-making industry — and as it is reflected in the other two cities’ imitations. Seay’s characters’ movements echo one another as they move through these cities; their actions are dictated as much by the cities’ own logic as by their own will.

Seay’s characters’ movements echo one another as they move through these cities; their actions are dictated as much by the cities’ own logic as by their own will.

There are maybe two literary types best-suited to capturing the feel of a city in fiction: the flâneur and the private eye. Recent examples of the former include the narrators of Teju Cole’s Open City and Geoff Dyer’s Geoff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. The flâneur is by definition aimless; he experiences the city in passing and attempts to make sense of his impressions. With the private eye it’s the opposite: there’s something he’s looking for, and in his travels through the city he is intent on forcing it to yield that thing. What the types have in common is that, despite their efforts, their impressions of the city often fail to coalesce into a coherent image; often the city conspires to hide itself from view.

Seay’s characters are firmly in the private eye mold. The book begins with Curtis, a retired MP who’s been sent to Las Vegas on a dubious assignment. Damon, an old war buddy who now works at a casino in Atlantic City, has enlisted Curtis’s help in tracking down Stanley, a friend of Curtis’s father. Stanley owes money to Damon’s casino, or so Damon has told Curtis. Curtis is skeptical, but willing to go along — there’s a vague promise of a job at the casino in AC if he succeeds out in Vegas.

Canvassing the gambling floor of the Venetian Hotel; cruising the strip on the lookout for Stanley; handing out his phone number to dealers and bartenders; talking jazz with an Arab cabbie — Curtis makes for a hapless detective. It becomes clearer and clearer that Damon is using him, that he’s putting himself in danger by continuing to be involved, but Curtis seems to grow more comfortable as he realizes he’s losing control. Summoned to a meeting with a character named Argos, he’s relieved: “Curtis has nothing to gain by meeting with him. This thought is like a weight coming off, a light from a familiar doorway: nothing to gain.” Curtis is like a poker player who knows he doesn’t have the cards to win but stays in the hand anyway — he knows he’ll lose his chips, but it’s the only way to see what the other guy’s holding.

Midway through the Vegas chapters, Curtis runs across a book of poems that belonged to Stanley called The Mirror Thief. This sends the novel to Venice Beach, 1958. A teenage Stanley has come to town to track down the book’s author, Adrian Welles — he’s convinced there are secrets hidden in the book’s esoteric language, and he wants Welles’s help in unlocking them. The Venice Beach chapters have a period-piece vibe. The boardwalk is clogged with greasers and sailors on dates. The dialogue shifts between Stanley’s Philip Marlowe-as-juvenile-delinquent routine and the Beat crowd’s hepcat bullshit. But again and again a striking description will emerge from all the pastiche: “A pair of panhead Harleys is parked outside a liquor store on Breeze Avenue, their chrome-plated pipes and chassis so polished that they’re visible only by the deformed images they return of the night around them.”

A parody summoning equal parts Pound and Eliot

Welles’s book is its own pastiche in turn. A parody summoning equal parts Pound and Eliot, it’s meant to tell a fractured narrative of a certain Crivano, alchemist and magician, who intrigues against Venice’s ruling Council of Ten to steal the mirror-making secrets the city’s elders guard so closely. Mirroring Welles’s book, the third of the novel’s overlapping narratives centers on Crivano’s mission. Having begun with reflections of Venice — first in Vegas’s Venetian Hotel, then in Venice Beach — we now move to Venice itself, but even then the city proves elusive, as evidenced by Crivano’s impressions upon returning after a long absence:

The shapes and textures of this place have been so vivid to him during the twenty-odd years he’s been away that he tends to forget how few days he and the Lark actually spent here. His recollections have served as a kind of beacon in times of confusion and difficulty, a means of tracking his passage through the world. But now that he’s come back, he’s surprised to discover how much his mind altered during his absence: how much it augmented or elided or rearranged to suit the dictates of his imagination. He feels himself moving not through the city that has haunted him for so long, but through a city that is itself haunted by that city.

Venice’s true identity is as hard to pin down as Crivano’s, and in the Venice chapters comes the fullest elaboration of the book’s central theme: the mirror and what it reflects, true knowledge duplicated infinitely, lost in a never-ending mise-en-abyme.

Crivano’s conspiracy compels him throughout the city and brings him into contact with no end of richly invented characters: the handsome Portuguese converso alchemist Tristão de Nis; Narkis the circumspect Turk; the mirror-maker Verzelin, gone frothing mad from exposure to silver in the workshop. He listens to a fraud scholar who calls himself the Nolan discourse on the subject of “the Mirror”; duels in the street with a phantom wearing a plaguedoctor’s beaked mask. The book reaches its climax with the Council’s spies closing in on Crivano, and in fleeing them he is, as ever, subject to the city’s logic: “As usual the streets conspire to steer him elsewhere.”

For Seay’s characters, each on his own ill-fated quest, everything threatens to dissolve into illusion.

For Seay’s characters, each on his own ill-fated quest, everything threatens to dissolve into illusion. One potential way out is to embrace the mirror’s infinite doubling action, to embrace the thing simulated and forget the original. Curtis speaks with a casino boss who praises Las Vegas, temple of simulacra, describes its seductive appeal. “People call Las Vegas an oasis in the desert. No! It is the fucking desert. That’s the key to the whole trick . . . read up on your history, kid. You wanna make something disappear? You wanna make it invisible? Haul it out here. The desert is the national memory hole.” He sums it up: “Las Vegas is a machine for forgetting.”

And yet the characters’ heroism lies in their refusal to be satisfied with illusion — their determination to get behind the mirror. In this refusal lies the hope that the city, if only just the idea of it, endures. The struggle continues between illusion and forgetting on the one hand, knowledge on the other. Acting as Seay’s mouthpiece, Saad, Curtis’s jazz-loving cabbie, describes this struggle: “In this country, this is always possible,” he says, speaking of the Mormons’ flight to Utah, but continuing to touch on the novel’s central idea:

Enough! we say. We will go to the desert! We will make our own city. For ourselves, for our children. It will be a holy place, and just. We will know ourselves and our God by the shape it takes. So we build it. And people come, and more people. And then one day it is strange to us. No longer what we wanted. It has become, perhaps, the very thing we fled. So we go back to the desert, and we weep and pray that God or Fortune will flood the land, will bring the sea down upon the armies of Pharaoh, will erase our mistakes from the earth.

As strong as this desire for oblivion is, it can’t win out. “But though the waters may rise, nothing is ever erased, or ever can be. The city is everywhere.”

Anna Noyes on Sex, Guilt and Summer People

Posted on June 16, 2016August 21, 2024 by 007595

It would be easy to call Anna Noyes’ debut collection, Goodnight, Beautiful Women (Grove Press, 2016) a “quiet” book. It has all the markings of this designation: realist stories with precise, luminous prose, domestic settings that cultivate epiphanies, and a cast of characters coming of age and covering — or uncovering — the truth.

But Noyes’ book is anything but quiet. Within these pages, love is cut with many poisons — paranoia, indifference, circumstance, violence — and the New England settings seethe with suffering and shame. Loosely connected, the stories create a web the reader walks into without realizing it: A woman carries memories of a girlhood love into her brutal marriage; a college student’s relationship with her boyfriend and his mother changes dramatically during a summer vacation; a woman meets someone who might be her mother on a bus to Boston; a teenager’s love affair with an older man comes between her and her young sister. Below the tranquil surface, these beautiful women — and the beautiful girls they used to be — are screaming at the top of their lungs.

I spoke to Anna about sex, guilt, and summer people in June 2016.

Machado: Guilt, and its suppression, is a prominent theme in these stories. Given how you center women and girls in this collection, do you feel like the production, sublimation, and obligation of guilt is gendered? Why does that emotion in particular capture your narrative attention?

Noyes: I find myself writing again and again about latencies rising to the surface — emerging desire, mental illness, sexuality, physical illness, subtle discomforts or sadness. Latencies that have the potential to threaten the connection between my characters and those who hold them dear. When meeting a character, I’m curious what it is they guard closely, what qualities might be submerged, what is unspeakable or unthinkable, how this might be brought into the light.

One of my favorite ways to tell a story, with intimacy and urgency, is when narration can serve as a kind of confessional (between the narrator and the reader, or another character, or God, or their own conscience). Shortly after reading “A Father’s Story” by Andres Dubus — a heartbreaking, tense confessional — I went on to write “Drawing Blood” and “Treelaw.” Those stories draw momentum from a similar attempt at unburdening through storytelling. “Werewolf,” written earlier, operates this way too. That story was sparked after I assigned my undergraduate students Gordon Lish’s prompt to write your worst secret, the one that “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” (I learned of this prompt through a great interview in The Paris Review with Amy Hempel, whose “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” was also born from this exercise). I made myself do this assignment alongside my students — not to explicitly expose my deepest secret to the world (“Werewolf” is not autobiographical), but to speak aloud something that felt unspeakable.

So, I am preoccupied with the secrets, and shame, and guilt of all my characters, regardless of their gender. The stories in the collection center on girls and women, but in my larger body of work my protagonists are sometimes male, and still I work to dredge up their shame, to explore and to probe it. This ups the stakes, and the stakes ultimately always fall, for me, somewhere along the lines of whether the world will continue to meet the characters (or whether they’ll be able to meet themselves) with love and tenderness at the story’s end, or in the story’s unwritten future. Or will they, in some way, become exiled.

I think women’s sexuality and shame come hand-in-hand in this culture.

That said, I do think that women and girls are hemmed in by a rigid set of expectations about what kind of behavior and emotion is acceptable, what roles we’re meant to fulfill, what it is to be a good wife, daughter, mother. I think we are often taught to apologize, and to nurture and tend to others, and to carry the weight of those perceived failures to tend and accommodate. Personally, it is still hard for me to shake off a mantle of shame that absolutely feels gendered: bodily shame, shame about the validity of my mind, a deep desire to remain “good.” I think women’s sexuality and shame come hand-in-hand in this culture. Girlhood sexuality, even more so. And narratives that really lay bare certain emotions in girls and women — lust, anger, jealousy, destruction — seem to me harder to come by. When we come by them, I’ve witnessed their larger capacity to shock the reader, to seem extraordinarily raw or explicit or dark, to be interpreted as extremes as opposed to nuanced examples of the human experience, even though we frequently encounter similar narratives propelled by men.

This Is Who She Was

Machado: There is, rightly, ongoing pushback against the media’s use of the word “sex” when “rape” is the more accurate term — a desire to draw clear lines between criminal acts and consensual sexual activity. But many of your stories deal with the uncomfortable, liminal area between sex, budding sexuality, and sexual violence. (For example, one character describes what starts as brutality at the hands of her husband thus: “And I did need him, as though his body working into mine all night and every night after that for forty years performed some secret alchemy that made me crave him — he who should have been sickening, he whom I wanted to repulse me.”) What draws you to this difficult, dangerous space?

Noyes: The current conversations about how the media talks about rape, and about consent, are vitally important. In writing about women’s bodies and sexualities, a range of experiences made their way onto the page. Many of these experiences were culled (indirectly) from life. It seems to me that in the course of women’s lifetimes, and in the course of growing into adult sexual beings, instances of trespass are common — large or small, violent or subtle. I have hope that our culture can become a culture of consent; that obtaining and giving consent will be an integral part of sexual education and practice. This is not the culture we live in now, or the culture of our past, and I think the stories reflect that.

In my fiction, my allegiance is to an attentiveness to the detail that is unfolding and an attempt to remain alert to the embodied experience of my characters. I try to keep my gaze narrowed to the particulate, even as I’m approaching topics that exist within a political or moral context, a context I may have strong opinions about. I try to inhabit the bodies of my characters, to feel my way through their experiences intuitively, and to allow room for a range of experiences and nuanced feelings to arise. I want to give my characters room to react in the ways I might expect, but also in ways that are surprising, or fraught, dangerous, self-destructive, if those responses also seem in some way true. Especially in a first person narration, I try to allow the narrative to articulate only what the characters themselves might articulate — keeping in mind their specific contexts, their denials or delusions, the things about themselves they may not be willing to address, or may not know how to address. There is a certain amount of elision in the stories. A character like the narrator in “Treelaw” may not know why she does what she does, or be able or ready to put it to words, but I think the larger story provides reasons for her behavior that the reader can glean, even if she relays her actions as though they’re arbitrary.

I’ve written and re-written the story you quoted from, “Drawing Blood,” in a number of different ways over the years. In its earliest form, it was narrated by the current-narrator’s granddaughter, and began, “My grandmother was raped on her wedding night.” I think that’s how a young woman, observing the events from the outside, observing the story in today’s context, might begin that story. I’ve also written a version of “Drawing Blood” where, after a year of ongoing brutality, the narrator Mary puts her new baby in the pram and tucks as many belongings as she can fit in around the baby and attempts an escape. In the final draft, the one that is in the collection, the moment when she confesses her need for her husband came as a surprise to me. Reflecting on that story, I can intellectualize in defense of this dangerous space, and say, well, she might be operating from a place of self-punishment, or self-destruction, or paying penance, or reenacting the brutality her husband inflicted upon her lover Eva, for which she feels implicit; or perhaps too her body has felt pleasure in the course of this 40 year marriage, in the ways it is designed to feel pleasure, but from a source she finds abhorrent, and that is a heavy, shameful, dark burden she carries; or perhaps her course is shaped by her historical and cultural context, and an alternative path wasn’t easy for her to envision. I could continue in this vein.

I resist, as a reader, those stories that seem to wink at the reader over the shoulder of their narrators…

But I don’t necessarily think it is my job, as the writer, to clarify behavior on behalf of the characters, or to carefully parse why they do what they do. I try to keep this part of my brain very quiet, very dumb, as I am writing. I resist, as a reader, those stories that seem to wink at the reader over the shoulder of their narrators, saying “they’re telling it to you like this, but we both know it’s really like this.” In those moments when the writing feels close to dictation, when I find myself pulled toward uncomfortable terrain, to reasoning and behavior and deeply recessed darkness that is somewhat murky, and mysterious, even to me, I try not to say, “Well no, I can’t have her feeling that, I can’t let her say that.”

Machado: The settings of your stories — small, coastal New England towns — are vivid and powerful, practically additional characters in their own right. You were raised in Downeast Maine. How has your perception of this region shifted throughout your life? (Or, has it?) How has it affected your fiction, beyond setting your stories there?

Noyes: I grew up on a tiny peninsula, with 250 year round residents, and no stores or stoplights; the only businesses are a post office, a lobster pound, and a dentist, and we drive 30 minutes to go grocery shopping. During winters you can walk down the middle of the street, never seeing another person or a passing car. None of this — not the startling beauty of my town, which stuns me when I go back home now, or the slow, contemplative pace to the days — seemed particularly special to me, growing up.

Now, when I go back, I find the physical details of this place overwhelming: complete darkness at night, deep quiet that keeps me alert to those breaches of quiet in the woods, the astounding palate of rust-colored lichen on the rocks and pale green moss hanging from the pines. When I return, I feel especially awake to the details around me — a state of mind I try, and usually fail, to invoke in Brooklyn, which is where I live now. Distance from my hometown, and from the surrounding towns, has given them a nearly mythological resonance, and this feeling has amplified each time I return to these settings in my writing. The landscapes of my childhood are threaded throughout the collection — the old rock quarry drawn from the one I lived beside with my mom for a season in an airstream trailer; the dark, silhouetted islands; the fox’s scream, which sounds so much like a woman’s. I find the details of this region freighted with meaning, as I imagine most people feel about the landscapes they come from, and love, and perhaps especially those landscapes they have (temporarily, or permanently) left behind.

Also, it must be said that I spent a lot of time as a kid hanging out in the mini-mall parking lot, going to Wendy’s — truly a lot of time with malls and fast food (one review referred to a “motif” of chain restaurants in the book, and I felt caught in the act. Indeed, there’s both a Denny’s and a Ruby Tuesday’s in the collection, and places like these still comfort me, and feel inexorably linked to home.) I didn’t just spend my days wandering through an evocative landscape, reveling in it. I am equally drawn to a town like the fictional Treelaw — with its dogs tied up in the front yards, and the kids walking down the center of the street chewing stolen Nicorette gum and spitting — as I’m drawn to a town like the fictional Alma, with its stately summer homes. These two worlds exist side-by-side in Downeast Maine, and I have intimate knowledge of both. I’m probably more interested in a girl hiding under a broken trampoline in her front yard than a girl gazing out at the water from a beach. In my stories, picturesque places and trouble often intersect. Maine’s details, especially the details of the natural world, I find particularly ominous; the everyday assumes a kind of menace. I think this impulse has bled into my wider work — I don’t think I could write any story where the physical details weren’t also emotional vessels.

Also, though I grew up in Maine, I still find its romanticism so seductive. When I was 25, I moved back to Maine with my boyfriend after two years studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had an idealized vision of my life in Maine, a life that also included a hefty portion of romanticism about what it meant to be a good grown-up woman: buying a home, marriage, maybe, soon, children. I spent the year attempting to knit, roasting things. I’m a sucker for movies about Maine — the phony accents, the foul weather gear, the cheery banter. Sometimes, I pictured myself inside movie-set Maine, and felt weirdly soothed.

I was very unhappy, inside this lovely idea of a life.

I was very unhappy, inside this lovely idea of a life. I worked on my stories, which felt far away from being a book, without seeing myself in the narrators who fled their lives and people they loved. In my writing, I tried to complicate familiar narratives of Maine, of girlhood and womanhood; still I was trying desperately to make the familiar molds work for my own life, even when I felt miscast.

In the springtime, I left — the beautiful place, and the person who I loved. I was bereft to lose the life I had been building, but also, immediately relieved. It turns out, for me right now, a happy life is eating canned beans three nights in a row, living with my best friend in this big city, drifting; I had to break with a good romance, a good life, to restore my own power. For my characters, too, I hope some power, and strength, and momentum, however fraught, might be found in breaking away.

Machado: The transient presence of “summer people” — tourists who visit this region during the season, and leave when it’s over — feature throughout these stories. What interests you about these fixtures of New England life? How does their ephemerality (and the reliability of that ephemerality) contribute to this collection’s mood and setting?

Noyes: Though I was raised in Maine, my parents and grandparents were summer people. My grandparents were the first to winterize their summer homes; before that, my family summered in my town for many generations. As any true Mainer will tell you, this makes me an outsider. The grand homes that were once in my family have been sold off throughout the generations, and sit vacant through the winter. I’ve always felt like an outsider peering into that life, only a few generations removed from its opulence.

I’ve always felt like an outsider peering into that life, only a few generations removed from its opulence.

People who come to Maine for the summer, as tourists or because they have second homes here, have their own kind of intimate, sanctified connection with this state that is poignant and true, and that is something I respect. Many of these people are near and dear to me. But I also think this tourism and summering hinges on an idealized version of Maine that is sometimes superimposed over a complex reality. I am interested in who and what this idealized picture necessarily excludes; who feels protected by the safety and ease the summertime lifestyle assumes, and who does not. I am trying to depict what I know of this part of the world, which is so starkly lovely, and also so often beautified, seen as a “vacationland,” and a reprieve from real life, and to depict it with honesty, and care. There is darkness, and there is also tenderness, humor, strength.

Penguin’s Modern Poet Series Gets a Reboot for the 21st Century

Posted on June 15, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

When the Penguin Modern Poets series was launched in 1962, its goal was to introduce contemporary poetry to “the general reader.” Each anthology covered three poets, and a total of eighty-one writers from Allen Ginsburg to Kinglsey Amis were showcased in the series’s twenty-seven book run. The anthologies were popular; the tenth collection, The Mersey Sound, included the works of Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten, and Adrian Henri and went on to become one of the best selling poetry collections of all time.

The series, which ended in 1979 except for a brief 1990s revival, is relaunching in July under the direction of Penguin poetry editor Donald Futers. The first collection is titled If I’m Scared We Can’t Win and will feature the work of Anne Carson, Sophie Collins, and Emily Berry. The goal is to release a new anthology every three months and, unlike the original series that featured mostly American and British poets, the revived collections will include poets from a range of backgrounds.

Futers has the first twelve issues already planned. He says, “There’s a strong case for our finding ourselves right now in a golden age for poetry. Between creative writing programs, an abundance of new publications, the ever-growing popularity of spoken word and performance poetry — think of Kate Tempest, or Warsan Shire — and a new generation made unprecedentedly available to one other across national boundaries by the internet, exciting poetry capable of speaking deeply to, challenging, and exciting its readers is being written on a staggering scale.”