I kind of knew right away that I would be charmed by Renee Gladman’s Calamities. I just wasn’t sure whether that was an entirely good thing. First of all, I liked the fact that although it does not announce itself as such, it takes the form of a diary, not entirely unlike this one, its entries unparagraphed, like these—which the author seems to consider essays, although I’d credit them as prose poems (I know, I know, I went through this same ambiguity a few months ago when I wrote about The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead)—concerns a day, and concerns dailiness. And each one starts the same way: “I began the day…” Thus: “I began the day having given myself the task of compiling a list.” “I began the day reading the third section of Eileen Myles’ Inferno.” “I began the day looking at nothing move slowly in and out of focus on a movie screen.”—to take a few at random from near the beginning of the book, which ends, however, with a fourteen-part sequence, more than thirty pages, in which only the first section starts “I began the day.” Throughout, there’s a sly flatness of tone that reminds me a bit of Lydia Davis here but what’s conveyed is less explicitly fiction. And yet however “true” it may be to Gladman’s experience (I do believe she reads Eileen Myles and not that she’s made up a character who reads Myles; I believe that she is a teacher somewhere with comically boring committee meetings and students whose picture of poetry she somehow has to transform from Robert Frost to Ed Roberson, that she lives with a woman who makes ceramics, and so on—all sorts of ordinary life things that are conveyed about Renee Gladman in the course of this book) its very framing skews it away from unscripted reality. For instance I just don’t believe anyone starts their day looking at a movie screen, for instance; a computer screen, yes; a TV screen, maybe; but a movie screen, no—that happens a ways into the day. So “beginning the day” means what? Just “beginning the text,” “beginning again to write”? Maybe, and there’s something optimistic about that that I like. And I like that she is paying attention to a very slender space with almost intangible boundaries, the space between life and the imagination of life, between the recording of thoughts and events and their making. Gladman does this, she explains—but which she, the almost-real one or the almost-fictional one?—her aim: that “a picture of living would emerge that had a time and a place and objects different from the world of the body writing or reading that page…although not separate from the body writing in that familiar world, where a cup of tea was growing cold.” To elicit this textual space that is different but not separate, Gladman affects a quizzical, rather deliberately not-quite-convincingly wide-eyed persona that sometimes along the way became annoying—you could call it twee. Even in that passage I just quoted, I’m annoyed by the use of the word “body” where I think she means something more like “person.” I don’t like the pretense that, looking at anyone, least of all oneself, one pictures above all a material entity. Bodies don’t write people, people write people. And yet Gladman's grasp, really her libidinal delight in this different-not-separate space she conjures up by way of this body writing, its flows and caesurae, is a wonder to share. And that infra-thin space is as capacious as you like. Like me, Gladman still shares the old Romantic dream of a book that can write everything by writing itself, “lines emerging in such a way as to change language, to bring you down to the street,” a book whose closure could only be arbitrary.
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Renee Gladman, Calamities, is published by Wave Books, Seattle, 2016.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.