Harp & Altar

Jessica Baran is assistant director of the White Flag Projects in St. Louis and the art writer for the Riverfront Times. Her first book of poems, Remains To Be Used, is forthcoming this winter from Apostrophe Books.

Roseanne Carrara lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of A Newer Wilderness (Insomniac Press, 2007), from which the poems in this issue have been selected. She is at work completing a novel entitled The Week in Radio; drafting a second collection of poems, Spectral Evidence; and, with her husband, Blaise Moritz, producing an English translation of Silènces, the poems of the philosopher and anarchist Jacques Ellul.

Andy Fitch is an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program. He is the author (along with Jon Cotner) of Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse). His chapbook Island is forthcoming from The Song Cave, and his critical study Not Intelligent, but Smart: Rethinking Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. The audio recording from which Island derives has been published in a special issue of TextSound.

Eileen G’Sell teaches at Ellis University and Washington University in St. Louis, where she serves as publications editor at the Kemper Art Museum. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in Ninth Letter, Super Arrow, Zone 3, and Boston Review.

Amy King’s most recent books are Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox) and the forthcoming I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press), and she is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett. She teaches English and creative writing at SUNY NCC, works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and co-edits Esque with Ana Bozicevic and Poets for Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples. Please visit amyking.org for more.

Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster's Dictionary of American Authors, HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, and Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.

Jesse Lambert was born in Hudson, NY, and received an MFA from Hunter College. He has exhibited his work at eyewash@SupremeTrading and Klaus Von Nichtssagend in Brooklyn, White Columns in New York, Miller Block Gallery and Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, and Joseloff Gallery and Artspace in Connecticut, among other venues. He lives in Jackson Heights, NY, and works in Long Island City. More images can be seen at www.jesselambert.net.

Lawrence Mark Lane’s writing has appeared in Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction, Double Room, New Orleans Review, and Oxford American, among others. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Jesse Lichtenstein lives in Oregon where he writes poetry, fiction, journalism, and screenplays (and helps run the Loggernaut Reading Series). His poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Paris Review, Diagram, EOAGH, Gulf Coast, Octopus, Boston Review, and other journals.

Dan Magers is founder and co-editor of the online poetry magazine Sink Review and runs the chapbook press Immaculate Disciples. He has poems published or forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Eleven Eleven, and Forklift, Ohio, among other places. A regular contributor of book reviews at New Pages, he lives in Brooklyn.

Patrick Morrissey’s chapbook Transparency was published last year by Cannibal Books and his poetry and criticism have appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar. He lives in New York.

The American novelist and critic Charles Newman (1938–2006) was raised in the Midwest and taught for many years at Northwestern University, where he founded the literary magazine TriQuarterly, and Washington University in St. Louis. His books include The Post-Modern Aura (Northwestern University Press, 1985), White Jazz (Dial Press, 1984), and In Partial Disgrace, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press.

Michael Newton’s gallery reviews appear regularly in Harp & Altar.

Leslie Patron lives and writes in Providence, RI, where she received her MFA in literary arts at Brown University. Recent poems and stories have been published in Dewclaw, OCHO, and Parthenon West Review. The work in this issue comes from a recently completed manuscript entitled The SeaMaids, a collaborative work with illustrator Margaret Powers. Her hometown is San Jose, Calif.

Lauren Russell is the author of the chapbook The Empty-Handed Messenger (Goodbye Better). Her critical writing has appeared in Scapegoat Review, and recent poems are forthcoming from Eleven Eleven. She grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Neruda.

Rob Stephenson is the author of Passes Through (FC2). He lives in Queens, NY. Visit rawbe.com.

Stephen Sturgeon’s first poetry collection, Trees of the Twentieth Century, will be published by Dark Sky Books early in 2011. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cannibal, Eyewear, Harvard Review, Jacket, Open Letters Monthly, Typo, and other journals. He is the editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.

G.C. Waldrep's fourth collection, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts—in collaboration with John Gallaher—is due out from BOA Editions in April 2011. He has work in recent or forthcoming issues of American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Nation, and other journals. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., and teaches at Bucknell University.

Learning Again What We Think We Know: Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity

Jessica Baran

Lake Antiquity, by Brandon Downing (Fence Books, 2009)

A pencil-drawn dog gazes at a constellation of gold-star stickers; cut-out almonds descend upon a chart of raccoons, wolves, and other low-lying predators; Big Bird lowers its head and covers its eyes as a peasant girl smiles for her postcard portrait. Whether the visual collages in Brandon Downing’s latest book are articulated as poems, or the overlaid text-collages themselves engender elegantly bizarre pictures, these hybrid works reveal a common practice behind seemingly divergent modes of making art. The varied materials Downing incorporates in his assemblages—of found images and found text—become equivalent bases for the rarely mixed, the decontextualized, the disassociated. Leafing through Lake Antiquity feels not unlike rummaging through an oak chest found in an abandoned attic: beginnings and endings collapse as history and stuff tumble out into a mismatched pile that only makes sense when considered as a material portrait of its absent owner.

This history Downing mines is itself a careful collage pieced together from post-modern detritus—post-Dada, post-Ashbery, post-psychology—and post-consumer waste. While the imagery may, in its juxtaposition, yield surreality, its readymade sources are rational and enlightened in spirit, like Duchamp’s famously repurposed snow shovel. The Space Race, corporate boardrooms, industrialized cityscapes, nature field guides, and architectural blueprints are the backdrops for Downing’s scenes; Harpers, Popular Mechanics, and Fortune magazines are his big-box stores of ephemera. What intrudes upon this humanist vision of civilizational decline are the subtle but looming intimations of the defeat of humanism itself: charts of WWII “foes”; outdated racial profiles; a burnt-edge swath of red, white, and black stripes. In its lament over the failure of reason, Lake Antiquity is a deliberate Modernist throwback—a hand-crafted anachronism. Despite the outsized references, Downing’s cultural critique has a light touch and is mostly executed via absurdity: enter Big Bird, star-gazing dogs, rainstorms of almonds. It’s the prevalence of the absurd and the poetic—where Dada and Ashbery make their presence known—that places this work firmly adrift in the ahistoric and the emotional. The oak chest’s owner was a person of his time, but mostly of his sentiments.

While we were talking about it she took my hand and played with my fingers. When you know

what things are really like, you can make no poems about them.

I thought: they were hers: the slumbering countries which she passed did not dream

In fact, it may be the very quality of literary “sentiment” that informs the atmosphere of Lake Antiquity, just as it is writers such as George Meredith and Isak Dinesen, Downing’s recurring points of reference, who anchor the work, ultimately, in lyricism. Beyond cultural critique, the world is maudlin with romantic nostalgia and epochal regret; and the crisis of, simply, too much stuff is the durable story of humans communicating. In the X-Acto sliced and re-edited texts that compose Downing's poems, the cut-out word “history” is perhaps outnumbered by the cut-out word “love.” Neither the poems nor the collages are mere topical indictments of fascism, consumerism, or the disappearance of nature-as-muse; rather they’re about palpable and idiosyncratic I’s and you’s struggling to make a claim on intimacy in language as infinitely reused as the popular ads that create their visual backdrop. What, then, can be said again, but perhaps with fresh meaning, this time? As the piled layers of sources amass, Downing seems to suggest that the answer to this question is anyone's guess.

I am not in the least autonomous and superhuman —

a master of pastiche and of sentimental effects

and the skeleton of her vision against that surrogate god . . .

The work itself becomes yet another object—words as clip-outs acting as things, arranged amid other things and looking suddenly new, like a sea shell placed next to a sculpted marble fist in a cabinet of wonders. By both suggesting taxonomic order and utterly disregarding it, Downing’s collection of wind current diagrams and pattern samples, lunch menus and mushroom illustrations, teaches the reader to unlearn what we thought we already knew. History, as it’s told to us, is always at a remove and always at the whim of the narrator. That Downing presents it non-sequentially may indicate a different brand of truth—that of a reader himself, making his own route through the incomprehensible volumes of the past. As long as we remain receptive, as readers we are all conveyors of possible truth:

one who could set down, Dying for Love,

character of the divers ages of Love,

the Age of violent attractions

of Love

Forward and back Love’s electric messenger rushed

from heart to heart, knocking at each

Which is to say, that history is not told by the victorious, but by those who take ardent interest in what they see and “set down.” And, to repurpose a line from Browning, both his and our looks go everywhere.

Lake Antiquity is, in the end, a kind of pastoral, conjuring a landscape that we enter like idle walkers who have stumbled upon a destination but lack the requisite field guide. So we make it up as we go, which means perhaps that we must give new names to things we think of as familiar, that might already be codified like trees or plants, but, without maps or markers, are nameless to us. Downing seems to offer a new source of instruction—or a new way to instruct ourselves—by suggesting that the well-tread world is always left open to the next resourceful bricoleur and willing chronicler of awe.