Louis Streitmatter's _ A New Map of America _ (James Brubaker, Ed.), reviewed by Jack Boettcher

A New Map of America
Louis Streitmatter
Edited by James Brubaker
The Cupboard, Vol. 2, 2008
Chapbook, 45 pp., tape-bound.
$5.00

Reviewed by Jack Boettcher
Photos & captions: Tarpaulin Sky

As a creative practice, mapping precipitates its most productive effects through a finding that is also a founding; its agency lies in neither reproduction nor imposition but rather in uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds […] Not all maps accomplish this, however; some simply reproduce what is already known. These are more ‘tracings’ than maps, delineating patterns but revealing nothing new. In describing and advocating more open-ended forms of creativity, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari declare: ‘Make a map not a tracing!’

—James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping”

In Louis Streitmatter’s—or James Brubaker’s—A New Map of America, mapping is invoked as an act of creation, its pragmatic value de-prioritized or at times even ignored. Louis Streitmatter, the cartographer central to the narrative and the man consumed with the daunting task suggested by the title, is decidedly a maker of maps, not tracings. He is revealed to us through brief, anecdotal impressions related by his unsolicited editor, Brubaker, who narrates first in the form of an editorial preface and then later in digressive footnotes to Streitmatter’s mappings. Brubaker is an old friend whose distance from Streitmatter suggests that the cartographer mystified even those closest to him. Streitmatter is as much an artist as a cartographer (he once provided the editor with a “cubist rendering of my condominium’s floor plan”), and his cartographical aesthetic suggests that an intuitive, multi-dimensional, and often non-representational approach to mapping provides the more accurate assessment of our environment, or at least the more “vital, and beautiful,” terms in which Streitmatter locates the goals of his cartography. Usefulness in this branch of cartography is not completely ignored, but fleshed out to encompass a range of possible uses—primarily for those who might wish to know the land as well as cross it. Brubaker’s preface familiarizes us with the various approaches, methodologies, and artistic concerns in Streitmatter’s work, including a description of Streitmatter’s Virgin Isles map, which employs both achingly fine detail and wry minimalism to get at the “true essence” of the isles:

The manner in which he depicted the shoreline allowed us to imagine the beach slowly sinking into the ocean, and the utter blankness of the tourist-centric areas served as a profound representation of those regions’ true essence. This is why Louis Streitmatter’s work was once so respected by cartographers, travelers, and students of geography. The geographers and travelers knew which maps were Louis’s.

This editorial preface gives us a broad view of the cartographer’s eccentricities, but this section is only an introduction to his radical philosophies of mapping as practiced in the resurveying of America. The enigmatic narrative of Louis Streitmatter’s map is realized in the three sections following the editorial preface, narrated by Streitmatter himself: an introduction to the new map of America, the map itself, and Streitmatter’s various notes on the process. In a work of fiction concerned with the marginal—the discipline of cartography, a controversial masterpiece within that discipline—it is fitting and perhaps no accident that Brubaker’s book is composed of the marginal parts of a text—notes, introductions and prefaces, glimpses and beginnings.



Before looking at the sections of the book narrated by Streitmatter, its worth taking a closer look at the editor. James Brubaker is not only the editorial character in this fiction posing as scholarly tribute, but also the writer of A New Map of America, the pamphlet published by The Cupboard and paradoxically also written by (and actually attributed to) Louis Streitmatter, a character in the book. His is a work of fiction that takes its non-fictive conceit seriously enough to involve the design and materiality of the book, and the structure of A New Map of America is in many ways reminiscent of the short, reality-bending fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Brubaker writes in a similarly essayistic tone, and there are other reference points to Borges, too: Streitmatter’s obsession with transient, seemingly irrelevant landmarks recalls the Borges character Funes, the young man tormented by his marvelous abilities of perception and memory, and Borges reveled in writing about fictional works as though they were extant long before Streitmatter made his oddball survey of America.

However, Brubaker diverges from the conventions of the fiction-as-scholarship in the book’s subtle, rewarding humor and its rich characterization of Louis Streitmatter, which is intimate even as Brubaker professes greater and greater distance from his acquaintance. We see Streitmatter’s map not as a perfect, chiseled elucidation of the idea—as in the fictions of Borges—but through Streitmatter’s obsessions and oddities as a character, a man “in search of my country.” These aspects of the book flourish best in the final section, titled “Selected Landmarks.”. These landmarks are represented as the notes Streitmatter took in the field, and the interplay between Streitmatter’s notations and Brubaker’s annotations is playful and thoughtfully timed. Many of Brubaker’s annotations involve the editor’s attempts to understand Streitmatter through the recollection of personal meetings and accounts of the cartographer’s quirks. Ultimately, Brubaker finds, Streitmatter is mostly unknowable. These footnotes call into question Streitmatter’s entire project as “a scam, fiction posing as fact,” as the editor attempts to verify physically the cartographer’s fleeting landmarks (a tooth, a sandcastle, a man playing guitar) and finds most of them vanished or simply impossible, as when one set of coordinates, described by Streitmatter as an occupied bench by a chilidog stand, lands Brubaker deep within a U.S. military base. Despite the levity in many of these encounters in the field, the map also has its moments of melancholy and concern, as when Streitmatter travels to the White House “looking for Abraham Lincoln’s ghost” after hearing that “legend has it he grows restless and paces when America is in trouble.”



It would be fallacious to reduce all the metafictive elements of the book, as well as the madcap, quixotic nature of Streitmatter’s survey, to mere cleverness. The amusing and engrossing architecture of fake works, dubious accounts, and eccentric biographical details allows A New Map of America a referential insularity that is not only entertaining to explore, but also stimulates meaningful questions regarding how we process the environment around us in the contexts of history, culture, politics, and nature, as well as the way in which we weave our biases into supposedly neutral practices of measurement and observation. Streitmatter’s difficult survey seems to posit that despite our efforts to categorize, classify, and represent our environment, we never find the exacting order we imagine at the outset: the landscape changes as time passes, and all maps remain half-finished and half-honest, sensitive to time and social change. Brubaker (the writer) puts it much more aptly, in the first page of Streitmatter’s “Selected Landmarks”:

I did not find every landmark I set out to find, maybe because I was looking in the wrong places, or maybe because my list felt increasingly dishonest the closer I got to my subject. Ultimately, most of the landmarks I initially considered for the map were discarded or replaced. Somehow, this map’s large expanses of nothingness and the difficult but more suitable replacement landmarks resonate louder and deeper than what I set out to find in the first place.

A New Map of America is a surprising, funny fiction that resonates with its contradictions, comfortable trotting them out. Streitmatter’s map, which is really not too distinguishable from Brubaker’s text, is a work of grand ambition in minute scope, an ode to marginalia, and, best of all, a new way of using fiction to map—not trace—our common space.

* * * * * *

Jack Boettcher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Surveyic Hero (horse less press, 2007) and The Deviants (Greying Ghost, 2009), and his poetry and fiction is published or forthcoming in The Denver Quarterly, The Diagram, Fence, Indiana Review, La Petite Zine, Pleiades, and several others. He lives in Austin.

Noelle Kocot's _ Sunny Wednesday _, reviewed by John Findura

Noelle Kocot
Sunny Wednesday
ISBN 9781933517391
Wave Books, 2009
$14

Reviewed by John Findura


Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, of death, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” In Noelle Kocot’s fourth book of poetry, Sunny Wednesday, that sentiment is only partly true: everything here hurts. No page is read without feeling the sting and burn of the realization that, one day, the one you love most of all will be gone, not coming back. For Kocot it is her late husband, the composer Damon Tomblin. If there is any good that can come out of death, it is the fact that Kocot is able to create something beautiful and necessary out of the hurt that must be enveloping her.

The book has the tone of someone speaking slowly and quietly to herself in the back of an ill-lit church. It is not meant for us to hear. But how can we not eavesdrop on a voice filled with so much emotion? At times I almost felt the need to put Sunny Wednesday away, feeling guilty for finding so much to love in a book filled with so much loss. The poem “Once Upon a Time in America” starts with the lines, “Here in this room I slept in / As you lay dead and alone.” What could be more traumatic than that? What is more difficult for a reader to do than try and disconnect the poet’s voice from the poet herself when you know it is she who is speaking?

Like her previous collections, Kocot is meticulously reverent and sharp in her choices of words and their intercourse across lines. Sunny Wednesday is no exception, as in “For Damon,” where she closes the poem: “I have given up the greenness of my spirit // With yours, my toasted animal, my breath.” Perhaps the “greenness” of the spirit is indeed inexperience, but the feeling of jealousy over someone leaving also comes through, to say nothing of the lushness of this absence. The phrase “my toasted animal” also leaves one gasping, not just in terms of meaning, but in awe of how we can so closely hold spirit.

But more than anything else, Sunny Wednesday is an exercise in working through an event so horrible that it seems like it may never pass. Indeed, such loss as Kocot’s never leaves the living the same as it finds them. It’s unsettling to read some of these poems, such as “One Poem for Matthew Z.” (presumably Zapruder) where Kocot writes, lovingly:

ffffffffffff…The second time
ffffffffffffI’d ever heard my name spoken
ffffffffffffWith such care, a bum had just
ffffffffffffPut a cross on my husband’s grave
ffffffffffffAnd showed it to me. What does
ffffffffffffAll of this mean, Matthew?

That’s a good question, perhaps one the earliest poet asks, a question at the heart of any experience. It’s not clichéd, not worn and tired, because the trauma of loss here seems so authentic. The question, the proverbial “why,” is sometimes all that we are left with. Earlier in Sunny Wednesday, in “Entry,” Kocot writes:

ffffffffffffI ask myself, what is this life?

ffffffffffffWhat is this life with its risen characters
ffffffffffffWhat is this life with its new cartoons
ffffffffffffWhat is this tonality that lags

ffffffffffffBrave animal of eternal valor
ffffffffffffIsn’t it enough that I exist?

It is difficult not to yell out, “It is, Noelle, it is enough that you exist!” Towards the end of the collection comes the poem “Zero” and its ending lines:

ffffffffffffI’ve already washed my placard
ffffffffffffOf a sun rising in no particular direction,
ffffffffffffAnd given it to the last
ffffffffffffWho will be first
ffffffffffffAnd the first who will be last.

This sounds like the promise of someone giving up earthly pleasures in the course of waiting for the inevitable to finally arrive.

In the penultimate poem, “On the Death of My Mother’s Cat,” Kocot arrives at a question that is less inquiry than meditation: “I wonder what the chaos of the sun was / To her eyes before they closed.” It seems only natural and proper that the dead become one with all of the answers, while we are left here to ponder what we can never know.


***

John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of the chapbook Useful Shrapnel (Scantily Clad Press) and his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Copper Nickel, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Redivider, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

Timothy David Orme’s _ Catalogue of Burnt Text _, reviewed by Jodi Chilson

Catalogue of Burnt Text
Timothy David Orme
BlazeVOX Books, 2009

$16

Reviewed by Jodi Chilson

“Self made an object as words on the page”

Introduction

Catalogue of Burnt Text is a rumination of creation and absence, in which a young apprentice poet attempts to find a place for himself in the canon. In this the speaker calls on the muses—his master—to help in the writing of the work. However, in the act of writing the poet/speaker becomes poet and master both.

The poet/speaker inhabits the master’s cloak, attempts to be the poet’s own muse, and thus attempts to break the divide of the page: of the reader and writer, of the writer and speaker, and thus the master and poet: the writer and the written thing, the poet and the self.

I. Muse/Master—A Calling Forth

The master and self are called forth through the written thing. Orme writes:

ffffffffffff To Ipsentius

ffffffffffff How can I climb you down the clouds

ffffffffffff Rounding mind eye wide

ffffffffffff I call for your sight & strength

ffffffffffff Sky

ffffffffffff No other eye through only mind do you have seams

ffffffffffff Down into & call up the one who colors the sea

ffffffffffff Sky how wide the world is

ffffffffffff (10)

The speaker harks to Ipsentius, as master and as muse: “Oh Roman poet,” the speaker beckons, “I write to you because you are all that appeases my mind” (11).

The speaker writes to the master and through the act of writing beckons the master to exist; the act of writing engages the act of creation. The master exists because the “I” names him into existence: “I wrote you not enough—for now you only exist when I write your name.” (9).

The “you” easily could be the master, but is just as easily the self. The poet having not written the self/speaker enough on the page is in danger of losing the self, “for now you [I] only exist when I write your name” (9).

Part II: The Empty Cloak

Beginning before “Summer Song,” the work acts not only as a call to the muses but a creation song, bringing the muse, the master, into existence, so that the apprentice has a body to sing to, has a voice to reach from.

ffffffffffff “voice from throat / it begetth fathoms” (37)

ffffffffffff “space relateth into song” (37)

In this, the second part of the work becomes the vain attempt of the apprentice to sing to the master. The attempt is in vain simply because the master does not exist, and the apprentice knows clearly his creation of the master is nothing but that, an empty cloak.

The Latin phrases permeating the book act to enforce this engagement with the master; however, these phrases are, as the speaker admits:

ffffffffffff another re fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff turn to the ancients

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff (for solidity – or the

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff impression thereof

ffffffffffff (42)

“pointing out the apparent contradictions” (43). Thus, the Latin reveals the façade; the speaker/poet self-consciously reflects, including the ancients as a means of revealing the false-front of the attempt: the “impression” of “solidity.” Socrates chastises his apprentice, and thus chastises the apprentice/poet:

ffffffffffff you are trying to mislead us, [...]

ffffffffffff ffffffffffffffffffff —and at the same time you have not

ffffffffffff ffffffffffffffffffff grasped the truth of the book

ffffffffffff (43)

And through this act, perhaps it is also the reader that is being chastised; the speaker warns that we “have not / grasped the truth of the book” (43), and are in danger of missing the work completely. The speaker warns us in the words of the ancients:

ffffffffffff Nemo aliquid reco recognoscat, nos mentimur omnia. (60)

Which Orme translates for us:

ffffffffffff No one should take this seriously, for it is all a lie. (62)

We are made aware that the master does not exist. This is something the speaker obsesses over and worries about. What is the apprentice without a master? And thus, the speaker creates a master: a Roman poet, Ipsentius—the absent self (in Latin, ‘ipse’ = himself; ‘absentis’ = absent).

ffffffffffff ffffffffffff [what was not a turning point

ffffffffffff ffffffffffff was merely a point – a spire

ffffffffffff ffffffffffff I hung my shoe on]

ffffffffffff ffffffffffff (44)

The speaker points out the lack of the master and thus the existence of the apprentice as master. What began as a calling of the muses, a calling forth of the master to exist, instead is a calling forth of the poet into existence through the written work.

Part III: Motion—The Entrance of Speaker/Reader

The speaker contemplates motion as a means of existing, as a means of maintaining the setting of existence:

ffffffffffff If I stand here long enough even these mountains shall fall.

ffffffffffff Motion does not stop because you cannot see it.

ffffffffffff [(Surely) I am somewhere exaggerating.]

ffffffffffff (58)

The “mountains” exist as a setting so long as they are written and sustained in the narrative/poem; but if the speaker pauses on a separate topic, or if the narrative wastes away into silence, the “mountains shall fall.” The motion becomes a mathematical thing denoting existence as x:

ffffffffffff One says there is no time for x, and immediately begins explaining time

ffffffffffff as existing on an immeasurable plane consisting in motion and the

ffffffffffff human self revolving around a particular location in the universe that

ffffffffffff will continue to exist only as long as both motion and the self exists—

ffffffffffff all of which one says is (of course) inexplicable with words and does

ffffffffffff not stop the arms from reaching. (10)

The speaker attempts to solidify the self through acts of gesture and setting: “these mountains” he notes as though pointing out the mountains in the distance to the reader. In other instances, the speaker indicates the act of walking—another sort of motion with which we can associate the self written to a bodied-self. In one of these instances, the speaker laments the words in which the self is forced to beg for attention though the silence of the page:

ffffffffffff Walking through the woods I hear the cry of the song sparrow which I

ffffffffffff associated with the written word and its loathsomeness, its long notes

ffffffffffff drawn out, its cry for attention. (59)

The speaker hears the cry—thus has body. The written thing is loathed—as all it can do is but beg for attention. On the page, the highest form of existence is for the self to become an object, and through objectification, perhaps the self can invoke breath. And, thus, through the invocation of breath, perhaps the self can achieve an existence beyond the “written word.”

ffffffffffff The journey does not stop because of the movement [of the individual]

ffffffffffff ffff stops.

ffffffffffff I cannot separate movement from light. Mine inspiration. Round me.

ffffffffffff What more or better to do but watch the light moving: differently over

ffffffffffff ffff the same stone?

ffffffffffff (45)

Thus, motion/emotion breathe the self existent, spoken; the tears once solidified as textual on the page communicated the subject self: “interdum lacrimae pondera vocis habent”(15) [“tears sometimes have the strength of spoken words” (62)].

The reader calls forth the poet into existence through the reading of the leaves (words) on the page; the poet/speaker recognizes the impermanent existence of the words as they fade as leaves do in fall, changing color and descending to the ground, decaying into non-existence.

ffffffffffff what is the body fffffffffffff (but) fffffffffffff an extension of the mind

ffffffffffff imagine the body fffffffffffff(and) fffffffffffff watch it vanish

ffffffffffff (40)

The speaker/poet becomes/is the “self made an object” (12).

Conclusion:

Timothy David Orme dares us to exist, to become part of the motion, part of the plane his speaker inhabits; he dares us to take up the absence in the work and fill it with the speaker-self and our-self engaged in motion, through the act of reading becoming accomplice to the act of creation.

The reader/writer relationship is a mathematical equation; a thing of space and time bent by a spine, open-faced and splayed.We—the reader—exist, and in the act of reading allow the page existence; thus, redefining the “taking of two for one to exist” (50).

The Catalogue of Burnt Text is a contemplation of the written thing, which is simultaneously destroyed and made to exist through the complacency of the reader and writer both.

ffffffffffff I have watched a hand write words at its will. Its curve and movement

ffffffffffff ffff determines:

ffffffffffff creation or destruction in one firm line. Self made an object as words on

ffffffffffff ffff the page.

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff A removable object.

ffffffffffff (12)

***

Jodi Chilson graduated with an MFA from Boise State University in the Spring of 2006. Recent publication of poems includes those appearing in Left-Facing Bird (April 2008; editors: Lucas Farrell, Greg Hill Jr., and Brandon Shimoda). Jodi Chilson currently lives in Boise, Idaho with her husband and daughter, and teaches poetry at Boise State University.