What I've Stolen, What I've Earned by Sherman Alexie

My review of "What I've Stolen, What I've Earned by Sherman Alexie" appeared at WORD RIOT (now defunct) February 2014.

What I've Stolen,

What I've Earned

by Sherman Alexie

Hanging Loose Press 2013 156 pages

ISBN: 978-1934909-32-4

As a break-out short story writer, then a break-out screenplay writer, then a novelist, and most recently a National Book Award-winning author of the YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, it's easy to forget that Sherman Alexie started out as, and remains, a poet, and a good one. Some of his poems have been chosen for the yearly anthology Best American Poetry, and I would argue that his success in other genres is because he is a poet, and brings to them his unique and imaginative language, that above all sounds new and fresh, and that contains his unique blend of humor, despair, exaggeration/hyperbole, such as that found in his latest book of poetry, What I've Stolen What I've Earned, from Hanging Loose Press.

Because his poetry has always been so accessible and new-sounding, I had always thought of him mainly working in free verse, forgetting that even in his first books he's at least playing with a kind of formalism, which he continues in this collection, with variations on his own invention, in what I call the prose poem sonnet, though which he simply calls sonnets. They are blocks of text in which each sentence is numbered, up to fourteen of course, though also of course he even breaks with his own rule on this when the story he's telling becomes more urgent and a numbered sentence can become a numbered section of multiple sentences, usually happening after the traditional 'turn' of a sonnet on the eight line. For example, the first part of “Sonnet, with Saxaphone”:

1. This poem doesn't contain a saxophone or any reference to music, played with or without the saxophone. 2. This poem, though written by a Native American, will not contain any reference to Native Americans or, more idiomatically speaking, Indian, or, speaking in slang, Skins. 3. This poem will not be funny. 4. This poem is very funny. 5. No, it's not....

He also sometimes breaks a poem/story into fourteen sections separated by line breaks, creating more of a collage, like in “Love Sonnet, Constructed by Wikipedia”:

1. Love is a universal construct related to affinity.

2. Affinity, etymologically, is the opposite of infinity.

3. Love and ego are incompatible....

What's interesting in any of his sonnet versions is how the effect ends up being a blend (or maybe the contemporary pop term mash-up is more appropriate?) of poetry with essay and/or fiction. In fact, many of the 'poems' in this collection could almost just as easily be labeled as flash fiction and/or 'mini-essay' pieces now appearing in some journals. And the question of whether they could be 'stories' (ie fiction) or 'essays' (ie 'true') is interesting. Poetry, unlike supposedly prose, has no fiction and non-fiction sub-categories. The difference here in Alexie's prose pieces seems to be whether the story that unfolds ends on something in reality (or real, therefore 'true'), or if he goes off into what could be called exaggeration though is really imaginative, like in “Sonnet, With Bird,” the best poem in the book, about the death of a friend:

….14. A gathering of quail is called a bevy. A gathering of Indians is called a tribe. When quails speak, they call it a song. When Indians sing, the air is heavy with grief. When quails grieve, they lie down next to their dead. When Indians die, the quail speaks.

Does that last sentence push what had been factually 'true' into fiction? Even though it is true? Is it factually true? How can you prove it's not? Does it depend on who wrote the line? Or who reads it? I don't know, but it's perfect.

In addition to form, another formalistic device Alexie works with in this collection is rhyme, along with a little rhythm. And he's pretty explicit about why in the 'poem' appearing midway in the collection, “Phone Calls From Ex-Lovers,” the longest piece in the book, which, again, if it were crammed into prose would 'pass' as an essay. Instead, it's mostly free verse in mostly three-line stanzas. And it mostly is indeed about when he was younger and an ex-lover called him, but Alexie uses that story as a starting point to talk about memory, and how or why we remember things. From there, the poem goes kind of way off track, speaking directly to the reader:

And yet, there is still something more

To say about this, and so I irritably

Reach for that thing, and I want you

To remember it, to encode it

In your primate DNA, and in order

For that to happen, my final message

Needs to rhyme. Yes, I'm sorry, but

Free verse isn't designed to be

Memorized. I mean, Jesus, if you want

Proof, just turn on the radio, tune

To a classic rock station, and sing

Along with every song you know.

Count those songs. Count the lyrics,

Count the number of choruses—rhymed,

Of course—that you have memorized

Without even trying. If you're a typical

American, you'll discover that you know

The lyrics to thousands of songs

And you know those songs so well

Because they have, say it, rhythm

And rhyme. Hell, memory itself

Works in rhythm and rhyme.

The poem then switches to prose:

To prove my point, I offer here a list of “The Top 100 Songs of 1984”....As you read this list, I guarantee that all of you, between the ages of 35 and 50, will have one specific memory associated with 93% of these songs.

And then he actually does just that. The 'poem' contains a list of 100 songs. Which, I sheepishly confess, I mostly all know, and could sing along with, just as Alexie says. As the 'poem' continues, and it switches back into free verse, he argues, again I guess, that free verse just isn't made to be memorized, nor is even this very poem, which, he claims, I guess seriously, that the poem (and not he?) “desperately strives to equal Springsteen, / Stevie Wonder, or Carole King,” and so, he returns, finally, (anti-climactically) back to the main story “Of Phone Calls From Ex-Lovers” and ends with a rhyming couplet, which I won't include here.

As a whole, the poem isn't successful, not compared to other poems in the book, but it reveals a lot about Alexie. And it's where I diverge from him. I feel his frustration that poetry isn't more well-received, and even his (disguised as his poem's) desire for recognition/fame. But I just can't take seriously his implication that Bruce Springsteen's song “Dancing In The Dark” has as much power as a good poem, and I say that as a poet and musician, a music lover, and a somewhat fan of Springsteen even. Because pop music tends to deal simplified versions of good ideas, at best, and cliches, at worse. And the rhyme almost always is more important than the ideas expressed. Not to mention that pop music has, well, music to back it up. A catchy cliché can get a lot of mileage off of a good beat. Alexie's experiment, rhyming, leaves him with just that: obvious sounding rhymes, which are all too obvious, for example, in the next poem in the book (and the worst), “Ode to Coffee”:

In the coffee shop, the dreadlocked white dude

Orders a complicated drink.

“Man, don't be rude

To that sacred liquid,” I think....

And so on. Can't be coincidence that Alexie put this rhyming poem right after his explanation of why he has chosen to experiment with rhyming poetry. If anything, the explanation/justification makes “Ode to Coffee” that much more obvious, therefore that much more worse. And it's not even funny? Even if some readers think so, poetry that relies on mere cleverness is a step down for Alexie, whose humor normally, to my mind, transcends to joy. I just don't like seeing him, seemingly hubristically, sacrificing his great sense of language for the kind of silly desire to have his poems memorized and somehow passed on to future generations.

Which makes me feel totally horrible, since most of the book is great, and Alexie remains one of my top five favorite contemporary writers. I said earlier that Alexie's poems 'could' be labeled flash fiction or creative non-fiction, but they do still feel like poems, though that may just be context (that is, they're in a book I bought in the poetry section) and Alexie's intention (that is, putting them in a book of poetry). Still, some of these pieces would fit fine in one of his short story collections. Though I say that and immediately think, well, these might stand out as being a little experimental since, however vivid and alive his short stories sound, in appearance look fairly standard.

All of which is an argument for how good a writer Alexie is, which makes me wonder why he went with Hanging Loose Press for this book, when I would think he could get a bigger poetry publisher. In an interview with Bill Moyers last year, Alexie stated that he likes to help support indie poetry presses by publishing with them, when, I assume, he could get a big publisher (of fiction) to put out his books through a poetry imprint. And that's fine and good, except I wish someone like Copper Canyon would pick him up, a company that would put a little bit more care into the design of its books. At first I thought What I've Stolen What I've Earned was an old early book of his that I had somehow missed, since it's design is so basic and bland. People do judge books by their covers, and this one doesn't do justice to the language inside. Plus I'm not sure Hanging Loose has the widest distribution range, though I could be wrong, and I only say that because I just want Alexie's poetry to be available to as many readers as possible. His is the type of poetry that appeals to hardcore poetry fans, but could also bridge over to folks that think they don't like poetry. I guarantee that anyone who has enjoyed his fiction would also like this book. Imagine if this book of poetry sold as much as The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Thus, Alexie's perhaps frustration. I feel it, though he's probably one of the better-selling poets in the country. Which, I know, isn't saying much. I too want him recognized more widely. Or, that is, he is widely recognized. His poetry should be too—and poetry in general should be. But if it is, it's not going to be playing by pop music's rules. Poetry is never going to 'popular' just by its nature: it's language, ideas, thinking, on the edge of Being, forming it. That Alexie does this in such accessible language makes him one of the best poets we have.

The Day of the Triffids by David Wyndham

This review-essay appeared in 2015 at Word Riot, which is now gone, alas.

I would be surprised if anyone reading this remembers The Day of the Triffids, or has even read it—it was out of print in American for many years. The copy I found in the late 70s was an old paperback already, in my parents' eclectic collection—probably my mother's, though maybe actually my father's, from back when he still read books and hadn't yet succumbed to the great god Television. The Day of the Triffids was the first 'adult' novel I ever read, which, I think, was what attracted me to it—certainly wasn't the Hardy Boys or Old Yeller, though, like a lot of science fiction, neither was it inaccessibly difficult for a ten or twelve-year-old—not one of my mom's eastern religion books, or The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe it's because you always remember your first, but in the deluge of sci-fi and fantasy books I read in the years after, I never quite forgot Day of the Triffids, and after reading a crop of recent dystopian novels, all now mostly classed at YA, like The Hunger Games, World War Z, Divergent, Feed, and others (there are a lot of dystopian YA novels nowadays), and having discussions about formative books with my friend Jen, I had to go back and see if 1) Day of the Triffids still held up, and 2) I could learn anything more about myself, and my younger self, from what I was reading back then.

The story begins with the main character and narrator, Bill, waking up in a deserted hospital, after being unconscious for a while, and learning that while he was out, most everyone in the world has gone blind, and that not only that, what everybody took for non-sentient genetically modified plants have pulled up their roots and begun to hunt. I know, I know, in these days of zombies and vampires, the idea of killer plants doesn't sound so killer, but if one is willing to suspend their disbelief about zombies, a killer plant dystopia is at least as plausible. I couldn't have told you then why Triffids imprinted itself on me—the immediate thrill was imagining what I would do if I were one of the lone survivors of the destruction of human civilization—which is still true with the current crop, but as anyone who has thought about science fiction (meaning, I guess, trying to justify it to myself) will tell you, those dystopian worlds are stand-ins (not quite metaphors) (maybe fables) for our own world. In fact, those worlds do not seem so different to us readers than our own world. I read Triffids maybe at age eleven or twelve, not entering a new world but no, feeling that the world had changed. With puberty, I felt like I was waking after being unconscious for a long time, into a mostly deserted world run by things I'd thought of as weird and harmless (adults, and humans in general) but who were in fact scary and dangerous. Also, the people like me, the left-over puberty survivors, were mostly blind and helpless and, if I wanted to survive, I very quickly needed to find others like me, who could see. Also, once I realized that I liked what was called 'science-fiction,' I had a place to go, that I belonged somewhere: in the science-fiction section of the bookstore. Once I started carrying science-fiction books around at school, I began to find the other survivors—kids, mostly boys (though girls, I sensed, weren't killer plants)(or mostly not—cue Newt from Aliens: “Mostly....”) who were reading similar books, and these texts gave us a 'secret language' that the triffids couldn't understand.

The Day of the Triffids was written by David Wyndham, real name John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (!), a British science fiction writer who's other works I've never heard of. He was apparently quite well-known in the 50s and 60s, and though he died in 1969, some of his posthumous writing has been published as recently as 2009. Still popular and read in England, his books went out of print here in the States, until recently, when Triffids and his other most popular novel, The Chrysalids, were re-issued, by The Modern Library, both under the label of a “20^th Century Rediscovery.”

What I didn't remember, and maybe just didn't consider back then, was how much the novel is less about the weird evil flesh-eating triffids, than about humans, and Wyndham's thoughts on how exactly humans in a post-disaster world would re-form and survive. Most dystopian books present one form, one way, that the author thinks humans will govern themselves, or, usually, be governed. Wyndham presents many, using the structure of the book, with Bill traveling around England to various groups of survivors, as a way to present different philosophies about the best way to survive: Some as anarachic/communal groups, some as smaller family-sized units, and some (the really bad guys) going back to a form of medieval feudalism, with sighted people ruling estates of blind serfs (who will be fed on ground up triffid gruel). What I like about the novel is that Wyndam's characters have some actual intelligent conversations about the pluses and minuses of each form of government, though, interestingly, the increasing number of triffids force Bill and his fellow survivors to opt for larger groups, with larger areas of protected land.

What the few sighted people do, or don't do, with the now blind rest of the population becomes the big question. Do they take the truly compassionate route, and try and help everyone? Seemingly impossible, and endangering everyone, especially, as if blindness and carnivore plants weren't bad enough, with some kind of sickness, which may or may not be typhoid, or the result of biological weapons, ravaging London and other larger cities. Or, cut their losses and regroup in smaller groups with other sighted people, knowing that the blind people left behind will suffer and die? Not easy decisions, and no decision any character makes in the novel is without some dialogue with another character about its feasibility and morality. Even the 'best' guys (there are no real good guys) that Bill and crew join up with are not without some disturbing new rules, and in any case, in any variation of post-disaster re-organization, the general lot of women seems to always end up as baby-makers, which is the one conversation Wyndham avoids, by having even the main female character, Josella, an independent and intelligent woman before the disaster, and a writer of a novel that seems to be the equivalent of Shades of Grey (ultimate male science-fiction nerd fantasy: to be trapped in a scary new world with a hot female porn writer), happy and willing, and even looking forward to, having babies.

Re-reading Triffids now, I'm just struck at how seminal it was: its influence shows in all kinds of books and movies now, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to Stephen King's The Stand, to José Saramago's Blindness. One of my favorite zombie movies, 28 Days Later (screenplay by Alex Garland, another brit, who wrote The Beach) begins with the same premise of (and I take as an homage to) Triffids: a man waking up in a hospital after an overnight disaster, to find himself one of the few survivors). In fact, I think the whole zombie genre premise (ie zombies spread over the world, small groups of humans survive) comes from Wyndham's novel: just substitute killer plants for zombies. Or apes, say, in Planet of the Apes. Apes and especially zombies seem to make for a better metaphor (for example, racism/slavery, capitalism, AIDS, the invasion of Iraq) though who knows, with the now almost common, though still scary, genetically modified foods, care of the Monsanto cabal, maybe the triffids' time is close at hand! Maybe not even as metaphor!

And what did I learn about my younger self? Well, obviously, the world was full of metaphorically helpless blind people, and metaphorically evil triffids, and I was on my own, surviving the disaster called 'growing up.' And some of my fellow survivors might not be the nicest people either. Nor did compassion for the blind seem to be enough. In fact, it might have been too much: That, to have compassion and try to relieve the suffering of all the metaphorically blind people in the world would make me triffid food. No, best to withdraw, with a few like-minded souls, if I could find them (and especially with a woman who writes porn) and live on an island, where we could survive, and (maybe) figure out how to rid the world of triffids, and repopulate it with our metaphorically non-blind children.

Nothing has changed. I still feel this way.

The Palace of Illusions by Kim Addonizio

This review originally appeared in 2015 at Word Riot, which is now gone, alas.
 

The Palace of Illusions

by Kim Addonizio

Soft Skull Press 2014

ISBN: 978-1-59376-542-2

Kim Addonizio's writing goes for the guts—punches of raw common american language, about raw common human relationships, that are also, at times, funny and sexy, with touches of all her street-level poet heroes, like Charles Bukowski, Frank O'Hara, Anne Waldman and (early Satan Says-era) Sharon Olds. I have up to this point mostly thought of Addonizio as a poet, though she has written some novels, and her first collection of short stories, in the box called pleasure, is as unapologetically in-your-face as, say, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, and I love it. It gives her room to work even more in the lower-class blue collar divey world that other underground writers like Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr. make, if not beautiful, then interesting and sympathetic, and Addonizio, like them, may be showing her (unconscious or not) street Buddhism by showing how beauty can be found anywhere, that the lotus grows in mud.

But now I've shifted how I think of her, as not just a poet, but a writer in general, like Bukowski, because because of her new collection of stories, The Palace of Illusions, out through Soft Skull Press. Some of the stories, like “The Other Woman” and “Blown,” are similar to those in in the box called pleasure—short, fast, and powerful, from the POVs of trashy young women involved with trashy men (some not-so young) the results of which we readers know are doomed, and that they're bad choices. Actually, even the protagonists seem to know that they're making bad choices, and yet seem powerless to choose otherwise, which is how you might determine whether you'll like Addonizio or not: Is that how Real Life feels to you? Kinda out of control, at least temporarily pleasurable, and full of suffering?

Importantly though: even as bad choices are made, none of the young women protagonists refuses to accept responsibility for their actions, which they could in some cases very easily do, like in “Intuition,” when an older married man is breaking up with fifteen-year-old Faith, she briefly thinks about what would happen if she just went public with their affair, and how she could destroy him:

“I sit there, turned away from him on the swing, holding the knife I my lap. I cold turn, before he gets up, and stab him in the heart, and then he really would be dead. I could get away with it. I could say, He touched me between my legs. He forced me. He took me to the Tip Top Motel, and he said he would hurt me if I ever told. Everyone knows what men to to girls; people would believe is was self-defense. No one would know the truth.” (183-4)

But, she doesn't, which is why I like her—or, well, at least sympathize with her—and other Addonizio characters. It's not so much about ethics—Faith, obviously, doesn't like the man anymore, and has lost respect—but 'owning' your actions, realizing the inevitability of effect, from a cause that she, less than he, put in action. Which might horrify some readers, or make them go tsk tsk, but whatever Addonizio's characters are, they're not victims, or they don't think of themselves that way, and her stories are not about being politically correct.

“Intuition” is my favorite story in the collection. It's got the gutsy darkness of earlier Addonizio stories, but it's longer, and more in depth. If earlier stories (and, again, some in this collection) are more similar to her poems—capturing a short moment in time—this story has time to build, and has great passages like this:

“The thing is, you keep hoping. With each boy, you think maybe it will happen: he'll look at you a certain way, he'll get you, and your search will be over. I've been searching since I was thirteen, with one boy after another.” (163).

Hard to remember maybe (though funny too) that that's a fifteen-year-old-girl speaking, and yet Addonizio's talent (and this goes for her poetry too) is that she can write something in plain american speech that sounds easy to articulate/write/say, but isn't, and yet captures how anyone, fifteen to fifty, really feels, even when they're fucked-up messes: they still capture very human situations and feelings.

Other stories in The Palace of Illusions are more along this tone and strategy. Some would say they're more mature, but that would imply Addonizio's shorter pieces aren't as good. They're just different. Still, she is experimenting with a more formal, controlled, style. What these stories remind me of is City of Boys, a collection of short stories by Beth Nugent, which I thought was one of the best books of the 90s, though Nugent dropped away after that, and it's out of print, so I'm not sure many readers will get that comparison. But Nugent was coming from Hemingway's darker short works, and Marguerite Duras, and Joyce Carol Oats, as is Addonizio.

She's also experimenting with different ages, both younger—with the poor girl from “Beautiful Lady Of The Snow,” who you just want to hug and take far away from her mother and life—and the nameless woman in “In The Time of the Byzantine Empire,” the middle-aged academic that proves making bad choices is not just the domain of young people. And there's an older character, Ruth, in “Cancer Poems,”dying of cancer and taking a community college poetry class in order to maybe write a book she can leave behind for her granddaughter.

Addonizio is also, in a few stories, experimenting with fairy tales, and one vampire. These interest me less, though I acknowledge that other readers might find them preferable to the punch-in-the-guts stories. And even whe Addonizio writes about seven dwarves, say, her narrator still talks/sounds 'street smart'. The vampire is a teenager in college. Or, she's half-vampire, her dad is full vampire. The details are less important than the effect, of an insecure young woman with low self esteem, who can still, with (dark) comedic effect talk about stalking people to drink their blood.

Addonizio apparently being Addonizio, none of the characters in The Palace of Illusions (with the exception of Ruth, the cancer non-survivor) is what we'd call likeable. Relatable, yes: we've all done things in our lives that we regret or are not proud of (ie, we're fuck-ups just like everyone else)(or we feel that way)(or I do—if you don't maybe this collection isn't for you and you can just renew your subscription to The New Yorker). So, sympathy, yes. Pity, definitely. Interesting, for sure. And these types of characters can be harder to stay involved with beyond a short story. The one Addonizio novel I've read, My Dreams Out In The Street, I found difficult, not because of the style but because of the two main characters, and the awful choices they make in their lower-class lives. They're interesting, yes, but following them for two hundred pages and continuing to feel any kind of sympathy is a hard ask, though it apparently has a cult following.

Addonizio also written two fairly popular and well-received 'how-to' books on the craft of poetry, Ordinary Genius, and A Poet's Companion, co-authored with poet Dorianne Laux (another street-ish poet, though more interested in the erotic than the rough) both of which include short essay-chapters on writing as a process and way of life, as well as exercise-prompts that could be used on one's own, or in poetry workshops. What I would love is to read some critical essays from her, in maybe the style of Tony Hoagland, just to see how she thinks about other poets and poetry, though the truth is I'd just love to read anything by her.

Actually what I'd really love to do is jam with her sometime, since she also plays blues harp (harmonica) in a band and at open mics, and this seems perfectly fitting—she's not pop (too shocking and rough-edged for the prudish mainstream) and she's not jazz  (though she has an improvisatory fun feels at times, her subject matter is too dark) and neither is she heady classical (no 'too many notes' texts here—stark versus ornamental). No, her writing is from the bars, from the blues that come from real human working class relationships—the sadness and sexiness and fucked-up-ed-ness of things never quite working out, as all relationships never really ever quite work out, even when they do (and they don't).

After reading the last installment Best American Short Stories, I feared that I was losing interest in short fiction, period. But Addonizio restores my faith and interest. Good edgy fiction is out there, with publishers like Soft Skull Press, we just may have to search a little harder. That said, I don't know why The Palace of Illusions wasn't picked up by a bigger publisher. For all that I love Addonizio's underground feel, that's me being like those music listeners who like their underground bands to stay underground, when really it feels like she's about to explode.

—John Yohe

www.johnyohe.com

The Palace of Illusions by Kim Addonizio—a review

My review of Kim Addonizio's The Palace of Illusions, now up at WORD RIOT.