You see, the thing is, the Pill has had trouble getting around to the prose he’s meant to write for this here review-type blog, the problem being not only that he’s producing a whole lot of other prose for other, less bloggy, purposes (though is he ever), but also that, while he’s been meaning to sit right down and compose a review of Kathleen Graber’s excellent The Eternal City (an intention he continues to hold because that book is good and you should all be told so in no uncertain terms), he just can’t quit going back to Donna Stonecipher.
“No,” I kept telling myself. “This here blog’s supposed to be about new stuff and that there Cosmopolitan book’s a good two years old.”
“But, Self,” it finally occurred to me to reply, “it’s my blog. It can have whatever I want on it.”
And, Gentle Reader, I want some prose about The Cosmopolitan.
This is not to say that I don’t want to write about the poems in Stonecipher’s earlier volumes, The Reservoir and Souvenir de Constantinople, but The Cosmopolitan’s prose poems are the texts that keep drawing me back – to reread, to think about, to copy out in my notebook (there is not much higher praise than that last, I think). Why? Well, because, G.R., they are smart and compelling and memorable. The book’s “Note to the Reader” links the poems to what Stonecipher calls her “generation’s relationship to quotation and collage,” and she name-checks Joseph Cornell along with inlaid furniture as analogies for these poems. The “Note” seems intended to account in this way for the quotations that appear in the poems, but it also suggests both the paratactic relationships among the sentences and numbered sections that make up the poems and the indirect eliciting of an emotional response through correlatives that might be objective but are also redolent of intimate symbolism.
Which is to say, well, here, look at these two consecutive sections of “Inlay 14 (Walter Benjamin)”:
4.
Oh yes, she liked the opera, she said, sure – but only the arias. What would life be like, we wondered under the Prussian-blue dome adorned with stars, with only the best parts left in – aria after aria? In 1874, the book said, a Danish mathematician proved that not all infinities are of equal size.
5.
The relics are safe in their gold reliquaries. The roses in the botanical drawings aren’t going anywhere, exposed and in the throes of cross-section like beauty submitting to the torture it does call forth of its own accord. Nor is the bee going to get very far, dead on the edge of the windowsill like a spent hedonist.
Set aside the “Prussian-blue” of the dome (not because it isn’t lovely, but just because it’s the most obviously Cornellian touch) and see how the carefully selected bits are juxtaposed. What, on the surface, does the proof of unequal infinities have to do with opera composed only of arias, life composed only of heights? Nothing. But each of these calls out from the other a sympathetic resonance. Intensity of experience or emotion feels as though it opens onto infinity; the stars in that dome represent massive fireballs whose distant light lasts effectively forever. At the same time, though, cue Cornell, the blue of the dome is perhaps the standout fragment in the section, and what it emphasizes is the inarticulable loveliness of the spaces between, spaces much vaster than the stars themselves, dwarfing both astronomical dwarves and giants. Not all infinities are of equal size.
Now look at the three examples of containment in the next section. They build, from precious objects in their cases to objects fixed in representation to the stillness of death (itself figured as the exhaustion of pleasure). The continuity within the section is discernible, but what’s it got to do with those infinities? Well, everything, we sense from the shimmer set off by their proximity. The infinity of death, the infinity of art, the infinity of holiness; all infinite, but unequal.
The whole poem works through these processes of association, indirect affinity, the occasional suggestion of narrative. It also (like the other poems, like the volume as a whole) sketches a city, traverses that space, invokes the spirit of the writer whose quotation is “inlaid” in the poem, and follows the titular “Cosmopolitan” through adventures of body, mind, and spirit.
I’ve been trying for months now to get over this book (another great one brought to you by the fine folks at Coffee House, by the way), to get on to newer and more current or more pressing things. I can’t. And it’s Donna Stonecipher’s fault.
