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WORK TITLE: The Hermit
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1980
WEBSITE: http://www.lucy-ives.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/lucy-ives * https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/lucy-ives-the-hermit-new-book-poem/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1980, in New York, NY.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A.; University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A.; New York University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Triple Canopy, Brooklyn, NY, former editor; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, instructor.
AWARDS:Slope Book Prize, for Anamnesis; Iowa Arts fellowship; MacCracken fellowship.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including Artforum, Conjunctions, Bomb, Lapham’s Quarterly, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and to the New Yorker Online.
SIDELIGHTS
Lucy Ives is a writer and educator based in New York, New York. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Ph.D. from New York University. Ives is an instructor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Previously, she worked at the Brooklyn-based publishing company Triple Canopy. Ives has released collections of poems and prose, as well as novels.
Anamnesis and Orange Roses
Anamnesis: A Poem is Ives’s first book and the winner of a Slope Editions Book Prize. Some parts of the poem are written in second person, with the narrator commanding the reader to edit the work or create new work. Ives offers fragments of thoughts that are often not completed. Writing on the Colorado Review Web site, Joe Betz commented: “By not holding to one thought, Ives triggers many; we become the writer and the reader of multiple poems. Anamnesis is a new reminder of the fluidity of our roles and our memories. The reader’s experience is not passive, and the stylistic choice to expose poems and the writing of them for what they truly are—decisions and regrets and half-truths—is refreshing.” “This is an important book,” asserted a reviewer on the With Hidden Noise Web site.
In 2013 Ives released Orange Roses, a collection of poems and essays. In the first piece in the book, “The Poem,” the narrator discusses the acts of writing and reading. Other works in the book also comment on writing and poetry. Other topics include the passage of time, remembering one’s college years, and traveling in California. Holly Bilski, a contributor to the Colorado Review Web site, suggested: “Lucy Ives does not tell us how to find meaning in our lives, but she demonstrates its constant loss and rediscovery in her new poetry and essay collection, Orange Roses. Leaf through quickly, and it appears to be composed of interestingly disparate pieces that simply needed a home. It is anything but that.”
Nineties
Nineties: A Story with No Moral is a short novel set in the titular decade. The unnamed narrator lives in New York City and attends an upscale private school in the year 1994. She and her friends are focused on their appearances and spend much of their time looking at magazines. They try to keep their emotions below the surface, believing it is better not to care. Around the book’s halfway point, there is a long list of references from the nineties. The narrator and her friends take up smoking, go to a bar, shoplift, and have sex with boys. They are caught stealing, and one of the girls is forced to see a psychiatrist. In an interview with Nicholas Grider, a contributor to the Entropy Web site, Ives discussed the language the book’s narrator uses and tied it to the decade in which the novel is set. She stated: “This narrator is unable to perceive, intuit, or feel any kind of natural (or automatic) connection to the social world in which she exists. She also seems unable to react in any felt way to anything save language—here, largely brand names and other proper nouns—and this reaction is confined to noticing this language, organizing it in certain ways, ‘poring over’ it, obsessing.” Ives continued: “In this sense, the language the narrator has access to is structured more like an image than a sign. Words are objects of fascination rather than conveyors of meaning. This, to me, is a very nineties way of relating to the American language.” Ives added: “There was a feeling that one was not at home in the very words one spoke, partly I think because popular culture had become an engine for explaining the idea that all desirable forms of experience, even progressivism and ‘dropping out’ and so on, had to be purchased. And language was very often the engine of this engine.”
Jackie Clark, a reviewer on the Rumpus Web site, suggested: “One could argue that to write the book now, presumably at least fifteen years after the fact, indicates some type of remorse, whether or not that remorse is represented in the book. One could argue that the book is true to the experience of those events at the time of those events. It’s an honest depiction of doing something really fucked up and not really knowing how to deal with it. How the ‘regular’ things of girlhood like makeup and talking on the phone can be mixed in with this more complex understanding of how we exist in the world.” A writer on the Entropy Web site commented: “Through telescoped action and precise details in Ives’ sharp, spare prose, we get a portrait of an unnamed girl who unlike (for example) the heroine of Carrie is in no way special but also unlike that heroine has no means at her disposal to bring forth into the world the mayhem going on inside her. … [Through] Ives’ absolutely beautiful and mortifying parade of deceptive surfaces that slide along with us from the first page to the last, we get an absolutely indelible portrait of the complexity of a not-quite-average teenage girl.”
The Hermit
In 2016 Ives released a collection of poems, The Hermit. As in other works, she examines the writing process in the works in this volume. Ives also discusses other people’s perceptions of her, authors she admires, and the ability to share one’s thoughts with others.
A critic in Publishers Weekly offered a favorable review of The Hermit. The critic asserted: “The page transforms into an experimental playground where she produces gorgeous passages of lush imagery.” Daniel Benjamin, a contributor to the Make Web site, suggested: “Ives’s writing encourages its readers to consider their own power and form among the reality they encounter.” Benjamin added: “Perhaps The Hermit cannot avow anything other than skepticism about writing’s capacity to reach that other world. But in this book’s ability to ask what the other world is, its readers may see themselves as its writers. And so The Hermit already embodies a movement to that other world, a movement in shadow but full of possibility.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2016, review of The Hermit, p. 185.
ONLINE
Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/ (March 27, 2014), Katy Lederer, review of Orange Roses.
Colorado Review, http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/ (January 28, 2014), Holly Bilski, review of Orange Roses; (May 13, 2017), Joe Betz, review of Anamnesis: A Poem.
Culture Trip, https://theculturetrip.com/ (October 14, 2016), Ben Fame, author interview.
Entropy, https://entropymag.org/ (April 8, 2014), Nicholas Grider, review of Nineties: A Story with No Moral; (April 24, 2014), Nicholas Grider, author interview.
Lucy Ives Home Page, http://www.lucy-ives.com (May 13, 2017).
Make, http://makemag.com/ (January 24, 2017), Daniel Benjamin, review of The Hermit.
Poetry Foundation Web site, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (May 13, 2017), author profile.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (November 1, 2013), Jackie Clark, review of Nineties.
With Hidden Noise, https://withhiddennoise.net/ (February 21, 2010), review of Anamnesis.*
about
Lucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including Anamnesis, a long poem that won the Slope Book Prize, and the novella nineties. In summer 2017, Penguin Press will publish her first full-length novel, Impossible Views of the World. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Artforum, n+1, Conjunctions, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with Triple Canopy, the Brooklyn-based online magazine. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from NYU.
Lucy Ives
Poet Details
b. 1980
http://www.lucy-ives.com/
Lucy Ives was born in New York City and earned a BA from Harvard University, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in comparative literature from New York University. Her first collection, the book-length poem Anamnesis (2009), won the Slope Editions Book Prize. Ives is also the author of the full-length novel Impossible Views of the World (forthcoming, 2017); the “brief novel” Nineties (2013); a poetry and essay collection, Orange Roses (2013); and a collection of poetry and prose including a novella, The Worldkillers (2014). She has been awarded an Iowa Arts fellowship and a MacCracken fellowship.
A former editor of Triple Canopy, Ives has written for Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the New Yorker Online, among other publications. She lives in New York City, where she is editing a collection of writings by the artist Madeline Gins. In February 2014, Ives was a featured writer for Harriet.
Lucy Ives's New Book-Length Poem About Novel Writing Has Unexpected Conclusions
Ben Fama
Updated: 14 October 2016
In aphorisms, notes, and other short form, high-pleasure writing, The Hermit cruises among themes including suffering, the situation of philosophy in America, novel writing, lists-as-content, and visions.
“I remember I used to spend months and almost years in dreams,” writes Lucy Ives in her new book-length poem The Hermit. “Or what are better termed recollections. I wrote constantly. This was what it seemed appropriate to do. And later: I spent many years with a strong, almost violent feeling that there was much to live for, although I may have been inactive for much of this time.”
Cover of The Hermit, courtesy of Song Cave
Cover of The Hermit, courtesy of Song Cave
Much of The Hermit regards the conceptualization of literature as novelistic. It’s even possible to look at The Hermit as a novel, which includes both characters and plot. Consider how the opening sentence sets up a premise: “A man claims he makes a choice to be unhappy, since it allows him vigilance.” But the Hermit as a poem allows for its characters to dissipate into the ether of Ives’s thoughts. As she later concedes: “I don’t know how long any of the characters in this book can persist as characters.”
The dark heart of The Hermit is split in two sections. The first is introduced “At the end of her unfinished novel, a strange art object appears.” What follows is a long vignette, a detailed description of a wooden cube carved with figuration in relief displaying civilization as it stands—a line of dancing creatures, carnivalesque in their domestic animation—as well as various symbols of agriculture and tools that humanity has been built upon. This is followed by a depiction of a hermit, wandering the ruins of a once-golden empire, “grim reminders of human law and folly.” Finally, natures beautifully resumes, in the form of a natural spring.
The second section is study of a character, Nancy Thompson, from A Nightmare on Elm Street, who, in the author’s words, is secluded in a place of psychological horror and physical violence. Her self-enforced seclusion saves her life, and Ives confesses to understanding this character, a function of narrative she describes elsewhere as “the bait of recognition.” “A white home, mint mansard, ivy browning on a trellis. Shade in foreground. Branches pendant with parasitic vines.” Ives baits us into a good-faith reading with this pleasing establishing shot. This section is also the one where she addresses an other in second person: “before I met you,”— another baited trap.
Lucy Ives | © Raymond Adams
Lucy Ives | © Raymond Adams
There is levity among the denser sections. In one note, a dream, Charles Olson presses his semi-erection through his jeans against the author’s face, who reports smelling detergent. In another she describes the inability of novelist Michel Houellebecq to offer commentary in his work, saying he only portrays events in themselves. To Ives this may not be a criticism, who says later, “One must work, perhaps for some time, to see scenes.” A lot of The Hermit examines these difficulties in novel writing: “Possible for me to write 200 words a day, any day, every day.” Everything seems to encourage her: “on a country road, I pass an abandoned sign:
THO AS TRY CLUB
‘This is a poem about trying to write a novel,” Ives writes, daring us to read her poem The Hermit like a novel, or at least as a poet’s desire to write a novel. “When I was 13 I swore to myself that I would become a novelist,” she continues. In fact she already has: Her impressive publications credits include both poetry (including her excellent collection Orange Roses) and even a novel, nineties, a bildungsroman focused on a young woman coming of age during that decade. She is an editor for Triple Canopy, a magazine and arts organization committed to“resisting the atomization of culture” and who assembled an installation as part of the 2015 Whitney Biennial. Earlier this year it was announced she’d sold her second novel to Penguin, titled Impossible Views of the World. Ives hasn’t just fulfilled the promise to made by her 13-year-old self, she has documented what it took to get her there. In clumsier hands, this would come off as diaristic. In Ives’s, it’s art.
***
Ben Fama latest book of poems, Fantasy, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is the co-founder of the poetry press Wonder and lives in New York.
THE HERMIT
by
Lucy Ives
Song Cave / 88 pp. / $17.95
Lucy Ives was born in New York City and received a B.A. from Harvard University, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She is the author of ANAMNESIS (Slope Editions, 2009), NINETIES (Tea Party Republicans Press, 2013; Little A, 2015), ORANGE ROSES (Ahsahta Press, 2013), THE WORLDKILLERS (SplitLevel Texts, 2014), THE HERMIT (Song Cave, 2016), and the forthcoming IMPOSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE WORLD (Penguin Press, 2017). For five years an editor of Triple Canopy, Ives continues to live in New York and currently teaches at the Pratt Institute.
QUOTED: "This narrator is unable to perceive, intuit, or feel any kind of natural (or automatic) connection to the social world in which she exists. She also seems unable to react in any felt way to anything save language—here, largely brand names and other proper nouns—and this reaction is confined to noticing this language, organizing it in certain ways, 'poring over' it, obsessing."
"In this sense, the language the narrator has access to is structured more like an image than a sign. Words are objects of fascination rather than conveyors of meaning. This, to me, is a very nineties way of relating to the American language."
" There was a feeling that one was not at home in the very words one spoke, partly I think because popular culture had become an engine for explaining the idea that all desirable forms of experience, even progressivism and 'dropping out' and so on, had to be purchased. And language was very often the engine of this engine."
LUCY IVES INTERVIEW: LANGUAGE AND DISAFFECTION
written by Nicholas Grider April 24, 2014
According to her bio, Lucy Ives is “the author of nineties, a novel about a decade” though in my review here I was more taken with the novel’s play with the horror genre and the character’s complete lack of affect (apathetic stoicism) than with the novel as a statement about any decade, especially the nineties, so Ives agreed to answer some questions of mine about her novel, about the decade in question, and about how the two are related.
***
nineties-e1382942822317
Nicholas Grider: The main action of the book, with the teen girl narrator and her friends, seems like it could have happened almost at any point in the last four decades, yet the novel’s titled nineties and in the center of the book there’s a torrent of ’90s cultural signifiers. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about how the world of the narrator is grounded in the decade.
Lucy Ives: Even before we come to the torrent of signifiers, as you call it, there are hints about the dated nature of this text, again more signifiers: an educational typing/word-processing program involving an animated character shaped like an asterisk, the movie Children of the Corn II, Jerry Seinfeld, to name just a few. But I agree with you that the presence of these items and celebrities (plus the general absence of cellular phones) is not enough to certify its nineties provenance. What, to me at least, seems most “nineties” about this narrative is the form the narrator’s affect takes. This narrator is unable to perceive, intuit, or feel any kind of natural (or automatic) connection to the social world in which she exists. She also seems unable to react in any felt way to anything save language—here, largely brand names and other proper nouns—and this reaction is confined to noticing this language, organizing it in certain ways, “poring over” it, obsessing. In this sense, the language the narrator has access to is structured more like an image than a sign. Words are objects of fascination rather than conveyors of meaning. This, to me, is a very nineties way of relating to the American language. And all the nineties paranoia about persons and things being “real” or not, an individual having “sold out” or not, someone feeling viscerally “stupid and contagious” in relation to a regime of entertaining images (Kurt Cobain) or not—all this points to a way of understanding the world in which language has developed an autonomy that somehow matches or analogizes the power and autonomy of mass media. I guess it’s hardly a surprise that television formats or music industry “hits” might have affected one’s speech, but the 1990s was a time at which forms of resistance to consumer culture were being commodified and sold back to Americans at unprecedented rates. There was a feeling that one was not at home in the very words one spoke, partly I think because popular culture had become an engine for explaining the idea that all desirable forms of experience, even progressivism and “dropping out” and so on, had to be purchased. And language was very often the engine of this engine.
NG: Most of the characters in the novel are also too young and grounded in the present to really be nostalgic, yet right now there’s a large wave of ’90s nostalgia, especially in music. Does nostalgia play a role for you at all in the book? Another way of asking this would be: how does the novel’s title fit the story?
Ives: I think I have a relationship to the ’90s that is somewhat more active than a relationship (or feeling) of pure nostalgia would be. I think I actually want to recuperate something that I understand as definitive of this time, that seems specific to this time—but which is also strangely nearly ineffable, since so close to language and to representation itself. It’s not necessarily a good thing, what I’m talking about. But I think it’s significant for us as we attempt to understand what American language and American images are like now. So I’m questioning, too, your suggestion that this novel could have happened at many different times and that the title is what dates it with certainty (your suggestion is a fair one, I should note!) I don’t myself think these characters could have existed before early 1993. Certainly they may exist after. So we might find them walking around today, in some form, but they are emotionally and intellectually defined by this particular moment, particularly by virtue of being so young. I want this novel to be a space in which characters move around, personifying a decade; I haven’t wanted to create something “real,” even if real human experience could form the basis for what is in some sense an allegory, in my novel.
NG: What you’ve written (here and in the novel) about the narrator’s lack of affect is fascinating, and I’m wondering how, for you, the lack of affect is related more specifically to the decade, which burst forth with a resistant underground becoming mainstream (I’m thinking especially of Nirvana and the wave of performing not to care that really oddly came in their wake and with the birth of both Reality TV and home-consumer internet that postdates the novel by a few years. I was a high school freshman the fall that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out, and it was fascinating to witness my peers and others copy the surface of “grunge” but not the suddenly popular culture’s core of engagement.
Ives: Something that occurs to me, reading and thinking about this question, is that it’s really difficult to perform “I don’t care.” In other words, “I don’t care” isn’t an emotion; rather, it’s a vague way of attributing value. Also, performing “I don’t care”—which, I should say, has traditionally been the role of the dandy and other variously “cool,” refined figures, previous to the advent and global domination of the teenager as hero of culture and art—usually ends up being closer to “I can’t care,” or “It is impossible for me to attribute value of any kind to this situation/experience.” Then, built into the performance is the affect associated by the performer (the artist) with this impossibility. Does one despair because it is impossible to attribute value to experience? Does one wink, shrug, have sex, get high? I feel like much dated American popular culture of the earlier twentieth century concerns the shrug of an artist in response to the impossibility of caring about experience. Popular culture of the later twentieth century becomes invested in harsher or more absolute—and perhaps even more honest or uninhibited—kinds of response to a situation of “I don’t care.” Some of this feels related to social and economic pressures and is a more or less complex response. Some of this is a less complex performance really only touching on the matter of not caring. I guess what I’m saying is that I see a longer history of U.S. youth. Yes, the nineties were different. But to me they seem a reshuffling of certain well-worn American tropes, which is partly what makes them so ripe for figuration and novelization.
NG: I’m also wondering if you could share some more of your portrait of what language in the ’90s was––both what that meant for the nineties’ literary world and how a kind of fetishization of words developed across the course of the decade and, following that, more specifically what role this fetishizing of language takes place less in the narrator’s psychology than in the style and structure of the writing itself. For me, the poster boy of nineties literature was David Foster Wallace and a kind of maximalism and display that came along with the internet, but the writing here is very different from that, and obviously that’s partly from being filtered through the mind of the narrator.
Ives: To the extent that poetry can be admitted here, the 1990s come at the tail end of a long series of obsessive explorations of language throughout the twentieth century, i.e., modernism, culminating, if you like, in something that appears on the west coast in the last few decades and is called “Language Poetry.” By the nineties, perhaps Language Poetry has been well institutionalized; it’s a recognizable movement or thing. I can’t exactly speak to what this means for popular prose. It is interesting that David Foster Wallace, who was something of an experimentalist, was also a superstar in the nineties. Whether it was the time itself or what you call his “maximalism” that made this possible, I can’t say. However, at the heart of Wallace’s maximalism is also an obsession with individual words, proper names. Here I’m not talking about the kinds of not very remarkable lists of names of persons that for some reason have been included in this year’s Whitney Biennial. I’m talking about the fictionalized names of corporations and mass-market products that appear everywhere in his stories and novels. Recall that Infinite Jest is set in so-called subsidized time; corporations have begun purchasing the right to name the very year, here: “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” (Y.D.A.U.). For my nineties, I do not fictionalize brand names. All the brands you read in nineties are quite real. I employ other stylistic affordances to emphasize what I view as the peculiarity of the language of the decade, which is to say that I’ve created a narrator who has an unusual kind of economic relationship to language, in that she recognizes both its power and her own disaffection with this power. I suppose that’s why she treats everything she thinks or says as a kind of image.
***
Lucy Ives is most recently the author of Orange Roses (Ahsahta, 2013), a collection of poetry and essays, and nineties (Tea Party Republicans, 2013), a novel about a decade. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Conjunctions, Fence, The Huffington Post, n+1, Ploughshares, and other journals. A deputy editor at Triple Canopy, she is co-editor of Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism, published by Triple Canopy and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. With Triple Canopy, she participated as an artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
QUOTED: "The page transforms into an experimental playground where she produces gorgeous passages of lush imagery."
The Hermit
Publishers Weekly. 263.29 (July 18, 2016): p185.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
The Hermit
Lucy Ives. Song Cave (SPD, dist.), $17.95 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-0-9967786-3-3
In her newest book of poetry, Ives (The Worldkillers), an editor and writer of many stripes, condenses what she calls "some kind of thinking about writing" into a cerebral collection replete with meditations on the writing process, dialogues concerning phenomenology, micro-stories, anxieties around a failed novel, lists, quotes, games, and notes to the self. Readers are invited to an inner conversation as the poet grapples with the idea of writing, the history of it, the creative act itself, and also the text as an object, asking permission to be seen (much as Ives permits herself to feel), to exist in the eyes of others, and to participate in the canon. What saves the book from being merely being a treatise or a personal journal is that the reader is taken along on the creative journey; Ives muses about another author or a technique, such as the idea of description, and the page transforms into an experimental playground where she produces gorgeous passages of lush imagery. There is some appeal in the variety of texts and in Ives's insights into her life as a writer, and she succeeds most when she allows readers passage into this potential space: "One must possess only the ability to tolerate a given position long enough to make it intelligible to others." (July)
QUOTED: "One could argue that to write the book now, presumably at least fifteen years after the fact, indicates some type of remorse, whether or not that remorse is represented in the book. One could argue that the book is true to the experience of those events at the time of those events. It’s an honest depiction of doing something really fucked up and not really knowing how to deal with it. How the “regular” things of girlhood like make-up and talking on the phone can be mixed in with this more complex understanding of how we exist in the world."
THE LAST BOOK I LOVED: NINETIES BY LUCY IVES
BY JACKIE CLARK
November 1st, 2013
“I am starting to figure out that what it is is I like to play with fate.”
*
When I was thirteen years old, I was caught shoplifting. There was a rash of girls my age who all regarded shoplifting as a norm, and I was one of them. I don’t remember how it actually started, but I do remember being impressed by friends of mine who would disappear down the cosmetic aisle in McCrory’s and emerge into the mall with a new compact, lipstick, and lip liner (very stylish at the time). I had heard of girls who lifted cassettes and sometimes even CDs from The Wiz after school, but that always felt like the big time to me and I was always too nervous to try. I did however get into the business of stealing clothes: going into the dressing room with a bunch of stuff, slipping some of it on underneath what I was wearing, and then walking out of the store like it was no big deal. I couldn’t tell you how many times exactly I did this, but I can tell you that it felt like an awesome and powerful secret, something that made me feel more acutely aware of my surroundings and as a result, made me feel in control of them.
*
Girlhood is mostly interesting to girls or rather, to women who used to be girls and are trying to contextualize it. Lucy Ives’s nineties deals, yes, with the pervasive pop culture of the 1990s, but its crystalline focus is through the eyes of a young girl growing up during that particular decade.
What does it mean to be a girl? Does it mean anything? I’m not suggesting that nineties has an answer to these questions, but it does start with a cryptic allegory that gives us some kind of framework through which to read the rest of the book. It begins, “A long time ago we invented a game about civilization,” and goes on to explain how an imaginary bus driver gets the imaginary people from an imaginary good town to go with him to Torture Town, despite its unusual and ominous name. Once they arrive, they are persuaded to enter the town’s factory, and then the “invisible dignitaries and citizens of Torture Town” have a good laugh and the factory springs into action: “shiny red domino-shaped blocks began to appear in a line on the opposite side of the factory from where the good citizens had entered. It was the object of the game.”
Now, this doesn’t necessarily sound like a game that is going to work out for the people from the imaginary good town. What would it mean to live as though every decision you made was part of a game? Or rather, what would it mean to make up rules to an imaginary game that only you and your friends played, regardless of any ancillary consequences, because, well, the consequences aren’t a part of the game and therefore don’t count? What if, for a time, that’s what being a girl meant? Maybe it meant trying to control and direct events in your surroundings. Maybe it meant making mistakes.
nineties is not an unconventional novel per se—it tells a story, there is a plot, there are characters—and yet there are no in-depth character descriptions or development or overt analysis. It is also a novel that is in all likelihood drawn from Ives’s real life experiences. There is a picture of her on page ninety with one of her friends, a blond-haired girl with a big grin, resting her head on the shoulder of the dark-haired girl one could assume is Ives.
*
The plot is pretty simple. First, we are introduced to our unnamed narrator and her girlfriends, Hannah, Gwen, Larisse, and Winnie. The action takes place in New York City. One of the girls lives up on Park Ave. They go to a school that has a headmistress. These girls are girls of a certain kind of privilege.
nineties at first reads like some kind of exposé of adolescent drama. A laundry list of the cool, “bad girl” things the characters get into: Gwen and the narrator sneak out and sneak into a bar in midtown, where they get older guys to buy them drinks, until Gwen gets a page from her mom and they realize they are totally busted. They smoke Parliament Lights. They go to pool halls and try to meet guys. Everyone “has a baby tee and leggings. Everywhere it’s about cropped hair and the benefits of eating low fat.” They “shoplift at department stores and only get black clothes.” They read Details magazine. They go to house parties of kids who are in high school. They drink and get drunk.
But then the tension of nineties shifts and becomes focused on one single, defining action: Gwen, Hannah, and the narrator come up with the idea to steal their friend Winnie’s credit card and use it to go shopping. They succeed at both the stealing and the shopping. The narrator hides the boots that she buys in her closest so her mom doesn’t see them. The school they attend immediately begins an investigation. The girls go two weeks before the narrator turns them all in. They go two weeks still hanging out with Winnie and letting her talk about her credit card being stolen. They even attempt to comfort her in a sort of nonchalant way. Gwen says, “Whatever. Don’t even fucking worry. We know so many people who can fuck them up it’s not even funny.” The only inkling of guilt or concern comes from the narrator who realizes they are totally fucked, they are going to get caught, so she writes out a list of how they should handle the situation, outlining, “What We Did Wrong,” “What We Can Do,” and “Analysis.”
The first item on the “What We Did Wrong” list is “We did not close the locker door and left the planner out on the ground. Now everybody knows that whatever happened it happened in school.” What they did wrong was that they were amateurs, and that is her greatest regret. Ultimately, it is a conclusion that the narrator comes to in a poem that she writes which gives her the courage to fess up in the hopes that the situation will just go away afterwards: “No one is going to kill you. // It is just people.”
*
I couldn’t help thinking of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers while reading nineties. The adolescent shenanigans of the girls in that movie are definitely higher-stakes. They involve sticking up a restaurant (with fake guns) for money to go on spring break, ending up in jail, then falling in with a local thug, sticking up other spring breakers with him, and climatically using actual guns to take out an entire rival gang. These girls are older than the characters in nineties, but it’s a similar pattern of behavior in that there is no forethought or concern about potential repercussions. They are “playing with fate” and are turned on by it. I think this is true of every generation, nineties or otherwise. Perhaps it’s just true of youth. The scary thing about this playing with fate is that said fate can be accessed in further and more nuanced ways aside from just credit fraud. The Internet and social media can inspire such cruel, desperate, and depressing behavior (think of all the stories of kids who kill themselves because they are bullied online, because of their sexuality or otherwise), and we are still learning how this behavior will be understood through the eyes of a generation of humans who have never experienced life without it.
*
After we left the department store wearing stolen men’s silk boxers under our clothes (what can I say, they were cool in, you guessed it, the ’90s), I realized that we were being followed by these two nondescript men, definitely men our dads’ age. I knew that they knew. I tried to test my theory by going into the girliest stores in the mall, Contempo Casual being one of my favorites. The two men followed us into the store. Getting nervous I tried to devise a plan. I decided the best thing would be to just go back to the store and return what we had stolen. I honestly thought this would work. It did not. My friend and I were immediately stopped when we tried to re-enter the store. Immediately brought to this tiny nondescript beige room. A short while later, our parents showed up to retrieve us. They wanted to know why we would do such a thing. My friend and I looked at each other and just shrugged our shoulders.
*
Gwen, Hannah, and the narrator are kicked out of their school. They have to go to a psychiatrist. When the psychiatrist asks the narrator why she did it, why she stole one of her best friend’s credit cards, the narrator simply replies, “I don’t know,” and I think that is the most honest thing she could say. I think it’s generally presumed that getting caught doing something wrong should yield some kind of change in behavior, the old adage, to learn from your mistakes, etc. But when the psychiatrist asks the narrator, “OK, if you could do anything […] anything at all right now, what would you do?” the narrator bats that shit out of the park: “I slowly say, ‘Two dicks.’”
*
One could argue that to write the book now, presumably at least fifteen years after the fact, indicates some type of remorse, whether or not that remorse is represented in the book. One could argue that the book is true to the experience of those events at the time of those events. It’s an honest depiction of doing something really fucked up and not really knowing how to deal with it. How the “regular” things of girlhood like make-up and talking on the phone can be mixed in with this more complex understanding of how we exist in the world.
Early on in nineties, the narrator confesses, “In real life, I never do anything. I let things happen. I watch.” I think that’s true of most thirteen-year-old girls. You don’t really do anything in “real life,” because what the fuck is “real life” and how is it different from the life you had been living? You don’t have any idea what “real life” is going to be or how you are supposed to be a person how actively partakes in “real life.” All of a sudden, all these adult boundaries and consequences manifest themselves, and the most logical thing one can do is rebel against them. The rebellion can be lived out to extremes à la the Spring Breakers girls, or it can be sublimated into something else, intellectualized, written about. It can be used to become the person you want to be in your “real life.”
***
First image credit.
Jackie Clark is author of Aphoria (Brooklyn Arts Press). She is the series editor of Poets off Poetry and Song of the Week for Coldfront Magazine and is the recipient of a 2012 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming from Delirious Hem, Denver Quarterly, and Yoga City. Jackie lives in Jersey City and can be found online at nohelpforthat.com. More from this author →
QUOTED: "Ives’s writing encourages its readers to consider their own power and form among the reality they encounter."
"Perhaps The Hermit cannot avow anything other than skepticism about writing’s capacity to reach that other world. But in this book’s ability to ask what the other world is, its readers may see themselves as its writers. And so The Hermit already embodies a movement to that other world, a movement in shadow but full of possibility."
The Hermit
by Lucy Ives
Reviewed by Daniel Benjamin
Published: January 24, 2017
0
Published by The Song Cave, 2016 | 88 pages
At the start of her 2013 book Orange Roses, Lucy Ives writes: “The fallacy of the poem is beautiful because it is already the embodiment of a reader, presaging the eventual arrival of a realizing eye.” Her latest volume, The Hermit – a spare and epigrammatic collection of lists, brief stories, poems, and other excerpts from the life of thought – further explores the shape of this embodiment.
The various forms of writing in The Hermit take place as if in some middle distance, a few steps removed from life; a vantage from which, it would seem, they can observe not only themselves, but the reader, too. The Hermit is composed of 80 numbered entries, mostly shorter than a page, and many only a single sentence. These brief thoughts, with much white space beneath, leave room for their reader to move around, in, among, and between them. “What if a person will always be a few steps from life, whatever this is, and what if this person will feel dissatisfied, imperfect on account of this distance?” one early entry begins. “What will we say of them? Do they become a character typical of their time? And, if such a person cannot become such a character, what is the use of them?” Like the paintings of Agnes Martin or the films of Nathaniel Dorsky, the most important character in Ives’s prose is its reader. In the white space underneath these notes my own mind’s wanderings take on what is not exactly an importance, but a space for reading and thinking. I move around in this writing, and become aware of my moving around within it, and consider not only the shape of the writing, but my own shape as its reader.
In other words, Ives’s writing encourages its readers to consider their own power and form among the reality they encounter. Sometimes in my reading, the fragmented thoughts in The Hermit would uncannily resonate with “narratives” occurring in my immediate vicinity, in the physical world in which I read. For example, Ives writes: “Imagine that love between two people is of such parity that one only has to hear the other speak; then, in an instant, remembers years of kindness. Why won’t the other speak now? Why does he seem to become lost, as if inside his own living?” In the white space below this entry, I jotted down notes on a situation unfolding beside me: I am reading on an airplane about to depart, and across the aisle to my right I hear two people next to me talking. The blonde tells the blond that her feelings for him are romantic and they should be together. She enumerates her virtues: “I’m a beautiful, smart person who loves you.” His answers are short and negative. In his lap are over-ear headphones he daren’t put on; he looks ahead with arms crossed. Before I root in my bag for a pencil I see her take out a notebook and start writing. I can almost see what she writes; surely he can. By the time my pencil is out she puts the notebook away having just written four or five lines. The crying babies become an object of conversation, then various timings and time changes, a return to small talk as we begin to taxi. With The Hermit in my hands, I am left considering: In an event such as this, do the people around me become characters, or do I? What is my own role in the scene I am observing? Must I sympathize with one of these would-be lovers against the other? Or could I place myself in an apposite relation, something perhaps like “parity”—and so also imagine that their silence, the awkward narrative notwithstanding, holds in it such parity as well?
The aphoristic fragments in The Hermit have a glancing and friendly relationship to narrative, though they never quite occupy it for longer than a few sentences. Ives’s ability to range across many genres seems informed by the various scenes of writing in which she has worked. Her published work includes poetry, essay, and novella; she edited the innovative online journal Triple Canopy; and she has a full-length novel forthcoming in 2017. “What occurs (to us) when we are not sure what we are reading?” asks Ives in an essay in Lithub. Indeed, what are we as readers to make of the various excerpts from varieties of lists that appear throughout The Hermit: place names, “title as autobiography,” writing assignments, books to read, and others? Other notes include recorded conversations, excerpts from readings, excerpts from a novel in progress, and writing games. Towards the end of the collection several of the lists seem inspired by one such “game”: “Make hundreds of lists. No titles on lists, each simply starts with an item. Every item must be the most interesting thing the writer can conceive of. And so begins: a monumental failure…” But the subjective failure to make something more interesting ends up being the least interesting aspect of these lists; instead, what we encounter here is the very phenomenology of language’s gathering: the mind experiencing its own relation to thought. Ives’s prose recalls the daybooks of George Oppen and the novels of Renee Gladman, finding a strange beauty in self-reflexivity and mundanity.
Towards the end of The Hermit, Ives writes:
I thought also, last night, as I resolved to stop reading and get back to work, that I have always done one thing, which is to think to myself, “There is another world, and when at last we are in this other world, all the parts that currently do not touch, in this world, either will have reality or will have been resolved, in that one.” The thought is so familiar that it is mostly unclear, challenging to articulate, a mush. What is the other world? And why is it—having had this thought last night, today, as I once again seek to write it down, having several times promised myself that I would write it down—impossible to reformulate? I can’t seem to represent or know the thought again, so entirely familiar.
In Ives’s writing, the “unclear” or “challenging to articulate” is ultimately found to function as a gesturing outwards, towards some indiscernible but intuited utopian possibility. In the “mush” of this thinking and writing, in the dark phenomenology of memory and articulation, do we still reach towards a world to come, towards the “other world” that is equally “familiar” and “impossible to reformulate”? Perhaps The Hermit cannot avow anything other than skepticism about writing’s capacity to reach that other world. But in this book’s ability to ask what the other world is, its readers may see themselves as its writers. And so The Hermit already embodies a movement to that other world, a movement in shadow but full of possibility.
Daniel Benjamin is a PhD student, poet, and part-time caretaker living in Berkeley, CA. With Claire Marie Stancek, he is the co-editor of Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba Press / Giramondo, 2016). He is also the author of the afterword for Jack Spicer’s The Wasps (speCt!, 2016). Other projects include a dissertation entitled On Lyric’s Universals: How Poetry Says “We,” 1955-2015; and a poetry manuscript.
QUOTED: "Through telescoped action and precise details in Ives’ sharp, spare prose we get a portrait of an unnamed girl who unlike (for example) the heroine of Carrie is in no way special but also unlike that heroine has no means at her disposal to bring forth into the world the mayhem going on inside her. … Ives’ absolutely beautiful and mortifying parade of deceptive surfaces that slide along with us from the first page to the last, we get an absolutely indelible portrait of the complexity of a not-quite-average teenage girl."
nineties
by Lucy Ives
Tea Party Republicans Press, 2013
171 pages / SPD / Amazon / Goodreads
Even though nineties is a short novel, Ives plays her cards close to her vest for quite a while before revealing what kind of novel you’re actually reading when it takes a turn midway though. And by Ives not revealing much I mean that we never even learn the name of the narrator or why she’s telling us what she’s telling us; all we get about the narrator is that she’s a girl of thirteen or fourteen at a private school in uptown Manhattan, that she’s presumably as wealthy as her friends, that she’s utterly absorbed by the details of surfaces, especially personal appearance, and specifically the appearance of models in pre-widespread-internet fashion magazines because the year is 1994. And nothing seems to really sink in with this girl, and she seems initially to leave no great mark on those around her, and (initially) she’s about as deep as a page of one of the magazines she stares at.
She’s not unsympathetic, but Ives masterfully achieves a portrait of teenage girlhood in the mid-‘90s both because we know so little about the narrator and partly through Ives drenching her characters in what in psychiatric terms is known as lack of affect, meaning a kind of blunted, unresponsive response to other people and the world around us. Ives’ narrator, in brief scenes between which the silence of unmediated feelings is quite loud, understands, or at least seems to understand everything happening to her and the people in her insular world, but neither shows nor recounts much reaction to it, either positive or negative. It’s not so much that the narrator doesn’t care (because we eventually get ample evidence she does) as that caring about things is somehow tacky, beneath her, indicative of a youthful naiveté she claims to no longer possess. And both Ives’ and the narrator’s careful attention to distance—the distance between appearance and reality, the distance between people, the distance between desires and action—lulls us initially into thinking what we’re getting is a sharply-drawn portrait of a shallow girl in a glassy world of interchangeable friends and relative comfort and luxury, a world of few consequences. So at first everything we view through the narrator, from the arrangement of dividers for a school binder to awkward teenage drug use and even more awkward teenage sex, is pretty much equivalent. Things happen. The narrator shares some of them in a way meant to indicate she finds it all shrugworthy.
Then, midway through the book, we get a torrent of a paragraph of the narrator’s world and afterward we find out what kind of novel it is we’re really reading. The torrent first: rather than make any grand statements about the ‘90s or nostalgia about it, Ives gives us, at a distance from the narrator’s seemingly flat world, an ocean of surface and distance in the mid-‘90s that opens like this:
Filofax, whippets, Urban Outfitters, snap bracelet, Victoria’s Secret, death row, Mayo Clinic, Kevyn Aucoin, StairMaster, Gillette Sensor, Trish Goff, IBM, Emma Thompson, 2 Pac, J. Crew, Details, NoDoz, Na Na, Betsey Johnson, pukeface, Janet Reno, clinique, Simplex Subsistence, eyebrow shaping, pro-choice, Tavern on the Green…
and which goes on like that for two and a half dense pages of ‘90s signifiers, presented seemingly without order and as if all equivalent. The reason this passage is key is because the lack of affect and the lack of information we get until the torrent of cultural reference leads into the first real decisive act by the narrator, and even though it’s minor both as transgressions go and in terms of consequences it reveals that what we’re reading is a carefully, elegantly understated horror novel. There’s never any violence or gore, much less monsters and demons, only teenagers and distant authority figures, and nobody dies, much less gets injured, but what we find out during the final half of nineties, leading up to a spectacularly yet quietly terrifying final scene, is that the lack of affect and penchant for distance are a mask, for the narrator, surface and nothing more.
And the reason nineties is such a compelling novel, horror or non-, is that we’re never quite sure whether the narrator is victim or villain. And there’s a very real possibility she might actually be both, striding calmly through an increasingly unordered world while inside her there’s some considerable tumult that we, except once, don’t directly witness, only get reference to—the way she reacts to the provocations of her meanspiritedly insecure friends, the way she reacts to the admonitions of school authority figures, the way she confesses, the way she acts toward her probably-only-visited-once psychiatrist, the way that on the phone speaking to the father of her best friend Gwen she threatens suicide and we’re not sure, by late in the novel, whether (again) this is a manipulative move, a legitimate threat, or something somewhere between the two. Even if the narrator’s transgressions are minor and ultimately waved away by everyone around her save for her dismissal from school, nineties is really less a portrait of disaffection than a story about how that disaffection ultimately fails to protect the narrator from the world around her or from herself.
So through telescoped action and precise details in Ives’ sharp, spare prose we get a portrait of an unnamed girl who unlike (for example) the heroine of Carrie is in no way special but also unlike that heroine has no means at her disposal to bring forth into the world the mayhem going on inside her. Instead we see a girl do and say a few mildly but not drastically desperate things leading up to the aforementioned wildly revelatory final scene, but in Ives’ absolutely beautiful and mortifying parade of deceptive surfaces that slide along with us from the first page to the last, we get an absolutely indelible portrait of the complexity of a not-quite-average teenage girl.
Microreview: Lucy Ives, Orange Roses
KATY LEDERER
Mar 27, 2014
Microreview: Lucy Ives, Orange Roses
KATY LEDERER
Mar 27, 2014
Topics: POETRY CRITICISM
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Orange Roses
by Lucy Ives
Ahsahta Press, $18 (paper)
Though lyric in its form, Orange Roses is a poetic coming-of-age narrative that unfolds against the backdrops of college, California, cityscapes, and an American art conference. Explicitly influenced by the serial work of George Oppen, Ives takes accretion as her lodestar, moving fluidly from analysis to aphorism, concept to sonnet, and paragraph to fragment. “Language,” she writes in “Orange Roses,” the eponymous heart of the book, “since inorganic, is not suffused by time and does not ‘die,’ despite the expression. And yet without the depth of time, the possibility of sequence, there could be no meaning.” In the assertively mechanical “Early Poem,” Ives takes her directive literally, calling out her sentences by number as she lays them down. In “Picture,” she reverts to a knowingly simple (and beautiful) objectivist approach: “The cup of flame above / The refinery // Red floor of the landfill / By the yard of red and white / Cranes // Violet clouds / White plains.” “On Imitation” delineates her early thoughts about mimesis: “The question was not what can words say, but what can they show. Where the word evokes an image, it does some sort of work. But most of the time people are just talking about something or other.” Ives is a poet of aporia or lack, seeking to discover what exists by examining what is absent: poetry “is not a question of relating language to a person one is but rather of relating it to the exact person one is not.” Orange Roses is autobiography composed of its omissions.
QUOTED: "Lucy Ives does not tell us how to find meaning in our lives, but she demonstrates its constant loss and rediscovery in her new poetry and essay collection, Orange Roses. Leaf through quickly, and it appears to be composed of interestingly disparate pieces that simply needed a home. It is anything but that."
Book Review
Orange Roses
Poetry
By Lucy Ives
Reviewed By Holly Bilski
Ashanta Press (2013)
104 pages
$18
Buy this book
Lucy Ives does not tell us how to find meaning in our lives, but she demonstrates its constant loss and rediscovery in her new poetry and essay collection, Orange Roses. Leaf through quickly, and it appears to be composed of interestingly disparate pieces that simply needed a home. It is anything but that. Here, there are koan-like short verses, nominal sonnets, prose poems, lists, confessions, travelogues that read like flash fiction, and even a poem not listed in the contents like one of those bonus tracks artists used to hide at the ends of cassette tapes. They are linked by their search for meaning, which is never where it is sought, yet can only be found in the searching. The key to the ideal reading is in the first lines of the first piece, “The Poem”: “The fallacy of the poem is beautiful because it is already the / embodiment of a reader, presaging the eventual arrival of a realizing eye:”—the reader always collaborates with the poem, of course, but is rarely reminded so explicitly to do so.
Next, “In Sonnets,” in five parts of fourteen lines, searches for meaning in separation. Prior to its discovery is a desire to rewind:
Try saying Lure
My former I am waiting
That you change back
One fool hopes you
Soften
Failing that, an insight:
This is to tell you my new home
How right here becomes
A thing you could have seen
This new understanding of moving through loss becomes the relationship’s value, as “Everyone’s life must be / Rarified some way.”
The reader will benefit from reading “Early Poem” aloud. Certain questions arise—how are the sentence numbers significant, where did the eighteenth sentence go (only the most intrepid reader will glean this information), and how long can this be sustained? Those questions may distract, but that is part of the fun and a good portion of the point; between comedic episodes that include the army of ancient Rome, a one-eyed duck doodle, and crabs on Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park, discoveries are made, such as: “In the thirteenth sentence I realize I have chosen something.” Soon, the speaker nears the meat of it:
I sit down beside myself in the thirty-fourth sentence and say to myself, smiling, even small numbers are big. This is the working of time, the thirty-fifth sentence joins in saying this, too, once one has crossed the years their number does not matter. But what I was trying to get across was, I think in sentence thirty-six, that maybe you could not have done things earlier, maybe it just was not possible in those days for whichever reasons.
Less distractible now, more focused, the speaker begins periodically to address someone specific. By sentence sixty-six, the suspicion arises that “counting…goes on and means itself without having a meaning.” But all this counting, the reason for which the speaker all but dares us to calculate, is forgotten by sentence ninety-three where an intimate quiet falls: “Now I am speaking to you.” The last effort to keep count occurs in sentence ninety-six when the speaker states: “What it means to live is the subject.” Then the numbers stop. The final sentence, one hundred, marks the point of so much loss (and potential gain) that it even lacks a period, the devastating effect of which is magnified by the poem’s flippant beginning.
Such misdirection is no magician’s trick. It is as though Ives acts in the capacity of a Montessori teacher, allowing the reader to explore exactly what happens to all of us, over and over, our whole lives. As the title poem “Orange Roses” puts it:
Quality of time. One wishes to assign qualities to it, but then these are the qualities assigned; planned and not discovered. Why should the unexpected be
of such value, when we are trying to sense not it but rather that in or against which it occurs?
Like finding a mislaid hundred-dollar bill while searching for a quarter, the unexpected is vastly richer than the planned; hence, the initial poem’s desire for that unknown quality of the reader’s collaboration is understandable. Sometimes all is asked is commiseration, as in “On Imitation”: “On weekends sometimes I lay on the floor of my room and pondered the perfection of everyone’s actions. ‘Everyone is acting so natural,’ I thought. ‘Everyone knows just what to do.’” The speaker is a college student in the late 1990s, but anyone past the age of twelve can relate. Sometimes the reader must fill in a huge blank: “Movies were natural. The higher their budgets, the more natural they appeared.” By now, that feels reasonable. We can see the “nasty sentimentality” of Titanic, “epitomized by Kate Winslet’s crimped orange hair” even if we liked it, perhaps especially then.
Near the end of “On Imitation,” we are confronted once more with meaning’s loss. In her search for a natural writing method, the speaker hits on a plan: “I had decided that I was going to search for the most dumb writing, the most image-like. I hoped it would be so much more natural.” She does the logical thing and travels along the California coast, taking notes, and turns around when she gets to Crescent City. Of course, none of that writing survived. What, then, was discovered? That remains satisfyingly unclear. The reader discovers one final poem, unlisted in the table of contents, fittingly unexpected. It is poignant and, like the other pieces in this collection, unlike anything else in it. Rather than supplying answers to the reader’s unanswered questions it serves quite neatly to replace them. Its perfect title? “I Don’t Know.”
Published 1/28/2014
Holly Bilski lives and writes in Sacramento.
QUOTED: "By not holding to one thought, Ives triggers many; we become the writer and the reader of multiple poems. Anamnesis is a new reminder of the fluidity of our roles and our memories. The reader’s experience is not passive, and the stylistic choice to expose poems and the writing of them for what they truly are—decisions and regrets and half-truths—is refreshing."
Book Review
Anamnesis
Poetry
By Lucy Ives
Reviewed By Joe Betz
Slope Editions (2009)
83 pages
$14.95
Buy this book
Maxine Chernoff asks an important question in her introduction to the Slope Editions Book Prize winner Anamnesis: “What response will the reader have to this malady of words and their impermanence?” The question relates to the concern the poems have on the page, where they “write” and “cross out” exhaustively. This technique allows the reader a full view of the writing process. We are able to see revision that is not truly revision, in the new-seeing vein, because the revision becomes the poem, and the process in which the poem came into being is there for the reader to see, producing that odd sensation when one is able to look at original drafts beside the published product in museum glass. The poems become a splicing of the two: draft and finished product. Lucy Ives’s Anamnesis resists paraphrase, but it does reveal process. What remains is a fascinating book that provides a new reading experience and a revision—pun intended—of the writer-reader/writer-writer relationship:
Suppose we write the sentence, "Paul had a very great mind"
Later we can return, strike through the word "mind" and write "brain"
Later we might add, before the word "had," the words, "the owner of the restaurant"
We might add, "whose sign is the shape of a sleeping deer"
We could strike this sentence out entire
The poems in this collection all work in a similar fashion. We are told to “write” and “cross this out.” We are engaged in the process of writing the poem with the poet, a stylistic decision creating a refreshing read with each poem. This removes the idea of the poet producing, after tireless drafts, a sparkling poem on the page. Ives tells us to join in that misery. We are given directions, however, that are impossible to follow, creating a paradox for the reader: we are both the writer and the reader. What we are told to “write” is already written. What we are told to “cross out” creates a new type of confusion; if we physically cross out what we are told to, we lose the original upon which the poem depends. Our situation is complicated. Here are the next few lines of the poem begun above:
We could write, "Debt has become the watch word"
We'll write, "Recommended for you"
But we can cross this out
Write, "My family has three members"
Strike through "has," write, "is"
Anamnesis also seems to examine narrative. Ives begins a thought only to stop it with what could or might be in its place, convoluting the stories that seem to hide in the poet’s consciousness. The reader finds familiar words in the above section: debt, you, we, family. From these key words, though, nothing is developed. The reader is left feeling like the poet: helpless to what the poem wishes to accomplish but seemingly cannot.
The obsessive nature of writing and rewriting, revising and striking through to find what the poem is after, points to the book’s title. “Anamnesis” is the “recalling of things past” according to the helpful OED definition in the back of the book, and Ives seems to be telling us with her poetry that our recollections are suspect. What does this say, then, of narrative poetry and its often perfectly executed turns of memory? Ives’s “cross out” and “write” say she does not trust that movement. Far from being obtuse, though, Ives’s bounce from thought to thought is like the pinball flicked into the monster’s mouth: we don’t know where it will pop back into the game.
Here are the poem’s final lines:
Strike through "members," write, "both my mother and father, in the
apartment right now"
Strike through "right now," write "in the mornings, noon, and in the evenings"
Strike "both" through
Write, "Lucy was saying that"
Strike the whole sentence
Thirty-five pages end with deletion. We are told to strike a line or the entire poem, to “cross everything out.” What coherence the reader might gain from the poem is canceled. I’m not, however, a very obedient reader. I read through the poem again and allow my mind to construct meaning with meandering. Something clicks—not in the poem necessarily, but in the reader’s mind. Even the imperatives “write” and “cross out” trigger partial memories of my teachers as I return to the poems.
We are hardwired to connect, as a later poem in the book conjures Pound with this line: “The tree branch moving like a face in a crowd.” Of course, that same poem ends with “Cross this out,” but it’s too late, and that’s the point. By not holding to one thought, Ives triggers many; we become the writer and the reader of multiple poems. Anamnesis is a new reminder of the fluidity of our roles and our memories. The reader’s experience is not passive, and the stylistic choice to expose poems and the writing of them for what they truly are—decisions and regrets and half-truths—is refreshing.
Joe Betz is the 2009 Goldstein Prize winner judged by Paul Muldoon and a recent MFA graduate from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
QUOTED: "This is an important book."
lucy ives, “anamnesis”
Posted on Sunday 21 February 2010 by dbv
Lucy Ives
Anamnesis
(Slope Editions, 2009)
The premise of this book is laid out in its epigraph, by Vito Acconci: “Sometimes I draw the line on what I have dun.” Deleting the struck-through text, one is left with “o.”: a reminder that the poet can call forth through absence as well as through presence. Anamnesis is a book-length poem about not only writing by also unwriting: not erasure, but crossing out, leaving a record of thought. The book is divided into nine sections by pages that feature only a centered “+”, an interesting device: “+” can be the addition sign, but it might also be a crossed-out vertical line: a negated “I” as appears in the quoted Acconci?
Despite the promise of the epigraph, this is not a book that relies overtly on typographic trickery, though it is deeply engaged in the process of writing, a process that is reenacted in the text. This sounds like the overt premise for a fair amount of electronic writing: from William Gibson’s Agrippa on, it’s been a field fixated on the idea of the ephemerality of digital text. But the premise of good conceptual art is good ideas, not necessarily formal trickery, and it’s the ideas that Ives is interested in. (At the end of the day, “Agrippa” remains a rather bad poem written by William Gibson; while the concept is fine, the text seems incidental.) The way Anamnesis works is evident from its first stanza:
Suppose we write the sentence, “Paul had a very great mind”
Later we can return, strike through the word “mind” and write “brain”
Later we might add, before the word “had,” the words, “the owner of the restaurant”
We might add, “whose sign is the shape of a sleeping deer”
We could strike this sentence out entire
We could write, “Debt has become the watch word”
We’ll write, “Recommended for you”
But we can cross this out
Write, “My family has three members”
Strike through “has,” write “is”
Strike through “members,” write, “both my mother and father, in the apartment right now”
Strike through “right now,” write, ” in the mornings, noon, and in the evenings”
Strike “both” through
Write, “Lucy was saying that”
Strike the whole sentence
Taking the “we” at face value, we could attempt to follow these instructions, to create a sequence that starts like this:
Paul had a very great mind
Paul had a very great mindbrain
Paul the owner of the restaurant had a very great mindbrain
Paul the owner of the restaurant had a very great mindbrain whose sign is the shape of a sleeping deer
but already we have problems: which word does whose modify? The restaurant could have a sign in the shape of a sleeping deer; but it’s the personal noun Paul, rather than the restaurant that can be modified by whose. The whose clause can’t be inserted after Paul because the owner of the restaurant gets lost; it can’t be inserted after restaurant or brain because it would appear to modify those words, which would be ungrammatical. A solution would have to go beyond words themselves: but one notes that this is a book that purposefully doesn’t including periods, in an attempt to construct meanings out of words as words, unaided by that particular form of punctuation.
The commands to write and cross out are repeated through the book. The voice in this stanza is interesting: as something of an introduction, this stanza uses “we” in different tenses: “We write”; “We could write”; “We’ll write”. We seems to include both the speaker and the reader, inviting the reader into the text; but the shifting tenses make the relation of the reader to the speaker unclear. These might be mental exercises, à la Wittgenstein (“Suppose we write”); or they might be future plans (“We’ll write”). By the next stanza, “we” has turned to “you”: “You can write”. Unadorned imperative forms with an implied you become the rule: “Write”; “Cross out”. The reader must make his own space in the text, deciding whether these commands apply to him. There are limits to the reader’s power: following the instructions will only go so far. This is a “writerly text,” as Roland Barthes would have said.
I’m not trying to suggest that the reader is excluded from the book: I don’t think that’s the case at all. Rather, the reader is invited to be a part of the process as something is created by writing and effacing. Another electronic project comes to mind: Brad Paley’s CODeDOC, a program which reflexively visualizes itself while being run. The difference between this and Agrippa might be instructive: there’s an economy of means in CODeDOC, in that the code is the poem, rather than being something separate from (and more interesting than) the poem. Ives’s book contains its own mechanism: everything is done with words.
I feel like I might be unjust to the book by drawing these comparisons to electronic writing; other comparisons could as easily, and perhaps more fruitfully, be drawn. To J. L. Austin, of course, to Barthes and Blanchot, through both of them back to Mallarmé. Marjorie Welish’s recent work – I’m thinking of Word Group and Isle of the Signatories might be another useful point of reference: Welish, with her strong visual sense, is similarly interested in the word on the page and how meanings change without being a concrete poet. And beyond the focus on the process of writing and re-writing, there’s also the problem of how we use writing: as this book moves on, it becomes slowly less imperative and more a consideration of life: of how one does things, thinks about them, records them. This is an important book: I’ll come back to it.