Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Mobius Strip Club of Grief
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
husband, the poet Ben Pease. co-founder and editor of Monk Books, monkbooks@gmail.com, http://monk-books.com/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| ontrol no.: | n 2012000495 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2012000495 |
| HEADING: | Stone, Bianca |
| 000 | 01263cz a2200169n 450 |
| 001 | 8867131 |
| 005 | 20140102093415.0 |
| 008 | 120104n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2012000495 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC |e rda |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3619.T65643 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Stone, Bianca |
| 670 | __ |a Sophocles. Antigonick, 2012: |b CIP t.p. (illustrated by Bianca Stone) |
| 670 | __ |a Someone else’s wedding vows, 2014: |b CIP t.p. (Bianca Stone) |
| 670 | __ |a 12-31-13 e-mail to T.Ross, Tin House Books: (Bianca Stone is not the same as Biana Rossini no2009147703); see her website: http://www.poetrycomics.com/p/about.html) |
| 670 | __ |a http://www.poetrycomics.com/p/about.html; “BIANCA STONE grew up in Vermont, and graduated from NYU’s Creative Writing Program. She is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), several poetry and poetry comic chapbooks, and is also the illustrator of Antigonick, (a collaboration with Anne Carson). Her poems have appeared in magazines such as American Poetry Review, Tin House, and Crazyhorse. She lives in Brooklyn; Poetry Comics is a space created by Bianca Stone, to explore the relationship between poetry and visual art, as well as presenting new exciting news in the poetry world”) |
| 953 | __ |a rg09 |b xk20 |
PERSONAL
Born 1983 in Burlington, VT; married Ben Pease (a poet); children: Odette.
EDUCATION:New York University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and visual artist. Ruth Stone Foundation, Goshen, VT, codirector. Monk Books, cofounder and editor.
WRITINGS
Has published poems, poetry comics, and nonfiction in a variety of magazines, including Poetry, jubilat, and Tin House Magazine. Has also published chapbooks.
SIDELIGHTS
Bianca Stone, a poet and artist, received her master of fine arts from New York University and then moved with her husband, poet Ben Pease, back to her native Vermont. There she and Pease took over the directorship of the Ruth Stone Foundation and founded Monk Books. Ruth Stone was a poet who lived in Vermont and published thirteen books of poetry. At the foundation’s website, the mission statement states that the foundation “serves to fulfill Ruth Stone’s wish that her physical and literary estate would be used for the furthering of poetry and the creative arts.” Ruth was Bianca’s grandmother. Through Monk Books, founded in 2009, Stone and Pease have developed the Ruth Stone House Reader, a yearly anthology of chapbook-length collections by four poets—all of whom are given residencies to conduct their work. Stone herself has illustrated or written several books, chapbooks, and “poetry comics.”
Antigonick
Antigonick, the Sophocles play known more commonly as Antigone, was translated by Anne Carson and illustrated by Stone. The tragedy follows the main character, Antigone, who is the daughter of Oedipus—born through the incest of Oedipus with his mother, Jocasta. A critic in the New Yorker thought that Stone’s “enigmatic illustrations” did not serve the “light, swift” poetry of the translation. Emily Stokes underscored and amplified this opinion in the Guardian (London, England), remarking that the illustrations were a “surreal assortment of icy landscapes, domestic interiors, gothic houses, unravelling spools of thread, precarious staircases and drowning horses” that “relate only occasionally to what is happening in the play.” A reviewer writing in Books & Culture, however, commented: “The drawings, on semi-transparent pages overlaying the text, depict bleak landscapes, mundane interiors, and hopeless figures, like panicking horses and three cheerleaders standing listlessly in a row, with cement blocks in place of heads. Colors are sparse, and in places almost random-looking. These illustrations … are impressive.”
Rebecca Bates, in her critique in Guernica, found the entire book “an art object unto itself.” Carson wrote the book by hand, largely in black ink interspersed with red portions. She also observed: “Stone’s illustrations are devastating in their own right and are essential to completing the world of disarray in which Carson’s nightmare interpretation of Antigone takes place.” The blocks drawn in the place of heads, Bates claimed, lend the illustrations “magic … from the complete anonymity of the figures depicted.” The “images’ anonymity,” she pointed out, “is central to Carson’s text.” In the Globe & Mail, Ewan Whyte noted that “at first appearance, it looks like a graphic novel of outsider art,” with “illustrations [that] are immediate and visceral.” Dan Kois, writing in Slate, called Antigonick a “beautiful, bewildering book, wondrous and a bit scary to behold, that gives a reader much to think about.”
Someone Else's Wedding Vows and The Möbius Strip Club of Grief
Stone’s next book is Someone Else’s Wedding Vows. her first full-length poetry collection. In Heavy Feather Review, M. Forajter explained that this book “explores the self from a distance in order to construct a clearer view of its movements and position within the larger world.” The poems “flow as if from dream to dream” with “bits of the everyday … tangled up with the surreal logic of visions.” In total, Forajter concluded, “If you enjoy the trend of quietly surreal poems, soaked with tender reflections on the domestic, then these poems are for you. If you are looking for something more radical, something that will change the chemical make-up of your bones, you may have to turn somewhere else.” According to Analicia Sotelo, in American Microreviews and Interviews, the collection is one of”astronomically good poems … written with a straightforward, metered gravity that will immediately let you in.”
Online at Bookslut, J.P. Poole called Someone Else’s Wedding Vows “enviably good.” The critic found a ” kinship with Emily Dickinson.” Stone is likewise “fascinated with domestic life, its quietness, and … sort of ‘loaded gun’ sexuality.” Poole lamented the lack of illustration from this talented artist but recognized that the “danger of including illustrations in a book of poems is that they inform the work too much or not enough.” Poole summarized: “She isn’t accessible in a way that is overly easy to understand, but she also isn’t so out there than no one but a student of the classics can parse her—she’s just the right amount of mystery and relatability; she’s one to watch out for.” In Colorado Review, Kent Shaw described the world of these poems: “A world emphasized by imaginative potential and explanation. An exaggerated world. A world on the verge of detonation.” He concluded: “Big love, the kind of love continually appearing in Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, is the kind of love that will be lived with for years, that will be analyzed and exploded and breathlessly evaded only to be breathlessly clutched at too tightly. How is the imagination not the natural part of a process like this?”
Stone next wrote The Möbius Strip Club of Grief. In this collection—whose title harks back to Ruth Stone’s poem “The Möbius Strip of Grief”—Stone acts as a sort of guide through the land of the dead for those still living. In Publishers Weekly a critic described the book as an exploration of “grief, familial connection, and the small things that sustain life” using a “confessional voice with humor and portentous imagery.” Lauren Kane reviewed the book at Paris Review, explaining that Stone “is our Virgilian guide through a wildly conceived purgatorial landscape.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Bo0ks & Culture, July-August, 2012, Sarah Ruden, review of Antigonick, p. 38.
Publishers Weekly, November 20, 2017, review of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, p. 70; February 3, 2014, review of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, p. 35.
New Statesman, July 2, 2012, Olivia Laing, “Such a Devoted Sister,” review of Antigonick, p. 52.
ONLINE
American Microreviews and Interviews, http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/ (March 5, 2018), Analicia Sotelo, review of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows.
Bianca Stone Website, http://www.poetrycomics.org (March 22, 2018).
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (May 1, 2014), J.P. Poole, review of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows.
Cold Front, http://coldfrontmag.com/ (August 20, 2013), Timothy Liu, review of Antigonick.
Colorado Review, http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/ (March 5, 2018), Kent Shaw, review of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows.
Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/ (August 24, 2012), Alex Dueben, author interview.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (June 27, 2012), Amanda Shubert, review of Antigonick.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) http://www.globeandmail.com/, (June 23, 2012), Ewan Whyte, review of Antigonick.
Guardian (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 8, 2012), Emily Stokes, review of Antigonick.
Guernica, https://www.guernicamag.com/ (July 13, 2012), Rebecca Bates, review of Antigonick.
Heavy Feather Review, https://heavyfeatherreview.com/ (June 12, 2014), M. Forajter, review of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows.
New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/ (June 27, 2012), review of Antigonick.
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (June 25, 2012), review of Antigonick.
Paris Review, https://www.theparisreview.org/ (December 1, 2017), Lauren Kane, review of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief.
Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (August 7, 2012), Harriet Staff, brief author profile.
Poet.org, https://www.poets.org/ (March 22, 2018), brief author profile.
Ruth Stone Foundation, http://ruthstonefoundation.org/ (March 23, 2018).
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (September 7, 2012), Dan Kois, review of Antigonick.
Times Literary Supplement, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/ (August 1, 2012), George Steiner, review of Antigonick.
Bianca Stone
http://www.poetrycomics.org/
Hillery Stone
Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Books, 2016), and multiple chapbooks. She is also a contributing artist for a special edition of Anne Carson's Antigonick. With her husband, the poet Ben Pease, Stone co-edits the small poetry press Monk Books, and with Pease is executive director of The Ruth Stone Foundation, an organization dedicated to the furthering of poetry and the arts and the preserving Ruth Stone's legacy and house in Vermont.
Bianca Stone
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Bianca Stone
Bianca Stone is the author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief, forthcoming in February 2018 from Tin House Books, and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), and is also the illustrator of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012), a collaboration with Anne Carson. She runs the Ruth Stone Foundation in Vermont and New York City.
A Bianca Stone interview
BY Alex Dueben Aug 24, 2012
Bianca Stone isn’t a name familiar to most comics readers; in fact she’s better known to poetry aficionados. The author of multiple chapbooks of poetry, this year Stone released I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You Beautiful Mutant, a collection of poetry comics that Stone wrote and illustrated. While she occasionally adapts short poems from other writers, she mostly illustrates her own work. This year she also worked with the great translator Anne Carson and the designer Robert Currie on the book Antigonick which was released this summer. A translation of the play by Sophocles, it’s one of the best designed books of the year with hand-written text and translucent vellum pages contributing to a unique reading experience. I reached out to Stone to talk about poetry, art, the interplay between text and image and working with Anne Carson. This interview was conducted over e-mail in June and July, 2012.
TCJ: What are Poetry comics?
Bianca Stone: Sequential art that uses poetry as the text. But there are so many variations. Some examples are very abstract, some more traditional and more obvious than comic strips/graphic novels, with text that is clearly poetry (sometimes well-known published poetry). I use that term because it fits the best with what I’m doing. An artist named Dave Morice has been doing them for a long time, and actually published a book “Poetry Comics.” I was excited to find that, but it’s a much different thing than I was doing. I like how everyone who does it is very different. I use the term Poetry Comics for a much broader sense. I’m very interested in pushing against the limits of what a comic can be. There are so many aspects of the comic book, and the comic strip, that offers itself so readily to poetry. Things like panels, gutters, lettering; the conscious choices made regarding empty space on the page vs. the text; timing, line breaks, condensed language, etc. There’s so much to play with.
In my work I prefer to have the images move away from literal illustration of what the text is saying. I want to use the image as another element of form in poetry—to have the image offer more space for the reader to interpret and create meaning on their own. I almost exclusively make poetry comics of my own writing for this very reason.
TCJ: Talk a little about where this idea first came from and how they’ve evolved over the time you’ve been composing them?
Bianca Stone: My family are all writers and artists, so for as far back as I can remember I’ve written poetry, and also been confident in my art. However, I never particularly put the two together and called it something. I was always plagued by the idea of having to choose one or the other in my career path, and poetry was what I “chose” as the focus of my studies and profession. I wanted to keep up with my art, and when I was in graduate school at NYU’s MFA program in poetry (class of 2009), I had some professors that really pushed me in the right direction in this regard. Anne Carson’s class on collaboration was one of the first opportunities to use poetry comics as a legitimate element of my studies. It was natural to combine them in a class on “collaboration” where we were supposed to each get together in groups each week and come up with ways to collaborate. The poet Matthew Rohrer was really the person who encouraged me with Poetry Comics. He introduced me to a lot of great things and we did a whole independent study in it together. Another person is Matthea Harvey, who is a big advocate of poetry comics, and really inspired me. Although she didn’t teach at NYU, she was in and out all the time and sent me a package of some of the materials she used in her Poetry Comics class. Over the years I’ve developed, of course. I’ve started using almost exclusively watercolor paper and a calligraphy pen and ink; I’ve been using more color, and experimenting with paint. Now I always have a bunch of whiteout on hand now, since I only use ink, and that’s become a whole new element to my medium. Some big influences in my Poetry Comics come from Peanuts, Edward Gorey, Maira Kalman, Joe Brainard, Swamp Thing, Batman comics, Ralph Steadman, Scott McCloud’s books on comics, Marlene Dumas, Henry Darger, to name a few...
TCJ: That was an interesting list of influences you rattled off. I could have guessed Steadman and Kalman. I would have guessed Gorey just because of your sense of humor, but what was it about Swamp Thing?
Bianca Stone: Swamp Thing is obviously a far cry from my work. But still, I felt it creeping into my mind when I worked. I alluded to it in a few poems too. It’s important to allow influences into our work, even if they seem completely different. For whatever reason they resonate with us artistically, and push us in new directions.
TCJ: Do you read many comics nowadays?
Bianca Stone: Yes, of course. I’m always trying to find new things. I just finished “LINT,” from the ACME Novelty Library, which I liked a lot. I bought Alison Bechdel’s new memoir about her mother, and have been reading the Sandman series, although I’m kind of in the middle about Gaiman. I endlessly read Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. I just finished Ben Katchor’s strange, grey, text-heavy The Cardboard Valise. His work is so interesting. I downloaded this Comixology app, and although it’s strange reading comics in this way, I’ve been enjoying the Crisis on Infinite Earths and Batman. When I talk to some of my friends who are real comic book buffs, I’m clearly low on the knowledgeable scale, but that’s always how it goes. I like to read lots of different kinds of things, and I’m still learning. I love it when people recommend things to me. It’s always fun going into the comic book store and asking the workers there. People have strong feelings about what they like and what’s worth getting into, and it’s great to hear them talk about it.
TCJ: The Poetry Foundation actually had an exhibition, “Verse, Stripped” in Chicago recently. What did the exhibition consist of and what was the experience like?
Bianca Stone: I was thrilled to be a part of that. There are some real poetry-comic advocates at Poetry Foundation! Some friends and I put a little panel at NYU together last year of Poetry And Visual Artists. I think that Poetry Foundation must have known about it because three of us who were doing it are in the exhibition, Sommer Browning, Paul Tunnis, and myself. I had just had my first official comic published with Factory Hollow Press, and so they used the whole second half of that comic book in the exhibition. The Poetry Foundation website is really doing a lot of amazing, innovative things.
TCJ: You spoke a little about how the poetry community has embraced poetry comics, but have you or others had much interaction with the comics community?
Bianca Stone: I don’t know about other people, but for me, not much. I would love to interact more with the comics community, which is strong in NYC. When I lived in Williamsburg I went a lot to this great little comic book shop called Desert Island. They have a ton of small press comic book stuff; zines, and local artist’s works. I met Gabrielle Bell there, who was doing a signing, which was really exciting. A few times I’ve have readings/Poetry Comic showing with comic book artists, recently at this “Second Comics/Illustrations benefit” with Julia Wertz, Josh Neufeld, and Marcie Paper. And once I did a reading with Sarah Gidden, and Lisa Hanawalt. I was really taken with Lisa’s style. I wish the worlds would collide more, but they do somewhat.
TCJ: Talk a little about your recent collection of poetry comics, I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You Beautiful Mutant, which is a heck of a title by the way.
Bianca Stone: At the time I was reading about the importance of mutation in human evolution, and how we evolved from cell mutation. Suddenly everything was very X-Men feeling. It felt inspiring for a love poem. I’m thrilled with how Factory Hollow (Emily Pettit, Guy Pettit and Dara Wier, all amazing poets) have been with making the comic. Emily has been rallying me on with my art since I first met her, and was kind enough to take this on. (She, too has done some awesome poetry comic stuff, and does amazing photography of tiny furniture, as well as stop animation). We’re going to have the Poetry Comic periodically, it’s like my dream-come-true. I wanted it to look like a real comic book, like you’d by in the dime store. I like that it looks like a classic comic book, but you open it up and it’s something so very untraditional.
TCJ: Do you think differently about writing a poem that is accompanied by illustration and one that simply stands alone on a page?
Bianca Stone: Yes, of course. Everything changes when there’s an image. Recently in a review of Antigonick by Chrissy Williams, quoted John Berger saying “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” We react differently to the pictorial. It can be dangerous, because you’re giving the reader an interpretation of the text, essentially. And there is never one narrative interpretation. For that reason I want to move away from illustrating what is “happening” in the poem, because what’s happening in the poem, isn’t necessarily what is happening, in your mind or in the poem, while you’re reading it. I believe the creation of the poem happens in this way, which is why having a readers of your work is important: for the poem to really exist it needs to be invented by the reader. This is why I try to create a visual element of the poem that is immediate, but not redundant. I don’t want to tell people how to read the poem via my images, which is how the naturally look to images: for explanation. But I also don’t want to shut the reader out completely with over-conceptualizing it. I want them to read the poem as they would words alone, and have the images naturally weave in and out, and to feel right, but not to be entirely definitive. The practical function of art and text together is not exactly what happens with poetry comics, or with Antigonick. Rather, words become a functioning element of the art, and vice versa.
TCJ: Now I don’t expect to see you filling in an issue of Green Lantern next month, but do you have any interest in crafting a comic that’s more narrative-driven than the poetry comics you’ve made?
Bianca Stone: I’ve definitely done narrative things, but nothing on a larger scale; nothing clean and “finished”. My boyfriend is reading a lot of Green Lantern right now, and Crisis of Infinite Earths series, which I’ve been enjoying too. I really want to do a narrative comic. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. My next big project is just that: I want to make a long collection that weaves in an out of poetry comics and narrative vignettes that tell an overall story. There’s so much power in narrative that can get lost in the experimental. It’s the same with poetry in general. I think direct-narrative can be very important in poetry, and it’s somewhat out of style. I’m probably never going to do a traditional superhero series or anything, but I love fantasy so much that when I do finally do a narrative-driven work I’ll absolutely include a lot of inhuman characters and invented worlds.
That said, now I kind of want work with a superhero...
TCJ: You have a new chapbook of poetry, I Saw the Devil with His Needlework. Talk a little about what you’re trying to do with this book.
Bianca Stone: It’s a tiny exploration of the vastly different results of how we love. In particular, to do with men. Matthew Doddona wrote a nice review here and said of the poems: “the result is a memorable field guide into the unreasonable acts of love....Stone’s aesthetic comes in leveling the playing field, deriving these poems from the fickleness of masculine/feminine relations and pleading collusion, only offering a more tender way to understand these coalescent acts.” I agree with that.
TCJ: When I spoke with Ms. Carson she mentioned that you had taken the class that she and Robert Currie taught at NYU, Egocircus. Could you talk a little about what that class was and the experience?
Bianca Stone: It wasn’t called Egocircus when I was there....it was officially Poetry and Collaboration. I love the name Egocircus. Anne Carson and Robert Currie had just come to NYU. I was just getting to know her work and loving it. The class was fun, and sometimes frustrating (but collaboration is always frustrating at times). I think Egocircus is a good name for it. Everyone was a little unsure at first how we would collaborate. A lot of people never thought you could do something like that, or use any other genre or media in poetry. It’s very liberating to have a someone like Anne come in and let us go wild. It can be very reparative and stiff sometimes in the poetry workshop, I was very, very grateful to have her.
TCJ: How did you get involved with Antigonick?
Bianca Stone: After graduation, Anne Carson, Robert Currie and I discussed a few times doing a collaboration. We’d talked once about doing a comic book together. We were all interested in experimenting with the form. It evolved from there, and took a long time to figure out the final vision for the book with New Directions. It started out as a small enterprise, with short selections from Antigonick, and, to my joy, eventually became the whole of Anne’s translation, and much bigger beast.
TCJ: To what degree did Ms. Carson and Mr. Currie have a clearly defined idea of what the book would be and look like before you came on board and part of your job was to help create that vision, or did you have more freedom than that?
Bianca Stone: We all had vague ideas, but they really wanted to let me explore on my own. I had a lot of freedom. Anne and Currie wanted me to move away from the figure, from the character. It was great for me, because that’s not entirely my thing to illustrate an entire story with many different, specific characters. However, the human figure has always been very important in my work, so it was a challenge to move away from it. They gave me some pictures of Iceland landscapes that they had taken, and a wanted me to use them somehow. So I did a lot of landscapes, which was daunting at first, but once I got going I was very pleased with them. I also used a lot of animals and furniture to express the human emotion of the play. Essentially my job was just to draw 30 images. Which I did most of staying with the poet Emily Pettit and confining myself to her study so I could get them all done.
TCJ: I ask this specifically because I’m thinking of the text and had they already decided how the text would be laid out on the pages or was that decided after the artwork was completed?
Bianca Stone: Robert Currie designed the book and decided that I wouldn’t see the written text until I was done with the images. We assembled them together afterwards to see how they randomly came together. It was so fun and amazing to see how they did come together. He’s brilliant at assembling and conceptualizing and randomizing.
TCJ: Ms. Carson has said in the past that she thinks of herself as a visual artist more than a writer and was once quoted as saying “Homer’s a poet. I would say I make things.” And I’m just curious about your thoughts on this having worked with her.
Bianca Stone: It’s really amazing to see Anne Carson and Robert Currie collaborating with all these different artists. They do a lot of performance pieces with people. About a month ago I saw a performance of NOX, where they both drew on the wall over a dancer with projectors, while a recording of Anne reading from NOX played. It was wonderful. I think Anne is a writer who rejects the static, allowing for the work to be continuously created. She writes, yes, but she knows that that is only a fraction how one interacts with an idea. Once a work is written, she keeps making it. She has a complex mind, without being hyper academic. Her way of interacting with text is incredible, it goes beyond translation, beyond poetry and essay; she makes it bigger somehow, we enter in through a different door. I think what she said about Homer is entirely accurate, in her quietly genius way. She is never one fixed thing, but always moving, and insisting that we continuously invent.
Bianca Stone is a writer and visual artist. She was born and raised in Vermont and moved to New York City in 2007 where she received her MFA from NYU. She collaborated with Anne Carson on Antigonick, a book pairing Carson’s translation of Antigone with Stone’s illustration and comics (New Directions, 2012). Stone is the author of the poetry collection Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, (Tin House Books and Octopus Books, 2014) and Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours (Pleiades Press, 2016) and most recently, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018). Her poems, poetry comics, and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines including Poetry, jubilat, and Tin House Magazine. She has returned to Vermont with her husband and collaborator, the poet Ben Pease, and their daughter Odette, where they run the Ruth Stone Foundation and letterpress studio.
The Career Manifesto: Discover Your
Calling and Create an Extraordinary
Life
Publishers Weekly.
264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p82. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Career Manifesto: Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life Mike Steib. TarcherPerigee, $18 (288p) ISBN 978-0-14312-934-9
Steib, CEO of the XO Group media company, taps into the frustration overachievers feel when their career trajectories fall short in this motivating and action-oriented guide. Steib identifies what he calls the five pillars of success, namely purpose, plan, productivity, people, and presence. These five pillars, Steib asserts, will help readers reconfigure goals, increase productivity, and overcome obstacles both in and out of the office. To stimulate this transformation, he offers up a series of necessary steps, including "telling yourself the truth," "thinking for yourself," and "changing your stripes." He details exercises aimed toward gaining a sense of direction and control, such as creating "impact maps" and "happiness matrices." Steib's chapter on increasing productivity to the point of getting "10 times as much done" is particularly sharp and widely applicable, imparting beneficial advice on following effective habits such as generating "if-then" formulas, managing willpower, and systematically measuring results. In chapters devoted to "people," he explores "achieving impact with others" in various capacities, such as through networking, attending meetings, and collaborating on projects. For a brief discussion of "presence," Steib brings in insights from happiness studies. His book lays out a sound and logical approach, with easily applicable and customizable advice aplenty. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Career Manifesto: Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life." Publishers Weekly,
20 Nov. 2017, p. 82. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262119 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=403218ec. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
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The Mobius Strip Club of Grief
Publishers Weekly.
264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p70+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Mobius Strip Club of Grief
Bianca Stone. Tin House, $15.95 trade paper (112p) ISBN 978-1-941040-85-0
Balancing a confessional voice with humor and portentous imagery, Stone (Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours) explores grief, familial connection, and the small things that sustain life in her startling third collection. Readers encounter feuds with Anne Sexton's nieces and a hereafter where the dead perform for the living. But Stone's great achievements are two sequences that share an awed admiration for the female mind. The first, "I am Unfaithful to You with My Genius," is an ode to women writers and their "demon of genius--mad genius," inspiring the poet to devotion: "like Antigone I would ruin myself for you." The second, "Blue Jays," pays homage to the poet's mother, and by extension all women ("Mothers are all I have ever known"). Stone captures her mother's eccentricities and burdens with heartbreaking clarity: "your genius trapped like a moth on the screened-in porch of your pain." The book ends in a somber elegy for America--"I feel the phantom limbs of my predecessors/ waving in the air," Stone writes-putting an exclamation point on a collection that features a bravely vulnerable beating heart hidden beneath layers of irony and clever misdirection. Stone is the child of her muses, Sexton and Emily Dickinson, and it is an odd but delightful union. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Mobius Strip Club of Grief." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 70+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262072/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=01fc89a4. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262072
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Such a devoted sister
Olivia Laing
New Statesman.
141.5112 (July 2, 2012): p52+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Antigonick
Anne Carson (illustrated by Bianca Stone) Bloodaxe, 112pp, [pounds sterling] 15
It's ironic that the Canadian poet, academic and translator Anne Carson has chosen to concentrate her formidable attentions on dead languages. It's hard to think of a writer more committed to unspringing language from habitual usage, wrenching words back into an almost unnerving intensity. Unlike more cautious translators, she also likes to play with, not resolve, the problems of fragmentation associated with her period--an interest in absence that extends powerfully to her own hybrid work.
In the prickly, tender Autobiography of Red, she refashioned the myth of Geryon and the tenth labour of Heracles into a modern gay love story that works riddlingly around questions of possession, loss and desire. Her translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter, flaunts the gaps in the text, making eerie art out of the missing as well as the extant. And in her last publication, Nox, she created an extraordinary mourning document: a book in a box, which used Catullus's "Poem ioi" as the foundation for building a memorial of words and images to her dead brother.
There's a natural kinship between the heat of that work and Sophocles's Antigone, a play that centres on a sister's act of mourning and its horrific costs. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta: mother and son who were also, through ignorance, husband and wife. In Carson's version, her brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes, have fought and died on opposite sides of the Theban civil war. The city's new ruler, Kreon, has decreed that only Eteokles will receive burial, while Polyneikes will be left where he lies. Antigone cannot accept this and so she buries her brother herself, pouring dust and water on his body. In punishment, Kreon has her walled up in a cave, despite her eloquent defence and the pleadings of Haimon, his son and her husband-to-be. By the end of the play, both Antigone and Haimon have killed themselves, along with Eurydike, Kreon's wife.
After Antigone has been taken away by the guards, the chorus usually runs through precedents to the terrible punishment awaiting her. Instead, Carson furnishes them with strophe and antistrophe on the similarity between a Greek chorus and a lawyer, ending by concluding flatly, as Sophocles doesn't: "It's Friday afternoon/there goes Antigone to be buried alive/is there/any way/we can say/this is normal/.../no not really." Likewise, when. Eurydike, Kreon's wife, enters the stage to give her single speech, she introduces herself as being "like poor Mrs Ramsay who died in a bracket of To the Lighthouse she's the wife of the man whose moods tensify the world".
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These discontinuities are enhanced by Bianca Stone's distinctive, riddling images, printed on transparent paper, so the hand-lettered words beneath ghost through. Horses, chairs, reels of cotton, faceless humans and objects that resemble both gates and ladders reappear in ingenious combinations. Many seem to signify entrapment; all convey a profound unease.
Before Kreon sentences Antigone, they debate which is greater, natural or city law. Infuriated, Kreon brandishes an ugly phrase: "Enemy is always enemy alive or dead." It's not hard to see why a play so deeply concerned with war and individual morality might have remained in currency. Antigone has been so influential in western culture that in 1984 George Steiner was moved to compile Antigones, his examination of its representations in theatre, art and literature. Brecht had his Antigone perform with a door strapped to her back, while in The Burial at Thebes Seamus Heaney made sharp parallels with the Troubles.
But why the nick? Early on, Kreon appears in the "nick of time". The phrase crops up again, gathering momentum. It also seems to be represented in Stone's images of a figure passing through a cleft of rock. This is where Carson's best work is staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of power-boats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.
Laing, Olivia
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Laing, Olivia. "Such a devoted sister." New Statesman, 2 July 2012, p. 52+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A297717286/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=495f1e48. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A297717286
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Someone Else's Wedding Vows
Publishers Weekly.
261.5 (Feb. 3, 2014): p35. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Someone Else's Wedding Vows
Bianca Stone. Tin House/Octopus Books (PGW, dist.), $14.95 trade paper (78p) ISBN 978-1-935639-74-9
Stone's debut offers a captivating mix of lyric and grit, juxtaposing Latinate and colloquial diction in unexpected combinations. Stone is an accomplished visual artist (having illustrated, among other books, Anne Carson's Antigonick), and the penetrating playfulness in her visual work is also present in her poetry, establishing the breadth of the speaker's intellect and imagination while undermining poetic tropes, as in the closing lines of "What It's Like" ("There isn't even/ a sky. And there isn't even a sky behind that") or in "Driving Our New Car" ("I looked in the mirror this morning and I felt my age/ like a tremor from a distant fundraiser"). Each of her introspective speakers is witty and worldly, with a descriptive eye; each celebrates the machinations and mechanics of contemporary America: "Under the simulated/ middleclass environment/ of the fuselage/ the snow was falling." Familial and romantic attachment are central to the collection's thematic concerns, which Stone explores without sacrificing her interest in the universal, evolutionary, and metaphysical. In "Elegy with Judy Garland & Refrigerator," the speaker reflects, "I stand looking at the milk, the rack, the maple,/ and I realize grief wants me to stay/ a child, negotiating a stream of atoms,/ picking flowers. Grief wants me in good condition." Stone's poems astutely and honestly address the longing and cost of human connections. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Someone Else's Wedding Vows." Publishers Weekly, 3 Feb. 2014, p. 35. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A378681305/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=67315e86. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A378681305
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Antigonick
The New Yorker.
88.18 (June 25, 2012): p69. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
This new version of Sophocles' "Antigone" features hand-inked blocks of text, many of which are overlaid with color drawings on translucent vellum pages. Unfortunately, Stone's enigmatic illustrations, often showing people with cinder blocks instead of heads, do not always add much to the proceedings. The real attraction is Carson's translation. Though there are moments of preciousness-- Antigone and Ismene quote Hegel--her poetry is light, swift, and beautiful. Kreon decrees that Antigone's traitorous brother Polyneikes, dead after an unsuccessful attack on Thebes, should be left "to lie unwept and / unburied sweet sorrymeat for the little lusts / of birds." The siege of Thebes is brilliantly rendered in a single verse: "Seven gates / and in each gate a man / and in each man a death / at the seventh gate."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Antigonick." The New Yorker, 25 June 2012, p. 69. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A294369742/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ffb0d6c0. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A294369742
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Tragedy privatized
Books & Culture.
18.4 (July-August 2012): p38. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Christianity Today, Inc. http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Full Text:
Who's old enough to know this joke?
Q: Where does a five-hundred-pound gorilla sleep?
A. Am where lie wants.
To me, Anne Carson is a literary gorilla--exotic, powerful, yet arousing at protective instinct in my homey breast. I say a genius writes anything she wants. Alas.
In Antigonick, Carson's new translation of Sophocles' Antigone, the brightness--I think that's really a fair term--of the original tragedy is erased. It is erased with gall of Carson's verve and authority, but the result is still so distressing that brought to a conundrum: If this is literature now the most heightened version of reality, then I prefer refer the fantasy of the 1 lam Potter books, Jar what it's worth, which is roughly nothing. But who cares what I prefer? The gorilla is last asleep across my legs, but that's, well, lust a fact on the ground.
Carson's publications--poems, translations, essays, all enriched by if not based on her expertise in Classical Creek--tend toward the exquisitely visual and tactile. Her Nox [Latin for "Night"], on the death of her brother, is a paper-accordion scrapbook in a card-board library box of the kind that protects a fragile old book. I react to her books, to start with, with my senses. For Antigonick, that entails a comparison of the physical book with what I know about the outward experience of watching an Athenian tragedy.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The plays were part of national festivals open to all male--if not also female--citizens. The City Dionysia--the festival at which Antigone debuted, around 442 BC--also welcomed Foreigners and showed off Athens' wealth and culture to them. Festival plays, three of them back to back in a single day, took place in large outdoor theaters, in natural light. Rich men produced the dramas as a special gift to the commonwealth, competing in the magnificence of costumes, music dance, and of course the poetry that made tip the texts. Tragedians with the status of Major League pitchers today composed the poetry.
Aristotle's discussion, in the Poetics, of people like to see terrible things acted out is plausible enough in its psychology (the catharsis or emotional "cleansing" effected by pity and fear) but neglects the obvious for his era: watching tragedy was a pig party. We can acid to the psychology the notion of a defiant, life-affirming tension between the social, posh, in-control presentation of art and art's stories of doom. It's Schadenfreude without the shame, because the agony is fictional.
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To look at and sit with, Antigonick is vastly unlike historical Athenian tragedy. It is much emptier, narrower, and quirkier than even the ordinary modern book. On the cover is a blurry slice of a photo-- black and white except for the faint blue of what may be sand or snow--showing a distant figure between vertical text is made up of thick black and gray hand-drawn block letters--except that speeches are attributed in red to actors--with broken-off lines and a good deal of white space. The drawings, on semi-transparent pages overlaying the text, depict bleak landscapes, mundane interiors, and hopeless figures, like panicking horses and three cheerleaders standing listlessly in a row, with cement blocks ill place of heads. Colors are sparse, and in places almost random-looking. These illustrations--by Bianca Stone--are impressive. But their very impressiveness saps my will to live.
The translation--perhaps better classified as a "version" because of its liberties--is also fragmentary, whimsical, and arcane. (1) When Sophocles' original Antigone and her sister 'smell, King Oedipus' daughters through incest with his mother, meet secretly outside the city in the opening scene, they deplore their fan catastrophes and discuss what (if anything) they might do about the most recent one. After Oedipus blinded and exiled himself, the girls' brothers Eteocles and Polynices quarreled over the right to rule Thebes and were both killed when Polynices attacked the city unsuccessfully with an army of foreigners. Now Polynices' corpse lies rotting, because Creon, the children's uncle and the succeeding king, has forbidden the burial rituals that will assure the soul's due passage to the underworld. Carson's new Antigone and Ismene, before addressing any of these events, dispute whether Antigone's opening words about darkness, birth, and death allude to Samuel Beckett or to Hegel.
In all seriousness, I think its too had that there's hardly any follow-through on this gambit. As Hegel's famous disquisition on Antigone shows, the play does hold a great deal of philosophical interest--in fact, a more pointed, central interest for us than for the ancients. The Creeks and Romans were inclined to cite Socrates' trial and execution, not Antigone's insistence on burying her brother at any cost, as an example of conscience in defiance of the state, that staple of Western civilization. But at any rate, from its first performance the play would have provided a fair selection of abstractions to talk about.
It's a fable of hubris, like Oedipus the King, warning a democratic polity about the recklessness of concentrated power. Also like Oedipus, Antigone contains a "tragic bind": it is difficult to impossible to make a moral choice in the story's circumstances. Creon, in the aftermath of a plague in the city, the loss of a beloved tiller, and a combined civil war and invasion, may not feel able to spare a troublemaker like Antigone--but his punishment of her destroys his other niece, his son, and his wife. His brutal policies make the chorus--the "voice of society" in a tragedy--uneasy, but when Antigone marches with loud self-pity toward her living tomb, these fellow citizens prove, for the most part, sententious: they are on the king's side in this crisis.
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Like many other tragedies, Antigone is concerned with a contrasting female point of view, though-- again--the interest seems largely philosophical. Women have their distinct interests, to some degree sanctioned by heaven. They are in charge of preparing the dead for burial and can incur divine wrath for neglecting this task. But that merely places Antigone in her own tragic bind. Pace Hegel's thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, tragedy does not care much for reconciliation, or for ultimate, inclusive justice. The Athenian audience's satisfaction came from contemplating, not disputing, life's imbalances. The terrible steepness of these help keep the works meaningful and exciting for us.
Carson doesn't strikingly assist with this in Antigonick. The translation reaches a climax when Eurydice, Creon's wife, enters after Haemon, her son, has broken into Antigone his betrothed's living tomb and killed himself from grief at finding she has committed suicide. At this point in the original play, Antigone herself is all but forgotten amid the consequences of her death for the current royal family. (Critics have noticed how little time she has on stage in all, and how few lines, compared to Creon.) But Carson's Eurydice does not, like Sophoeles', concentrate on the loss of Haemon and disappear wordlessly to commit suicide when she confirms that he is dead. Instead, she reflects on the mystery of Antigone.
... THAT GIRL WITH UNDEAD STRAPPED TO HER BACK. A STATE OF EXCEPTION
MARKS THE LIMIT OF THE LAW THIS VIOLENT THING THIS FRAGILE THING TRY
TO UNCLENCH WE GOT HER A THERAPIST THIS POOR SAD MAN WITH HIS ODD
IDEAS, SOME DAYS HE MADE US SIT ON THE STAIRCASE ALL ON DIFFERENT
STEPS OR VIDEOTAPED US BUT WHEN WE WATCHED IT WAS NOTHING BUT SHADOWS.
FINALLY WE, EXPELLED HER WE HAD TO. USING THE LOGIC, OF FRIEND AND FOE
THAT SHE DENIES BUT HOW CAN SHE DENY THE RULE TO WHICH SHE IS AN
EXCEPTION
This comes across as the piercingly exact reality of a child with extraordinary gifts, whose parents can do nothing for her, either to convince her that she is not so different or to hurry the expression of her gifts. We can picture the child's embarrassed disgust with things she herself demanded in her
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frustration, things as disparate as a hike and therapy. And we can picture the family's confused, resentful mourning when she flees the scene of these mundane dramas outside her imagination's control.
"THE NICK OF TIME WHAT IS A NICK X I ASKED MY SON," says Eurydice and repeats the question before exiting, "BLEEDING FROM ALL ORIFICES." Well, what is a nick? Chance? Time? Damage? Androgyny? A significant person in Carson's life? A sound or verbal association such as she teases us with in Nov? The impenetrable individuality, if not self-involvement, of our best writers may be die real tragedy here.
In its tone, Carson's version is authentic to a brilliant degree, full of grim puns and unforgettable images to complement the drawings ("TONGUES [NAILED] TO THE FLOOR," for example, instead of just "curbed," as in the Creek--that metaphor has no power in modem English). There is nothing lofty or white-robed about Greek tragedy to preserve, and she has the gritty horror down pat. But she deprives us of tragedy's greatest comfort, which is that this story is about everybody.
(1.) I use the traditional spellings of the characters' names (simply in order to avoid contusion and wake reference easier for readers). Carson herself uses a set of updated transliterations that are technically more correct.
Antigonick (Sophokies)
Translated by Anne Carson
ILLUSTRATED BY BIANCA STONE * NEW DIRECTIONS, 2012 * UNPAGINATED * $24.95
Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Wesleyan University, where she has been translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her book Paul Among the People was recently released in paperback, and her translation of The Golden Ass, by Apuleius, was published earlier this year by Yale University Press.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tragedy privatized." Books & Culture, July-Aug. 2012, p. 38. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A295326106/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4f7eba3c. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A295326106
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Sublime and excellent
Ewan Whyte
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada).
(June 23, 2012): Arts and Entertainment: pR20. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 The Globe and Mail Inc.
http://www.globeandmail.com
Full Text:
Byline: EWAN WHYTE CLASSICS
Antigonick
By Sophokles
Translated Anne Carson Illustrated by Bianca Stone McClelland & Stewart, 162 pages, $29.99
In her updated rendition of the play she calls the Antigonick by Sophokles, Anne Carson fashions a protagonist with the headspace of a suicide bomber. Her Antigone is in love with the idea of martyrdom, and the fact that she is so public about it undermines her noble motives. Born from the incest of Oedipus, she has a cursed life, so this is a respectable way out for her. Carson highlights the aspect that she is more than slightly crazed when she responds to king Kreon's question: "And you with your head down you're the one?" With the one-word reply, "Bingo."
Based on a Theban legend, the original Antigone was written for the ancient Greek stage in Athens, where it was first performed in 441 BC. The Parthenon was nearing completion in that year and the large audience watching would look up to see the massive building in the background. At the time, King Kreon in the play could easily be associated with Pericles, the Athenian statesman who was ultimately responsible for the construction of the Parthenon and the ethically problematic formation of the Athenian empire. From the beginning, there were political overtones to this play. The German philosopher Hegel obsessed on this work and declared it in his Aesthetics to be "one of the most sublime and in every aspect most excellent works of art of all time."
In the play, Antigone ignores an edict forbidding the burial of her brother Polyneices, citing the sacred laws of the gods, and buries the body. Then, under King Kreon's order, she is locked in a mausoleum to starve to death.
Carson's work is more of a rewriting than a translation of the Sophoclean story. It is riveting and humorous. At one point, Kreon arrives with his new powerboat, "the ship of state" he claims to pilot in
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the play. At another point he calls the guard a goat's anus, a play on the word "tragedy" in Greek. It is full of such unexpected surprises and wordplay. However, it does cut out some of the balance of equal claims of the original. Antigone's valid claim of conscience overshadows King Kreon's claim of law. In deliberately presenting the story as Carson has, she shows an imbalance in the sentiment of our time. On a stage, this version could even be acted as a tragi-comedy.
As it is presented, it is a complete reading experience. The book begins and maintains itself with little punctuation. Given that was one of the problems with ancient texts, it is as though Carson is having fun with us. The book is also reproduced in Carson's own capitalized printed handwriting, which is at times difficult to read. The pages are deliberately not numbered. At first appearance, it looks like a graphic novel of outsider art. It is gutsy to present this as a fringe book. It makes the argument for the graphic novel saving the printed-book format alongside PDF books. Bianca Stone's illustrations are immediate and visceral, and Robert Currie's overall book design has elegance and strength.
It may be Carson has digested Plato's comment in the Laws when he says: "Strip what the poet has to say of its poetical colouring and you must have seen what it comes to in plain prose. It is like a face that was never really handsome when it has lost the fresh bloom of youth." Her poetry is an embodiment of the opposite of this. This is why her poetry will last in lines like this:
Kreon: "Late to learn o yes I am late too late o then o then some god slammed down on me a heavy weight some god shook me out on those rain roads alas for the joy of my life that I've trampled underfoot alas for us all going dark"
Ewan Whyte is a writer and translator living in Toronto. His work includes translations of the poetry of Catullus and the odes of Horace.
EWAN WHYTE
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Whyte, Ewan. "Sublime and excellent." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 23 June 2012, p. R20. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A294118809/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0a0b7c71. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A294118809
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A Möbius strip is a surface with only one side and one boundary. The easiest way to envision it is to imagine twisting a band of paper once and then taping the ends together. The title of Bianca Stone’s forthcoming collection, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, plays on the concept of this loop, which she writes, “cannot be / its own mirror image.” In this collection, the Möbius strip works as a metaphor for the unknowability of the afterlife, though the work is counterintuitively set in the bawdy, bodily space of a strip club. This combination is fantastically unsettling and sparks a serious meditation on grief and family, from a distinctly feminine perspective. Although Stone is working with a concept (one poem is called “A Topography of MSCOG”), there is nothing gimmicky or contrived about the poems in her imagined postmortem world. She populates her poems with characters that range from Emily Dickinson to her grandmother, and the result is the feeling that we are witnessing a soul’s intimate reckoning with life. Many poets have attempted to imagine the afterlife, and Stone’s addition to the tradition disrupts it in the best way: she is our Virgilian guide through a wildly conceived purgatorial landscape. —Lauren Kane
Antigonick
by Anne Carson, illustrated by Bianca Stone (New Directions)
This new version of Sophocles’ “Antigone” features hand-inked blocks of text, many of which are overlaid with color drawings on translucent vellum pages. Unfortunately, Stone’s enigmatic illustrations, often showing people with cinder blocks instead of heads, do not always add much to the proceedings. The real attraction is Carson’s translation. Though there are moments of preciousness—Antigone and Ismene quote Hegel—her poetry is light, swift, and beautiful. Kreon decrees that Antigone’s traitorous brother Polyneikes, dead after an unsuccessful attack on Thebes, should be left “to lie unwept and / unburied sweet sorrymeat for the little lusts / of birds.” The siege of Thebes is brilliantly rendered in a single verse: “Seven gates / and in each gate a man / and in each man a death / at the seventh gate.” ♦
Antigonick by Anne Carson - review
Anne Carson's take on Antigone is impressively powerful
Emily Stokes
Fri 8 Jun 2012 17.55 EDT
First published on Fri 8 Jun 2012 17.55 EDT
"How is a Greek chorus like a lawyer?" ask the chorus in Anne Carson's latest work, a translation of Sophocles' Antigone. "They're both in the business of searching for a precedent … so as to be able to say / this terrible thing we're witnessing now is / not unique you know it happened before / or something much like it." Such light-handed scholarship is characteristic of Carson, a poet interested in those moments when precedents can't be found and normal translations fail: "Now I could dig up those case histories, tell you about Danaos and Lykourgus and the songs of Phineas," they continue: "it wouldn't help you / it didn't help me / it's Friday afternoon / there goes Antigone to be buried alive."
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Carson, a poet influenced by authors as diverse as Sappho, Euripides, Emily Brontë, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, is known both for innovative translations of ancient texts and for her restrained but searing confessional poetry (try "The Glass Essay" or The Beauty of the Husband). Some of her best works merge her two roles: Nox, a facsimile of Carson's own scrapbook, presented the reader with notes for a translation of a Catullus' elegy for his brother, poem 101, alongside photographs and notes detailing the history of her own brother, Michael, who died after a long disappearance. Being scholarly and methodical, Nox suggests, has its limits: "Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light," she writes. "Human beings have no main switch."
For readers of Nox, in which Carson describes poem 101 as "a room I can never leave", there is something quietly horrific about Carson's choice of Antigone for a sequel – another difficult text about mourning a brother, in which the heroine is condemned to a living death in a sealed cave. The title is disconcerting, too. That "nick" is suggestive of a chipped ancient sculpture, a prison, a critical moment – or, as Carson's cast-list suggests, a ghostly presence: Nick is "a mute part [always onstage, he measures things]."
Antigonick, a "comic book" of Sophocles' tragedy, is one of Carson's strangest works. It dramatises its own eccentricity, evoking a portrait of the author in a state of distraction; the words of the translation are printed in handwriting (Carson's own), almost entirely without punctuation, in tiny capital letters that are both neat and a little frantic. The illustrations (by the artist Bianca Stone) are a surreal assortment of icy landscapes, domestic interiors, gothic houses, unravelling spools of thread, precarious staircases and drowning horses, which are printed on transparent vellum that overlay the text, and which relate only occasionally to what is happening in the play.
Antigone, the daughter of ill-fated Oidipus, whose brothers Eteokles and Polyneikes (Carson's own spellings), kill each other in battle, goes against her uncle Kreon's edict to leave Polyneikes unburied, knowingly inviting her punishment of death. She is a heroine who has been interpreted by critics in myriad ways: for Hegel, she represents the ethical value of the family against the state; for George Eliot, the strength of intellect against society; for Anouilh, during the French resistance, the rejection of authority. Woolf viewed her as a proto-feminist; others have called her a terrorist. Carson's cast has known them all: "Remember how Brecht had you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back?" asks the chorus. "We all think you're a grand girl," says Ismene, her sister.
Rather than offering a separate commentary to explain her text, Carson gives her characters their own. "This is Eurydike's monologue it's her only speech in the play," says Kreon's oft-overlooked wife. "You may not know who she is that's OK." She later offers an overview of Antigone's childhood – "we got her the bike we got her a therapist". It's a riff, perhaps, on Judith Butler's investigation into what might have happened had Antigone, rather than Oedipus, been the point of departure for psychoanalysis.
Like AE Housman's parodic "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy" ("ALCMAEON: I journeyed hither a Boetian road. CHORUS: Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?"), Antigonick conveys the nonsensical results of most translations of ancient Greek – the banality of stichomythia, the lists of question-words, the improbable coinages. When Kreon enters, he is "rowing his powerboat" – a mix-up of his favorite metaphor, the ship of state; Haemon interrupts an impassioned speech with a footnote: "There is talk there are shadows this girl here I posit a lacuna this girl does not deserve to die."
Readers who are not familiar with ancient Greek texts will most likely feel a bit alienated by all this, but unfamiliarity is, perhaps, the point. Unlike versions of Antigone that try to capture the drama's grandeur (such as Robert Fagles's translation for Penguin) or to make it relevant (including Don Taylor's version, currently at the National Theatre), Carson's aims to show the difficulty of translation, the truly "unbearable" nature of tragedy. The chorus's famous "Ode to Man", in which man is described as able to overcome everything but death, is, in Carson's telling, a bizarre mish-mash of worlds: "Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more / terribly quiet than man / his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea … and every Tuesday / down he grinds the unastonishable earth / with horse and shatter … Every outlet works but one / : Death stays dark."
The strangest thing about these lines is their power; even as Carson's translation teeters toward incomprehensibility, it conveys the compression of the ancient Greek, the fraught meaning of deinon (both "terrible" and "wondrous"). It captures, too, the rift between our everyday efforts to keep ourselves busy, and infinite tragedy: that raw nick between Tuesday and death. "You crack me you crack me open you crack me open again," wails Kreon as his fate descends upon him. When all the characters have left the stage, the only person remaining is Nick, "who continues measuring" – which is, after all, the only thing we terribly quiet customers can do.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/antigonick-anne-carson-review
Two Reviews of Anne Carson's "Antigonick," Pro and Con
By Harriet Staff
Two reviews of Anne Carson's Antigonick, which was released in May, reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian poet's non traditional translation. The first is mostly negative, hailing from the Times Literary Supplement. Calling the original "Antigone" the "most adult, unsparingly formal and radiant of masterpieces," the reviewer takes issue with Carson's "populist witticisms" scattered throughout the text.
...the voice-overs by Hegel, Virginia Woolf and Bertolt Brecht are a facile diversion. Kreon’s “new powerboat”, Antigone’s “Bingo”, her desire “to lie upon my brother’s body thigh to thigh” are vulgarities which subvert this most adult, unsparingly formal and radiant of masterpieces. Inspired by Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic but incomparable rendition, Heidegger declared the famous choral ode on the nature of man to be the foundational statement in Western civilization. Elizabeth Wyckoff’s version, one among so many, is lucidly attentive. Why Carson’s “customers” instead of “man”? Why this “hilarious cantering” or the all but total omission of the cardinal theme, that of the unhoused wanderer (apolis), outcast from the civic hearth – a theme which crystallizes the Sophoclean reading of the human condition?
However, the reviewer does make time for some praise, saying "at intervals, lightning does strike."
Guernica's review is more celebratory, and dwells on Bianca Stone's illustrations.
It may be tempting to dismiss the illustrations as merely quirky—one of the Chorus bears the Star Trek insignia on its chest, while elsewhere a figure wears a football helmet. But these touches serve to heighten the absurdity and dark humor of the senseless world Carson has created. Take, for example, the dictator of Thebes and arguably the true tragic character of the work. Forever refusing to heed the wisdom of others, Kreon relents at the last, only to find his family dead and his city in despair. However, Kreon’s is a tyranny beyond political power. He first enters the play with a decree: “Here are Kreon’s verbs for today: ADJUDICATE LEGISLATE / SCANDALIZE / CAPITALIZE” and, “Here are Kreon’s nouns: MEN / REASON / TREASON/ DEATH/ SHIP OF STATE / MINE.” Kreon is an autocrat of language; his words are his people’s words, because he declares it so. Indeed, when the Chorus reminds the despot that “mine isn’t a noun,” he replies simply, “It is if you capitalize it.”
This is what a Carson-infused lyricism looks like. The residue of our English teachers’ Antigone is there, but Carson and Stone have crafted something of an entirely new spirit. While the poet and her illustrator stray from the expected narrative, the tragedy of the work isn’t lost on anyone. The Chorus utters what is perhaps the most terrifying line, isolated on its own page: “Your soul is blowing apart.” It’s hard not to shudder.
Which side do you fall on? Read the full Guernica review here, and the full Times Literary Supplement review here.
Anne Carson’s Collapse of History
The author's Antigonick is an affecting interpretation of Sophocles' classic.
By Rebecca Bates
Anne Carson’s Antigonick opens with a sweeping declaration: “We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.” It’s the sort of thing we might expect from a traditional interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone—somber lines, death and destruction from the start. But, of course, this is Carson, and any sense of doom comes with a healthy dose of trickery. The poet/essayist/Classicist/translator-of-ancient-works immediately undercuts the mood with banter:
Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us
Ismene: Who said that
Antigone: Hegel
Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett
Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel
Perhaps, we think, this Antigone has something new to say.
Carson’s Antigonick is an art object unto itself, with the token handcraftsmanship readers will remember from Nox. Carson penned the whole work by hand in an all-capped scrawl with black ink, peppered throughout with fragments written in red. Loosely taking the form of a graphic novel, Antigonick features drawings on translucent vellum paper by Bianca Stone. Yet, rather than serving merely as a sideshow to the text, Stone’s illustrations are devastating in their own right and are essential to completing the world of disarray in which Carson’s nightmare interpretation of Antigone takes place.
Much of the drawings’ magic comes from the complete anonymity of the figures depicted. While Stone portrays members of the Chorus with human bodies, their heads are replaced with cinder blocks. They are literal blockheads, robbed of agency, incapable of doing little more than offer observations as the destruction of the play unfolds. Elsewhere, human forms become amorphous: a lone figure sits at the end of an empty dining room table, two androgynous bodies scowl at each other at the end of a bed. Essentially faceless, these figures are unrecognizable as anyone from the text. Is that Antigone and Ismene holding hands in the second plate? Which character stands in solitude at the center of a ravine?
The images’ anonymity is central to Carson’s text as well. Antigonick documents a collapse of history, where narratives are no longer strictly linear, but repeat endlessly. The Chorus laments Antigone’s death only insofar as she is a statistic: “Antigone Buried alive Friday afternoon / Compare case histories 7, 17 and 49 / Now I could dig up those case histories… / It wouldn’t help you / It didn’t help me / It’s Friday afternoon / There goes Antigone to be buried alive.” The horror is not simply that we allow the same atrocities to occur time and time again, but that we have resigned ourselves to this cycle and acknowledge our resignation half-heartedly.
It may be tempting to dismiss the illustrations as merely quirky—one of the Chorus bears the Star Trek insignia on its chest, while elsewhere a figure wears a football helmet. But these touches serve to heighten the absurdity and dark humor of the senseless world Carson has created. Take, for example, the dictator of Thebes and arguably the true tragic character of the work. Forever refusing to heed the wisdom of others, Kreon relents at the last, only to find his family dead and his city in despair. However, Kreon’s is a tyranny beyond political power. He first enters the play with a decree: “Here are Kreon’s verbs for today: ADJUDICATE LEGISLATE / SCANDALIZE / CAPITALIZE” and, “Here are Kreon’s nouns: MEN / REASON / TREASON/ DEATH/ SHIP OF STATE / MINE.” Kreon is an autocrat of language; his words are his people’s words, because he declares it so. Indeed, when the Chorus reminds the despot that “mine isn’t a noun,” he replies simply, “It is if you capitalize it.”
This is what a Carson-infused lyricism looks like. The residue of our English teachers’ Antigone is there, but Carson and Stone have crafted something of an entirely new spirit. While the poet and her illustrator stray from the expected narrative, the tragedy of the work isn’t lost on anyone. The Chorus utters what is perhaps the most terrifying line, isolated on its own page: “Your soul is blowing apart.” It’s hard not to shudder.
Rebecca Bates
Rebecca Bates is a senior editor at Sweet on Snapchat Discover and has written about culture, art, and books for Vice, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, The New Inquiry, NYLON, and elsewhere. She also coedits Powder Keg, a quarterly poetry magazine.
http://rebecca-bates.com
“How Is a Greek Chorus Like a Lawyer”
Artist Bianca Stone illustrates Anne Carson’s wondrous, frightening adaptation of Antigone.
By Dan Kois
1209_SBR_Antigonick
A page from Antigonick.
Illustration by Bianca Stone.
The poet and essayist Anne Carson is fascinated by the difficulties of translation—both the translation of ancient Greek to modern English (she is a professor of classics) and the translation of ancient ideas into modern thought. Her brilliant version of Sophocles’ Antigone, Antigonick, is both a commentary on the alien nature of Greek theater and a mournful rumination on all the ways Antigone’s story echoes through history.
But Antigonick is also a comic, in a way, punctuated by gorgeous watercolor-and-ink illustrations from the young artist Bianca Stone. Unlike a traditional graphic novel, where the illustrations work hand-in-hand with the text to tell the story, in Antigonick the art fights against Carson’s translation. Stone’s wild-eyed horses, distant figures in the snow, and cinderblock-headed figures are connected to Antigone’s story only in the most impressionistic, elliptical of manners. Indeed the art even literally obscures the words, printed as it is in full color on vellum pages overlaying Carson’s hand-lettered text.
The result is a beautiful, bewildering book, wondrous and a bit scary to behold, that gives a reader much to think about without making it clear how she should feel. The disturbing painting above appears just before Carson’s chorus mulls on the purpose of a chorus—a purpose that also applies to a translator, a writer, and an artist:
How is a Greek chorus like a lawyer
They’re both in the business of searching for a precedent
Finding an analogy
Locating a prior example
So as to be able to say
This terrible thing we’re witnessing now is
Not unique you know it happened before
Or something much like it
We’re not at a loss how to think about this
We’re not without guidance
Dan Kois Dan Kois
Dan Kois edits and writes for Slate’s culture department. He is writing a book called How to Be a Family and co-writing, with Isaac Butler, an oral history of Angels in America.
We’re very excited to have Bianca Stone illustrating the September issue of the Slate Book Review.
Previous SBR comics:
Only Skin by Sean Ford
Mind MGMT by Matt Kindt
Birdseye Bristoe by Dan Zettwoch
The Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra
Blue by Pat Grant
My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf
---
Antigonick by Anne Carson and Bianca Stone. New Directions.
See all the pieces in this month’s Slate Book Review.
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‘Antigonick,’ by Sophocles, translated by Anne Carson, illustrated by Bianca Stone
reviews | Tuesday, August 20th, 2013
COLDFRONT RATING: four
PUBLISHED BY: New Directions, 2012
REVIEW BY: Timothy Liu
“A MAN KNOWS NOTHING BUT HIS FOOT WHEN HE BURNS IT IN THE HOT FIRE”
Took me a few weeks (maybe months) to warm up to this new version of perhaps my favorite Greek Tragedy. Right away, the “nick” in the title Antigonick seems to auger for injury, i.e., to be cut or grazed, but also to be saved/rescued in the “nick of time,” which we as readers already know to be an impossibility when it comes to the curse on the house of Kreon. Nevertheless, it is a new millennial translation looking back across centuries into Time’s timeless abyss.
This Antigone has the feel of a graphic novel to it. The text is mostly hand-written in block letters by Anne Carson herself, perhaps in a kind of performance as pre-Gutenberg scribe if not a comic-book letterer (minus the thought balloons). Maybe what we have here is an Antigone dumbed-down for ADHD adolescents? There are a multitude of clever pleasures in Carson’s deployment of (white) space down the pages. Here is an example of fractured left/center/right “justification” previously unimagined in the history of Sophoclean translation:
Here I am reminded how the act of translation proceeds not only word by word but caesura by caesura, the necessity of isolated pauses in that collapse of the space/time continuum. Even the name “Antigone” dangling at the end of the page somehow splits visually into its monosyllabic morphemes: ANTI GONE, a figure for the act of recovery and restitution at stake at the core of our moral tale.
Took me awhile to embrace Bianca Stone’s “illustrations,” or rather, what to call them: associations? Spools of thread. Kitchen utensils. Banquet tables. Beds. Domestic prison cartoons but lacking the urgency and intensity of, say, a Louise Bourgeois? Human bodies juxtaposed with architectural columns (fragmentary ruins). Outhouses (waste). Boats (vehicles of escape from Kreon’s kingdom). Landscapes to get lost in (vanish into). If this Antigone were being staged, one can imagine Stone’s illustrations being projected onto a screen or scrim. I did start to enjoy how the vellum on which the images are printed fail to give way to easy transparencies: the images are not necessarily illustrations of the narrative per se but often exist in their own metaphorical valences.
Translation, then, as performance, even an act of defiance against rote expectations.
One starts to consider that this anachronistic Antigone might be not only for the 21st Century but perhaps for any century willing to consider what translation in our century might look like, a simultaneous double rendering of literary histories, even a reciprocal exchange. Sophocles has as much claim on us as Hegel, Beckett, Brecht and Virginia Woolf do on the Ancient Greeks, our translator might well be saying:
ANTIGONE: SOME THINK THE WORLD IS MADE OF BODIES SOME THINK FORCES I THINK A MAN KNOWS NOTHING BUT HIS FOOT WHEN HE BURNS IT IN THE HOT FIRE
ISMENE: QUOTING HEGEL AGAIN
ANTIGONE: HEGEL SAYS I’M WRONG
ISMENE: BUT RIGHT TO BE WRONG
Perhaps in our time, it is not possible to read Sophocles without also thinking about Hegel (even if we have never read either). Here I am reminded of a passage from Hegel’s The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline:
Nature is made of space and time, and is a process. When we stress its spatial aspect, we are aware of its objective nature; when we stress its temporal aspect, we become aware of its subjective nature. As we perceive it, nature is an unending and continuous process of becoming. Things arrive and depart within time, but they are also temporal—time is a way of existing.
Carson & Stone clearly enjoy the process of translation and illustration (and collaboration) in time. And the very existence of a Beckett or a Brecht in our century would surely alter any staging of Antigone one might encounter no matter what else one might have already seen. But what if Carson’s Antigonick were the one and only version an audience member/reader might ever encounter, that is, can any translation be definitive or are all translations merely supplemental to what has come before?
[ENTER EURYDIKE]
EURYDIKE: THIS IS EURYDIKE’S MONOLOGUE IT’S HER ONLY SPEECH IN THE PLAY. YOU MAY NOT KNOW WHO SHE IS THAT’S OK. LIKE POOR MRS. RAMSAY WHO DIED IN A BRACKET OF TO THE LIGHTHOUSE SHE’S THE WIFE OF THE MAN WHOSE MOODS TENSIFY THE WORLD OF THIS STORY THE WORLD SUNDERED BY HER I SAY SUNDERED BY HER THAT GIRL WITH THE UNDEAD STRAPPED TO HER BACK
By this late stage in the dramatic action, when Eurydike appears to rebuke Kreon shortly before she takes her own life (adding to that dizzying pile-up of corpses that seals the curse on this ill-fated house), we start to appreciate all the a-temporal layers that go into the making of this contemporary translation, what it takes to bring an ancient text “across” time and space, and what choices have to be made about all those undead ghosts carried on our backs, and where to finally set them down.
*
Antigonick – Anne Carson
by Amanda Shubert
[New Directions; 2012]
Antigonick is the newest book by the poet Anne Carson, and like Nox, the exquisite accordion book released by New Directions in 2010, it presents a new way of thinking about the book as a literary and artistic medium. A collaboration with illustrator Bianca Stone, Carson’s former student, and designer Robert Currie, who is credited as assisting with the design of Nox, Antigonick is an unconventional translation of Antigone, Sophocles’ tragedy about the willful, intractable girl who transgresses against her uncle the King of Thebes’ royal decree by burying her dead brother, a political traitor, according to the divine rites. The text is hand-lettered by Carson in black and red ink, and the color illustrations (they look like watercolor and ink, but the media aren’t recorded) are printed on vellum so that they overlay the text. The visual motif of a spool of thread runs through Stone’s illustrations, and like the thread the images are placed so they can get tangled up with the text. It’s a brave and interesting project, but one that, in spite of Carson’s fiercely intelligent creative instincts, doesn’t actually hold together.
If you’ve spent time with Carson’s work you know that as a translator she is unmistakably a poet. She’s done so-called straight translations from Latin and Greek, but much of her work is about the way translation never comes out straight at all, how it takes you inside of language instead as through a spectacularly winding corridor and into lushly spacious emotional possibilities. Her poetry is expressionistic (you see this in Antigonick), shot through with a spiritual turbulence and an almost violent sensitivity to experience, and the barbed edges of her lines can send shocks through you. It’s a little like reading Louise Glück in this way, but Glück’s images can feel so sharp they’re like switchblades through your imagination. Carson is just as emotionally uncompromising, but she’s wry and funny, too; the humor might be Beckettian in its existentialist stance, but it’s mischievous and it makes you laugh. As a poet and as a translator, she’s always opening doors in surprising places.
Antigonick is a strange book for Carson because, unlike Nox, or If Not, Winter, her translations of the complete fragments of Sappho, or Autobiography of Red, her luminous verse novel re-telling of the Greek myth of Geryon, to all of which Antigonick bears formal and thematic resemblances, it doesn’t fully open up the door to its source text for the reader. Instead, it demands prior knowledge of Antigone in order to really plumb the depths of the work. It’s not really a translation — it’s a re-imagining, what Carson’s Canadian contemporary Erin Moure calls a “transcreation,” with both text and images and the interplay between them transposing Sophocles’ language and themes. The problem is that the work comes alive in spectacular ways only when you put it next to a more traditional translation. (I used Robert Fagles’ with notes by Bernard Knox.) A classicist friend of mine commented that her undergraduates would find Antigonick a fascinating companion text to Sophocles’ play, and I bet that’s true, but I’m not sure it’s a strength. Antigonick strives to be a multi-dimensional artistic work, not a study of or a gloss on Antigone. This is the first book of Carson’s in which I feel her scholarly impulse barricades textual meanings. Usually it provides a generous way in.
The other problem is Bianca Stone’s illustrations. They form a parallel text to Carson’s translation; the visual motifs — spools of thread, bleak winter landscapes, horses, groups of figures with cylinder block heads, quaint domestic interiors with quilt-covered beds and floral rugs — have no literal connection to the linguistic images. That would be fine, except that I think they lack the depth, in both subject and style, to dovetail with Carson’s translation. The interactions between image and text with the vellum overlay is clever compositionally, but the connections feel so tenuous — you really have to reach for them, and even then you’re not satisfied with what you shore up. Carson’s work is so erudite, and Stone’s so elliptical, that the composite effect is frustratingly opaque. I can’t help thinking that more interesting illustrations would change the way I read Carson’s text, that the illustrations could help pry open that closed door. Instead they add another layer of mystification, and the book hobbles as a result.
Antigonick doesn’t ultimately work, but when you begin to give it the kind of scholarly reading it demands, you find it has moments of brilliance. (That is, Carson’s text does; Stone’s illustrations at best have moments of cleverness.) There’s a lot to relish here. And the idea of doing Sophocles as a graphic novel of this sort is kind of ingenious. Artist books, at their very best, are little theaters: they take a literary text and give it sensory life on the page. What Carson, Stone, and Currie provide together is actually a staging of the play in book form. (Carson reinforces this effect by prefacing the play with a list of its “cast” and a description of its “set,” terms found far more often in theater than in literature.) It’s thrilling to see Carson, after nearly thirty years of published work, turn her attention to the creative possibilities of the book as an artistic medium. What Antigonick showed me is that Carson can impress me, even electrify me, even when I think she gets it wrong. That’s one of the highest tributes I can pay an artist.
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Antigonick by Anne Carson - review
Such a devoted sister
By
Olivia Laing
Antigonick by Anne Carson (illustrated by Bianca Stone), Bloodaxe, 112pp, £15
It’s ironic that the Canadian poet, academic and translator Anne Carson has chosen to concentrate her formidable attentions on dead languages. It’s hard to think of a writer more committed to unspringing language from habitual usage, wrenching words back into an almost unnerving intensity. Unlike more cautious translators, she also likes to play with, not resolve, the problems of fragmentation associated with her period – an interest in absence that extends powerfully to her own hybrid work.
In the prickly, tender Autobiography of Red, she refashioned the myth of Geryon and the tenth labour of Heracles into a modern gay love story that works riddlingly around questions of possession, loss and desire. Her translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter, flaunts the gaps in the text, making eerie art out of the missing as well as the extant. And in her last publication, Nox, she created an extraordinary mourning document: a book in a box, which used Catullus’s “Poem 101” as the foundation for building a memorial of words and images to her dead brother.
There’s a natural kinship between the heat of that work and Sophocles’s Antigone, a play that centres on a sister’s act of mourning and its horrific costs. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta: mother and son who were also, through ignorance, husband and wife. In Carson’s version, her brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes, have fought and died on opposite sides of the Theban civil war. The city’s new ruler, Kreon, has decreed that only Eteokles will receive burial, while Polyneikes will be left where he lies. Antigone cannot accept this and so she buries her brother herself, pouring dust and water on his body. In punishment, Kreon has her walled up in a cave, despite her eloquent defence and the pleadings of Haimon, his son and her husband-to-be. By the end of the play, both Antigone and Haimon have killed themselves, along with Eurydike, Kreon’s wife.
After Antigone has been taken away by the guards, the chorus usually runs through precedents to the terrible punishment awaiting her. Instead, Carson furnishes them with strophe and antistrophe on the similarity between a Greek chorus and a lawyer, ending by concluding flatly, as Sophocles doesn’t: “It’s Friday afternoon/there goes Antigone to be buried alive/is there/any way/we can say/this is normal/. . . /no not really.” Likewise, when Eurydike, Kreon’s wife, enters the stage to give her single speech, she introduces herself as being “like poor Mrs Ramsay who died in a bracket of To the Lighthouse she’s the wife of the man whose moods tensify the world”.
These discontinuities are enhanced by Bianca Stone’s distinctive, riddling images, printed on transparent paper, so the hand-lettered words beneath ghost through. Horses, chairs, reels of cotton, faceless humans and objects that resemble both gates and ladders reappear in ingenious combinations. Many seem to signify entrapment; all convey a profound unease.
Before Kreon sentences Antigone, they debate which is greater, natural or city law. Infuriated, Kreon brandishes an ugly phrase: “Enemy is always enemy alive or dead.” It’s not hard to see why a play so deeply concerned with war and individual morality might have remained in currency. Antigone has been so influential in western culture that in 1984 George Steiner was moved to compile Antigones, his examination of its representations in theatre, art and literature. Brecht had his Antigone perform with a door strapped to her back, while in The Burial at Thebes Seamus Heaney made sharp parallels with the Troubles.
But why the nick? Early on, Kreon appears in the “nick of time”. The phrase crops up again, gathering momentum. It also seems to be represented in Stone’s images of a figure passing through a cleft of rock. This is where Carson’s best work is staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of powerboats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.
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This article first appeared in the 02 July 2012 issue of the New Statesman, Clegg the martyr
Anne Carson ‘translates’ Antigone
George Steiner
As Magritte might say: “This is not a book”. Rather, perhaps, an objet trouvé, a postmodern or Dada artefact, a happening somewhere to the far north (Manitoba?) of Sophocles’ resplendent, morally complex original. In Antigonick, Anne Carson and the designer Robert Currie aim at a “comic-book presentation”. Blocks of words have been hand-inked on the page, embedding the identity of the speaker within the block. The actual typography lacks all distinction; it borders on the illegible. Punctuation is fitful. Possibly all this is meant to suggest lettering on a papyrus. Bianca Stone’s drawings overlay the words. At best they imply a spectral domesticity or haunted landscape. Their pertinence to the Sophoclean action, to its intricate intensity, is hard to decipher. One Nick, a mute witness, is on stage throughout. He “measures” – what? At the bitter close the phrase “nick of time” smoulders in the exchanges between Kreon and Chorus. Or does the title “Antigo Nick” allude to the heroine’s incarceration (“nick” as slang for prison)?
Anne Carson’s is among the most inventive, astringent sensibilities in modern letters. Her work encompasses classical and philological erudition, poetry, criticism and translation. Her meditation on Simonides, Paul Celan and the arts of remembrance is masterly. Under licence, as it were, to Ezra Pound, Carson has “translated” the Greek tragic poets and Catullus. Her Sappho may well be the most incisive we have. Intertextuality, collage, declared and covert citations are instrumental and often enlightening in her “decreations”. Carson’s tactics of montage enlist opera libretti, screenplays, oratorios and philosophical arguments. Pascal is in counterpoint to Artaud; Hephaistos dances a “Hunger Tango”; Gertrude Stein, a titular influence, and Abelard meet. Beckett is pervasive, as are the terrors of vacancy in Antonioni. The reader, the listener is provoked and challenged to the utmost. An Anne Carson construct is a palimpsest drawing us into an opaque, turbulent vortex.
It is not difficult to conjecture what impulses directed her to Antigone. A defiant but ironized feminism is operative in Carson, as is the theme of singular, unquenchable love between sister and brother. In Nox, an assemblage both more and less than a book, she erected a baroque monument to her lost brother. She has given voice to Electra’s ache for Orestes “screaming in translation”. Now she turns to Antigone’s non-negotiable bond with the unburied Polyneices.
At intervals, lightning does strike. Polyneices has been left “sweet sorrymeat for the little lusts of birds”. Fatality has made of Antigone “Father’s daughter daughter’s brother sister’s mother mother’s son . . . . Doubled tripled degraded in every direction”. Antigone was “the child in her birdgrief / The bird in her childreftgrave-cry howling and cursing”. “Zeus you win always win / The whole oxygen of power / Belongs to you / Sleep cannot seize it / Time does not tire it / Your Mt Olympus glows like one white stone / Around this law: / Nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without ruin”. Kreon’s “I have death to do”. The Chorus witnesses Antigone’s soul “blowing apart”. The Messenger’s narrative to Eurydice is perfectly pitched:
Wish I could say I did not see the stones shrieking
The girl hanging
The boy a bloody lung the
Father on his knees the bolt leaving the wall
The
sword sinking up to its own mouth O my Queen
I did not see death marry them at last
Oh so shyly
But I did see it.
Kreon ends “perfectly blended with pain”. Antigone’s notorious apologia, long held to be a later insertion, is deftly qualified: “A husband or a child can be replaced / But who can grow me a new brother / Is this a weird argument, Kreon thought so but I don’t know, the words grow wrong”. When ruin descends on our precarious lives “It comes tolling over the generations / It comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor / And all your thrashed coats groan”. A pointed argument, a dialectical duel is “marrow versus marrow”.
Translation should embody an act of thanks to the original. It should celebrate its own dependence on its source. It concentrates scruple and trust, however recreative or anarchic its instincts. It is an informing craft which, sometimes enigmatically, reveals within or adds to the original what was already there – particularly where the text has been translated, imitated, adapted a hundredfold. Anne Carson has often achieved this exigent ideal. But not this time.
Here, the voice-overs by Hegel, Virginia Woolf and Bertolt Brecht are a facile diversion. Kreon’s “new powerboat”, Antigone’s “Bingo”, her desire “to lie upon my brother’s body thigh to thigh” are vulgarities which subvert this most adult, unsparingly formal and radiant of masterpieces. Inspired by Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic but incomparable rendition, Heidegger declared the famous choral ode on the nature of man to be the foundational statement in Western civilization. Elizabeth Wyckoff’s version, one among so many, is lucidly attentive. Why Carson’s “customers” instead of “man”? Why this “hilarious cantering” or the all but total omission of the cardinal theme, that of the unhoused wanderer (apolis), outcast from the civic hearth – a theme which crystallizes the Sophoclean reading of the human condition?
Time and again the subtle complexity, the lyric poise of Sophocles’ tragic idiom are sacrificed to populist witticisms: “Okay Teirisias, Point Game Match”. As a result the demanding intricacy of the conflicts between public and private, law and justice, between generations, between men and women, between the archaic and the institutional which have fuelled debate and wonder over the millennia, are slighted or patronized. An intricacy, moreover, inseparable from the register of voices, from the polyphony – prosodic, grammatical, stylistic – in the Greek. It is these translation or mimesis must confront.
Anne Carson’s colophon is well-known: she “teaches ancient Greek for a living”. One can only envy her students. (Or should one?)
George Steiner is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. His books include My Unwritten Books, 2008, and, most recently, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan, which appeared earlier this year.
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Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, by Bianca Stone
Heavy FeatherJune 12, 2014Book Reviews, Poetry
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20499
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, by Bianca Stone. Portland, Oregon: Tin House and Octopus Books. 88 pages. $14.00, paper.
Bianca Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows is a beautiful book. Published by the new partnership between Tin House and Octopus Books, Stone’s first full length collection of poetry explores the self from a distance in order to construct a clearer view of its movements and position within the larger world. Stone’s often passive reflections seem to come in after-thought, where intense happenings and the arbitrary cruelness of the world can be both muffled in intensity and made clear in its intentions by the passage of time. Stone’s poems seem to flow as if from dream to dream. Bits of the everyday are tangled up with the surreal logic of visions. By this logic, the real can only be expressed by the surreal; this is the only language it understands. A lover’s kiss is not a simple sign of affection so much as it is a blackbird or the action one must take to open an umbrella. The surreal is used a way to more accurately articulate the real.
Though Wedding Vows is masterful in this affect and gracefully crafted as a whole, it is ultimately not a book I would have chosen for myself. Though I greatly admire Stone for her multimodal work, her poetry comics which push and expand genre boundaries in the arts—I found this book disappointing in the fact that it seems uninterested in pushing boundaries. Her visual work is necessary and incredibly important to poetry. As a voice for the idea that poetry can have legitimate, worthwhile discourse directly with the visual arts, Stone’s presence is stunning and revolutionizes the way we poets must view all arts, not as disparate figures or as translatable languages, but as harmonizing equals. However, the things I usually like in poetry are louder, so raw and wildly human, that these poems of a quiet, contained imagination are deeply unsettling to me. Stone’s quiet domesticity and longing feels so wrong, so against everything in poetry that captures my heart, in those brazen poems I hold to me because they disgust and terrify and move me, that I’m not sure what to feel about Wedding Vows besides polite boredom.
The poems in Someone Else’s Wedding Vows are measured and perfect, each a lovely example of the ideal of contemporary poetry. I see the technical grace in these poems, the beauty in the collected and stacked images she renders. I understand that the things we experience as people, things like love and longing, are often too complicated to express accurately in words, and that Stone’s quiet and surreal world, populated by burning ships that flash on our cheeks, or quaint herds of rhinoceros to which we liken our lovers, become the only thing that makes approximate sense. But the problem is, is that I know this myself, and to me, poetry should make connections that are beyond what I can see alone.
These are poems that are easy to enjoy— pretty, with enough lines and moments that are surprising or moving to propel the reader through the book. Moments like these are present in “Reading a Science Article on the Flight to JFK” which churned my insides for its struggle to distance oneself from horrible, pervading grief, and in the long poem “Monsieur” where Stone’s speaker declares in righteous indignation,
I speak to a professional
who places a vase of flowers in front of me
the room smells like the person
who just came before
and I beat the air with my ultraviolet fist
In these moments, I want to crow with her, that we two together can turn our bodies to varying lengths of terrifying violence, that we must be together feared, that the vase of flowers that they seek to placate us with will suffice no more.
But the moment ends so quickly, and leaves me bereft and confused for this powerful moment we shared together on the page. And while these brief moments of surprise keep me reading, what Wedding Vows really suffers from is a lack of risk. In poems like “Dishes,” which offers no point of investment for me as a reader, aside the fact that I too wash dishes and sometimes also lament over the decline of my mental acumen and potential as I grow older, I feel lost as to what I’m supposed to take away from the poem at all. I’m not sure what the greater point of expressing these thoughts in a poem is, or what Stone finds issue with at all, except that she states her observation of these facts. I suppose we could conjecture to say that Stone is composing an aesthetic experience, and her beautiful, surreal imagery would certainly back up this assertion. But what transforms poems, what opens them up to possibility and connection, is vulnerability; knowing that something here on this page is at stake. In order to transform words from what else would be simply a collection of metaphors is the reader’s implicit knowledge (via the poem itself) that writing a poem, like all art-making, is a dangerous endeavor.
This is not to say that I am advocating for poetry to have something as dull as a point; this would be pedantic and wrong. But I am looking for moments of investment, whether emotional or theoretical, where I can devote my understanding. Wedding Vows does have risky poems, and these are the points within the book that I am truly hooked. There are moments in “Driving Our New Car” that break me. Stone gives her readers a small peek at the secretive, mysterious being that is mother, (“When I was a child there were always Mcdonalds wrappers on the floor” and “the car was always / an extension of her: parent, vessel”) before the speaker self-consciously skitters away. These moments of revelation, of intimate detail, are where the poem truly opens up; these are the moments of vulnerability that gives the poem a reason for existing. In these moments I am with Stone totally, but besides these appearances, that spark I’m looking for is too shy to really reveal itself.
I did not want to talk about Stone’s art at all in this review. I saw her talk at a panel at AWP this year, and she expressed regret that her art is so often what dominates people’s attention. In our visually soaked culture, images are easier to read and digest than poetry. I agree with Stone, and as someone who is also interested in the intersection of art and poetry, I understand the anxiety one has over one art potentially winning out over the other. But Stone’s art, now in the face of her full length collection, feels necessary. Without its ability to err towards risk, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows —for me—is lovely and nothing more.
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows is a beautifully crafted book. Its poems are elegant and graceful, touched with the surreal, and delicately floating as if from dream to dream. I love her description of love as likened to “odd toed ungulates” and I respect the quiet, reflective space this work occupies. If you enjoy the trend of quietly surreal poems, soaked with tender reflections on the domestic, then these poems are for you. If you are looking for something more radical, something that will change the chemical make-up of your bones, you may have to turn somewhere else.
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows at Powell’s City of Books.
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows at Tin House.
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows at Octopus Books.
***
m. forajter is a recent MFA graduate from Columbia College Chicago. Her poems have appeared in places like the Columbia Poetry Review, Black Tongue Review, Finery, and Radioactive Moat. Her chapbook, WHITE DEER, is available from dancing girl press. She writes at mforajter.tumblr.com.
Someone Else's Wedding Vows by Bianca Stone
[More info about this book at powells.com (new window)]
Bianca Stone is multitalented, both poet and artist, and despite her youth, her name is found in some of the best literary magazines out there, including Poetry -- the holy grail of poetry journals, where she published an essay about her grandmother, Ruth Stone. And for being a relative newbie on the scene, Tin House Books and Octopus Books, a dreamy small press joint venture, scooped her right up. And now her first full-length book Someone Else's Wedding Vows is enviably good.
At first glance, her poems are lineated simply -- no grand experiments with form here. What unspools from line to line are thoughts, lovely thoughts that arise out of and are contained in domestic city life, one that occurs within small safe rooms that are not entirely unhappy, but seem to seep up an ever-present grief. In "Elegy" she writes "I take out my collection / of tissue and listen to Judy Garland." If one is getting ready to fall to pieces, it helps to have actions to perform -- objects to look at to remind us that we exist:
...I open the refrigerator
staring at the eggs, each in their Styrofoam socket, each
dumbly assembled head bowed --
when I hold in the fridge light,
the cold driving over my knees,
I think of the funeral.
We are not Transcendentalists anymore; we no longer have a cabin in the woods to contemplate our existence in the world. We have refrigerators; they are the dark wells that our thoughts drop into.
In many ways, Stone shares a kinship with Emily Dickinson; She is fascinated with domestic life, its quietness, and has a sort of "loaded gun" sexuality. Stone can't really compose a confessional poem -- � la Anne Sexton -- because intimacy seems to create discomfort, such as in the poem "Sensitivity to Sound" where a heightened auditory sense resembles mania:
At night I heard the mice screwing in the walls.
Heard them stop, heave into one another, flail back
onto the pink spun insulation
and I heard their terrible dreams begin.
When I shaved my legs it was the sound of dogs barking.
Not the low, consistent bark
but the shrill ones that rise and fall in intensity.
My eyes made the sound of a date being set,
of a photograph being taped to the wall.
Love too is a sort of mania. And the power of this poem is what the speaker chooses to suppress. Sex is both mechanical and miraculous. She writes, "In the rain I heard each drop crossing the immaculate bridge / of your nose. Your penis lifted / like a crane lifting a piano to the top floor."
The ceremony of life is central to Someone Else's Wedding Vows. In the beautiful title poem, a wedding is an occasion for poetry, but it is about as meaningful as reading a greeting card aloud. (Dickinson was relegated to greeting cards.) The poem begins: "The rise of Australopithecus. The weird clouds over Long Island / at the classic wedding. The crowd frightened of what it means / having O'Hara's avocado salad poem read."
If poets are a category of outsiders, the speaker here is doubly so:
I want to embrace whatever is firmer and bigger than myself.
Like the sound of the wind around the tent
or everyone inventing their own colloquial happiness,
acting out, too bored or wired
with rancor to stop eating. And it's true
I spent my whole life in fear of sharing my mind
but with a longing for it to be taken.
The honesty of these lines is something to be admired. Our reactions are never as jubilant as we suspect they should be. Someone close to me has a baby, and part of me shrugs as if to say, "It's just a baby;" and then maybe the baby smiles and I see the baby that I'm supposed to see.
Stone isn't always at the top of her game. There are plenty of instances where I lose sense of her powerful voice. She falls victim to the self-congratulating I-centric poem; the sort of poem that is so locked in the cerebral interior that it refuses to let in any light, such as in the poem "Outpost":
I was going down a river
lulled by the 21st century.
I was staring out of my compound eye
with monochromatic vision.
I was turning into folio.
I was eating. I was ultramarine
with flaming ideas.
I took your picture
without any flash.
Here the anaphora keeps recharging when the battery is just plain dead. The lines are technically good, but the music is missing.
When I saw the cover of Someone Else's Wedding Vows, with Stone's illustration on the cover, for some reason I simply assumed it would include more illustrations inside. She is a talented artist. I would love to have seen her take more of a risk with her first book -- as in do what she did for Anne Carson's Antigonick for herself. There's a risk of course, the warning from the publishing powers that be that this union of poetry and illustrations just isn't done. Books must fit into neat categories in order to be shelved. The danger of including illustrations in a book of poems is that they inform the work too much or not enough.
However, in the history of American poetry the union of poet and artist has always been a constant. E.E. Cummings drew by day and wrote poems by night. The Houghton Library at Harvard apparently has over 10,000 sheets of his drawings. Elisabeth Bishop was a brilliant watercolorist and in 2011-2012 the Tibor de Nagy Galler in New York featured her work, which was later compiled in the gorgeous book Elizabeth Bishop: Objects and Apparitions, a must have for any collector. Sylvia Plath drew illustrations of a Curious French Cat; her daughter, Frieda Hughes, released Sylvia Plath: Drawings in 2013. And Lawrence Ferlinghetti used one of his oil paintings for the cover of A Time of Useful Consciousness.
I'd like to digress for a moment at talk about my generation's dread of something called "selling out." Selling out occurs when you get too popular and hit the mainstream culture in such a way that causes friends, fans, and comrades to sort of hate you. Bands are constantly selling out, moving from a little record label to a big one. But poets, poets don't get much of a chance to sell out because they are lucky if they sell at all. My question is would it be so bad for poets to start to sell out?
Say I walked into a Urban Outfitters to buy a pair of socks with hamburgers on them. Would it be so terrible to see on a display table some poets like Bianca Stone, Tao Lin (he can steal his own book), and Tracy K. Smith next to whomever the next big thing in fiction is? Would it be so terrible if during the holidays when I'm at the very end of my rope, at my sister's house and my nephew is throwing a code orange potty training fit, and my only recourse is to walk a mile to the nearest bookstore, which happens to be a Barnes and Noble that instead of having to choose between a young poet like Rimbaud (who I don't have to remind anyone is dead) and the current over-fifty, white, male poet who pontificates about fly fishing and erectile function I could choose a young poet like Stone, while I smoke a guilty "but-I'm quitting" American Spirit yellow like it's a joint?
Would it be so terrible if young poets released books as often as Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood publish novels? Stone has what it takes to reach multiple audiences -- poetry snobs like me who have subscriptions to obscure magazines that no one has heard of and readers who typically read Nylon magazine and may not even know what a chapbook is. Stone is good for poetry. She isn't accessible in a way that is overly easy to understand, but she also isn't so out there than no one but a student of the classics can parse her -- she's just the right amount of mystery and relatability; she's one to watch out for.
Someone Else's Wedding Vows by Bianca Stone
Tin House Books
ISBN: 978-1935639749
88 pages
Buy this book >>>
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows by Bianca Stone
Octopus Books/Tin House Books, 2014; 78 pp
Reviewed by Analicia Sotelo
This book of astronomically good poems is written with a straightforward, metered gravity that will immediately let you in. If you read this collection quickly, as I did, know that you’ll always be grounded, even though each image is like a little planet that hovers and then propels itself away, only to return later, when you’re looking for something to eat in the fridge. Frank, jubilant and realistic, the speaker in these poems takes ordinary moments (a wedding, drinking with friends, listening to Judy Garland) and gives them a spark of heavy thought:
I stand looking at the milk, the rack, the maple,
and I realize grief wants me to stay
a child, negotiating a stream of atoms,
picking flowers. Grief wants me in good condition.
Grief wants me to remember everything. Imperfect. Clear. (15).
Grief, but also love and sex, binds these poems together, relieving “this human brain that cannot assume the trust position” (14). And maybe because emotions, both dark and light, are universal, many of these poems are written with an anachronistic exactitude that makes the 21st century seem like every century:
there are those who believe
Jesus never kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth
with his great, red, pharmaceutical tongue;
and there are those whose bodies
are perfectly made for erotic positions
in the seamless electricity of stark apartments (26).
There wasn’t a poem in this collection that didn’t give me a sense of the “monstrous ordinary knowing” that exists in every one of our lives, and for that I’m grateful (34). Read this masterful first collection to see “the weird clouds over Long Island at the classic wedding” and then:
That grief walks barefoot, eternally,
in the local Grand Union grocery,
filling its basket, stimulated
by each regret;
that it knows my teenage ghost (32, 15).
Book Review
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows
Poetry
By Bianca Stone
Reviewed By Kent Shaw
Octopus Books (2014)
88 pages
$14
Buy this book
Someone Else's Wedding Vows by Biana StoneDo you remember learning about bimetallic strips in middle school? The expansion rate of one metal was different from the expansion rate of the other, which made them perfect for thermostats because the temperature of the room would cause the coil of bimetallic metal to unwind or retighten, turning off or on the heater in the room. That is what it feels like to read Bianca Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows—where Stone is one metal, and me reading Stone is the other metal. Her experience of the world occurs at a different rate than mine. And so when things heat up, and by things I mean grief, or the trivialities of life, or getting a Frappuccino at Starbucks, or maybe shaving your legs, there is Stone experiencing life on a different register than me. She is imagination exclamation-pointed. She is always thinking about an image that would do a much better job explaining what experiencing is like. And so Stone bends her reader to her will, or to her willful imagination, or just to how her imagination will all her life be explaining her experience to her.
For example, in the poem “Elegy with a Darkness in My Palms,” Stone writes a poem for a fairly familiar occasion. It is Christmas Eve. She is at home and the poem has that special loneliness that we feel around our families during the winter holidays, like perhaps we should feel closer to them because we all share a mutual history. And yet there is a sense of lingering alienation. And yet, however familiar the circumstances, Stone’s imagination renews it. There is “the size of darkness in my palms / that shake out like emerald hummingbirds.” There is throwing a rind of toast at the moon “that recedes into the clouds like an iridescent testicle / into the holy lap of the atmosphere.” There is the apartment in Brooklyn that is an empty submarine. Is this what life is when this speaker is living it? A world emphasized by imaginative potential and explanation. An exaggerated world. A world on the verge of detonation.
And what chaos it is. In the world of Stone’s imagery, chaos is everywhere. It is in the speaker’s psychology. It is woven into the landscape. And often it is in both at the same time. It could be chaotic circumstance that prompts the psychology to a vision of order. It could be a chaotic psychology being placated by the habits that order human life. “I cannot love like a ninepin. Not / like the lane. Not like the blue shoe” says Stone in “What It’s Like.” If using the terms of chaotic circumstance the speaker could be personifying the different parts of bowling, so she can compare them to her personal, steadfast love. In terms of a chaotic psychology, we could be hearing from a speaker unable to describe the emotion inside her; the poem becomes her search among the ordered world for a suitable analogy.
It is perhaps ironic that this gesture towards chaos is often the most controlled part of the poem. While the poems manipulate chaotic circumstances, live off the chaotic impulse, and situate chaos as a hallmark of the human condition, all the images and circumstance make such an orderly appearance in the poems. The occasion and the setting are usually the most fixed elements. The poem “What It’s like” is a good example. The “I cannot love…” statement quoted above is followed by an “I can love…” statement, which is followed by two “This is….” statements:
This
is a pond where thousands
of black tadpoles loiter at the rocks.
This is a wooden raft being tipped
by an assembly of teenagers.
The imagery here is both fresh and unusual, yet it doesn’t push the poem out of its regular structure and order.
I like thinking about how poems that operate like this could be called a wedding vow, even if that vow is someone else’s. Wedding vows touch on all the chaos that might come to life, like sickness and health and grief and wild successes and horrible defeats, yet they also try to tell the beloved that all the normal, inconsequential things that happen in life are just so much better when that person’s around. Life will likely be unpredictable, says the wedding vow, but we can vow to let this new person bring some sensibility to life—even bring unpredictability to life. Granted, these poems aren’t much of an avowal. They are not really promising anything to anyone. These are personal testaments about normal life, normal devotion, as seen by an imagination that could explode what we expect in any normal moment. What is your human life like? Stone’s poems go there. But then the poems color that life different. Stone’s poems bring the quotidian into bloom.
These blooms aren’t only in adoration and light. There can be a darker side to the vow. Part of your promise involves what you fear most you might forget. In Stone’s words:
Devotion is like
an MCG 8 museum climate control machine
calculating temperature
in the corner of the room
or a continuous subsonic boom
confined to my skull
What are you supposed to do if your undying devotion drowns out what you’re supposed to feel when you’re devoted? Put more plainly, how do you keep from slipping into an automatic devotion? All devotion has a dark side. It must. It’s a part of our human lives. And the fact that Stone’s poems include this darker element should only underscore the reality of her devotion. “Our love is so meager / I have to hold it in my hands / like a white moth” she claims in another section of this poem, “Monsieur.” For lesser loves, this might be a concern. But big love, the kind of love continually appearing in Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, is the kind of love that will be lived with for years, that will be analyzed and exploded and breathlessly evaded only to be breathlessly clutched at too tightly. How is the imagination not the natural part of a process like this?
Kent Shaw’s first book, Calenture, was published in 2008. Poems have since appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Boston Review and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor at Better Magazine and an Assistant Professor at West Virginia State University.