Brief Review: Zone (correlations 1973 2021), by Barrett Watten

 

The poems in Zone: correlations (1973 2021), by Barrett Watten, (Chax Press, 2025, 259 pgs.) by Barrett Watten meet at the pinnacle of at least several discourses: Language Poetry, Conceptual Writing, Cultural Studies, and Marxist / Post-Marxist theory. They are tightly, even impeccably constructed. They do not intend to let you off easily; if you come to these poems without knowing the discourses which have helped shape them, you’re going to have to learn some things if you want to get through to what the poems are doing.

The dynamics and theories of writing informing each of the extended serial poem sequences in Zone can be found in the Notes / Sources / Publications / Credits section at the end of the book. Those notes give the book a remarkable theoretical underpinning, nearly an armor. Like the poems themselves, the literary minefield of defenses and possibilities in the notes is a remarkable combination of precise and unpredictable.

The poems feature a wide variety of forms and game-playing, most of which depend significantly on juxtaposition, in which phrases are put side-by-side and readers are asked (one might even say “required”) to work through the potential connections. Watten’s poetry has often been at least as much about where it refuses to take readers as where it will help them go. I kept asking myself whether I was enjoying the poems until I decided that, obviously maybe, enjoyment isn’t the point. The poems are more about learning and having to learn, about being where you are without finding any clear place to stand. They tell readers things and then pull those things away. Their moments of recognition are connected intimately with moments that require readers them to enter uncertainly into deceptive fields of language, of the multiple possibilities of association and dissociation, and to engage the play of the words with the reader’s own abilities for inventiveness and intervention and play also at stake. There’s a lot of play in Zone, and a lot of humor too. But the book’s purposes are constant in their seriousness.

The poems in Zone can’t be summed up by discussing what they’re “about.” Every one of these multi-part sequences ranges across multiple subjects, although the notes at the end of the book provide useful insights regarding the topics at hand. Period style in literature; war, whether military or literary or of many other kinds; the nature and problem of interpretation; contemporary American and world politics; the COVID era; the work of Stanislaw Lem or Jean Cocteau; this list is only a small portion of the issues that cross these poems. Maybe the most insistent concept (as Gertrude Stein famously wrote, “There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistence”) in the book is that of the zone, of a world divided up into always-politicized segments of all kinds. And at the forefront also is the question not just of the subjects of the poems but of the language used to frame, highlight, shape and confuse those subjects.

Although many of these subjects involve highly theoretical matters, they are also matters, frequently enough, of life and death. From Section 16 of “Notzeit (After Hannah Höch)”:

Then, all at once, he climbs out of the subway and stands in the twenty-

first century.  Or is it the twentieth? It looks surprisingly the same.

The difference is what has been withheld, cannot be observed, can only

be happening elsewhere, is transmitted over virtual supply networks.

A women gets on a bus in the distressed zone and coughs four times;

the bus driver complains of her manners; two weeks later he is dead.

A young doctor’s video captures our day: entering the zone; masking

up; attending to indescribable passages; calculating their survival.

I thought you knew him from his picture in the paper, but the sphere

of those we can identify with certainty is shrinking from day to day.

A new anonymity takes us away from ourselves; those unnamed others

have less implication. We care, certainly, but can do nothing about it. (147-48).

Echoing Bad History, an earlier work of Watten’s, in Zone historical events and personal experiences of those events are always caught up with other historical events and other personal experiences. The attempt to separate out any one person or moment or experience only ends up leaving them isolated, falsely, in both time and space. There is nothing, no matter how horrible, that is not already moving on to the next thing, no idea that is not caught up in the next idea. Given that, the very concept of a zone, designed for control, is also designed for failure. The globalist attempt to put everything in its place ends up highlighting how much no thing, and no one for that matter, can ever be made to stay where someone thinks it might belong.

Not every potential reader will be willing to do the work Zone asks readers to do. It asks you to come where it is; it doesn’t reach over to you, except in the explanatory notes, and even there not as much as it might seem. The people who do stick with the worthwhile effort of reading the book are going to find themselves involved in a unique kind of awareness, one that shows that knowledge might best be considered a practice of learning more about what you don’t know, and why, without ever reaching the point of knowing it.

Or, as I can imagine Watten writing, not that either.

Some Pickups from Recent Travels: A.C. Benson, R. H. Benson, and M.P. Shiel

 

Some pickups from recent travels. Some people know that I read a lot of horror literature, with a specific interest in gothic literature and the classic British ghost story.

E.F. Benson is one of the most famous and highly regarded of British ghost story writers. What I didn’t know (and most people don’t) is that his two brothers also wrote ghost stories, although they didn’t have their middle brothers significant commercial success. But their stories too are quite well told, if not quite as crisp and high energy.

M.P. Shiel is little known now, but for a time he had a reputation for writing some early great novels in what became known as science fiction. He wrote horror stories too, and his story “The House of Sounds” was mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s book Supernatural Horror in Literature as one of the great tales in the genre. Shiel’s personal history as a criminal (you can read about this elsewhere) pushed him and his work out of the public eye nearly for good. But what’s equally fascinating, from the vantage point of now, is he was born and raised in the West Indies and his paternal grandmother was likely an enslaved person. Many photos of him show clearly that he is a person of color. And why this matters is that unlike Lovecraft and most of the 20th century British and American cosmic horror writers, Shiel in his fiction is not a racist, and his horror stories do not seem to dwell in a land of inferior and superior races. The style of his writing can be overwrought and unbearable to contemporary readers, but not all of it is.

Broken Lens #11 and "The Palace of Light"

 

I’m pleased to have some work featured in Broken Lens Journal Issue #11, which has returned after a hiatus with its first issue in 18 months under slightly new editorial management, with Adam Stutz as Editor-in-Chief and Isabel Yi Jimenez as Poetry Editor.

I’ve been enjoying reading the writing by the other contributors, especially because this is a rare situation for me: my work is appearing in a magazine in which the names of every other writer in the issue are not names I've heard before (or if I have, I’ve forgotten).

Context in the social world of poetry always changes, of course. Processes of contextualization and decontextualization always go on together, although my sense is that social media has changed things, maybe making new contexts come together and go away more rapidly than they used to. My own decontextualization might be more rapid too living in a place like San Diego, which has some local communities of poets but mostly not ones with much connection to contexts outside themselves.

Of course, one has to work to make connection, while being decontextualized doesn’t always require taking any action at all.

Is it fun or disconcerting to be “out of context" (which is always, of course, being in a new context again)? A bit of both, I think.

My work in the magazine is the opening pages of my prose poem “The Palace of Light,” which is from Book 21 of The End of America poems. Book 21’s title is Palace of Light, Pit of Virus. “The Palace of Light” was originally composed between September 2019 and March 2020. It was in the process of winding itself down in February and March 2020 when, for the obvious reason, it was over. The multi-part conglomeration "Pit of Virus" began to be written some months later.

And here’s a link directly to my work, which also contains a brief audio recording of me reading some of the material in the poem.

Some No Doubt Mainly Personal Refections on The Collected Poems of Charles Olson

 

I’ve read a fair amount of the work of Charles Olson: The Maximus Poems (twice), the Selected Writings, which at one point in time was many people’s introduction to Olson’s work, Call Me Ishmael, some essays in the Collected Prose, but although I’ve looked through The Collected Poems of Charles Olson many times and owned it for decades, I’ve never read it cover to cover like I’m doing now (Rod Smith gave me the idea). The editor George Butterick, claims that the book that contains all Olson’s poems except Maximus, although another, later Olson book, A Nation of Nothing But Poetry, published some poems that as it turned out didn't get into the Collected.

When I first was reading what has often been called The New American Poetry, around 1986-87, first introduced to me through issues of Boundary Two (which would soon introduce me to Language Poetry as well), a journal edited by my then professor William Spanos, it seemed exciting, and very contemporary, something I needed to know RIGHT NOW.

At some point though, the New American Poetry began to seem historical to me, no longer contemporary in that it no longer seemed to be speaking quite to the present and its problems but to the American past. When I started to feel that way, I’m not sure. Maybe after I moved to Southern California and my sense of the culture I was living in had to go through some significant changes.

Just so I’m clear, I LIKE poetry that has the feel of history in it, and that belongs significantly to the past. To say that something no longer feels contemporary to me is not to say that it sucks. But it is to say that it seems to be responding to a reality that feels at a remove from contemporary reality, and that its understanding of literature and of itself speaks to a framework of a world that is gone.

The mythologizing urge of Olson in these poems, not as consistently developed as in Maximus, is fascinating, the mythologizing and psychologizing of gender especially, all the man and woman overarching archetypes (and the sexual mythologizing that would have probably been risky then but maybe seems quaint now–I realize some people might critique this more harshly) that come across as shifting and unstable.

It’s that shifting, the instability, that mark the poems not only as clearly Modernist but also as, I might venture to say, Postmodernist. The poems offer big frameworks but also seem to pull them away. They speak both within and against a world in which grand claims, grand absolutes, were probably norms of U.S. culture that are long gone now, in whatever distorted fashion they might sometimes (even often, lately) cross the U.S. contemporary political and cultural landscape.

If these poems are taking me into the past though, I feel them simultaneously defining a world which I was coming out of (in two senses: I was from there but had to leave it behind). It helps me understand how I got here, how poetry got here, in all the variety of heres that present themselves so relentlessly every day. They’re a crucial part of the American literary landscape in which my thinking and writing developed, as they were also a profound force for his own generation and the generations that more immediately followed him.

Ross Macdonald, the Early Novels

 

Some of Raymond Chandler's short stories were published in magazines in the years before his first novel, The Big Sleep, cane out. He was 51, and a fully realized writer, by the time that first novel reached its first readers in 1939.

The situation was different for Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), usually considered the last of the great triumvirate of U.S. hard-boiled detective noir writers (Dashiell Hammett is the first of the three). Macdonald published four novels before the first book in his Lew Archer detective series. I read all of those novels in the last few weeks as I prepare to teach my detective fiction course again this spring. The books are (in order) The Dark Tunnel (1944), Trouble Follows Me (1946), Blue City (1947), and The Three Roads (1948).

Each of these books was a pleasure to read. Maybe the fourth, The Three Roads, was the toughest going. None of them are as successful as the Archer series, the first book of which, The Moving Target, was published in 1949, when Macdonald was 34. The action in these early books is sometimes overblown, sometimes silly, and yet always fascinating enough that I wasn’t tempted to put any of them down. Parts of all of them are riveting. All four are murder mysteries too, minus a central detective, but they’re also noir action thrillers mired in the problems of World War II as it is affecting people living in the U.S. All of them feature central characters with experiences as soldiers who are either on leave or recently discharged.

The novels have many of the strengths of Macdonald’s later, more successful books, a great style, compelling conflicts, unexpected turns. It’s also interesting that some of their shortcomings are similar to some that turn up in the later books as well if in smaller degrees. In any case all four remain very readable today, and not just as exercises in the development of greatness, although they certainly proved very valuable to me in showing the characteristics of Macdonald’s writing in proto-form.

Flash Review: Mort(e) by Robert Repino

 

I liked the concept of the novel Mort(e) by Robert Repino, a science-fiction tale about an animal revolution against human control over their lives. And there were some strong chapters, especially the first one, which really drew me in, and some others later that kept a focused intensity. Too much of this book though was long-winded world building and summarized action that often felt unnecessary. And nothing much happened with the central concept to illuminate either the human world or animal resistance to it.

The characterizations weren’t all that interesting, and the central motive for the drama, Mort(e) the cat’s love for Sheba the dog, never felt convincing or interesting and seemed mostly an empty shell created to connect together the too-often summarized action. Mort(e)’s name, which stands out so prominently every time it appears, turns on an idea that felt tangential and random and without much power. Ultimately this book depends on a flashy main idea that was not developed in a way that had great significance.

Having a compelling main idea and a visually catchy name for your main character is no substitute for having an engaging story to tell, but an idea like that and an excellent opening chapter might get a writer all the way to a book contract.

Lafcadio Hearn, Japanese Ghost Stories

 

I had a read a few of Lafacadio Hearn’s ghost stories set in Japan in various editions over the years and never quite connected with them, maybe because I was expecting something that they didn’t offer. But rereading the stories in this more complete collection, I found them to be some of the most beautiful ghost stories I’ve ever read, equally capable of being tender and moving as of inspiring a subtle but genuine sense of fright.

Hearn lived all over the world and was often notorious in his lifetime (in 1874 he married in Ohio a biracial woman who had been born into slavery, breaking the law since interracial marriage was illegal in the state) both for his behavior and outspoken attitudes, in which he frequently and openly rejected American and British racism, and for some of his newspaper writing, in which he sometimes covered some of the most sensational murders and violent crimes of the day. It was after he moved to Japan in 1890 that he wrote these stories which are now the basis of his fame. The stories are highly regarded and frequently read in Japan, while he remains a familiar name in British and U.S. supernatural fiction.

If you like your moments of fright tinged with a melancholy and sometimes tragic sense of loss, and with a historical and cultural richness that isn’t that common in the history of ghost stories, you’ll be very happy reading Japanese Ghost Stories. You’ll even forget about the silly cover quickly enough.

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate it!