I’ve never been part of a poetry community. I’ve been around the edges of a couple but never tried, maybe never knew how to try, to enter. I don’t think I ever really wanted to be there—fearing the effects of peer pressure, maybe. That old Cat Power song: “What would the community think?” Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University is all about what the community thinks, and what she thinks or how she feels about the community—what she calls, in peculiar and recurrent phrasing, “the mostly white, mostly middle-class poets I am and hang out with.” That plural “am.” She describes, at a reading she gave in New York, feeling that “I was sort of received as yet another Bay Area poet obsessed with the gossip of the Bay Area poetry community, with a myopic Bay Area feeling around me.” I suppose that means I shouldn’t be the right reader for this book. I did feel a strange sense of disquiet while reading it, which somehow added to my pleasure. It kept me alert, like eerie background music in a movie scene of domestic banality intimating that the haunting, or the murder, or the whatever it is that’s the terrible obverse of domestic banality lays in wait. What worries Young is not the unheimlich connection between dwelling and haunting, though. It’s the connection between poetry and academia. She’s part of both, but (like many) sees her affiliation with the latter as tangential, “weird and in between.” She attends a conference and feels “smuggled in.” Something that makes more visible to her the fracture in her sense of who and what her community is (and what her relationship to it might be) is the aftermath of the murder, on New Year’s morning of 2009, of a young Black man, Oscar Grant, by a white transit cop in the Fruitvale (Oakland) BART station. What’s her role in the protests? How can a community interact with what’s outside it when it’s internally riven? I find Young’s inconclusive worryings at all this far more compelling than I ever would have imagined. Although she entertains the thought that (contra Gertrude Stein) “it is almost impossible to write for your friends and strangers at the same time,” I always felt that I was the stranger she was writing for. (We’re not one hundred percent strangers, having met once, but near enough.) She treats the reader generously by way of spelling out to herself as much of her quandary she can. The writing is quintessentially poet’s prose, which is something quite different from prose poetry. There’s a kind of intimacy about poets’ prose that’s not to do with its subject matter, rather with its mode of address, which comes from poetry rather than from fiction or journalism: “What I assume you shall assume,” as Whitman said, meaning that I don’t have to explain every little thing, in fact I hardly have to explain anything at all except to the extent that I have to explain it to myself, because you and I are already in the same train of thought. There’s a poignant, beautiful, longish paragraph that I wish I could quote in full but that begins like this:
If I had not been with my friend in the auditorium and bookstore and art space, how could I know anything about the way they sit in chairs, or lean forward while listening, how could I know the way their hands hold a pen or move across the pages of a notebook? How could I identify the particular sound of their laughter or sighs? If I had not stood with my friends outside the door talking, how could I know anything about their opinions on literature and politics? And if I had not walked to the train or parking lot with them afterwards, how could I know where they live, or recognize the car they drive? If I had not gone with my friends to the bar, how could I understand the way they tell a joke, or dance, or hold their body when insecure?
—and so on. A novelist or a journalist would have felt compelled to say just how so-and-so sat in a chair, or describe just what X’s laughter sounded like, or to explain what whoever-it-is thinks about politics. Thank goodness, Young doesn’t need to do that. How the friends are is a corollary to the more astonishing mystery, that they are—and this being is a question. The answer is unwritten.
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Stephanie Young, Ursula or University is published by Krupskaya, San Francisco, 2013.
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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.