SoundMachine - Softcover

Zucker, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940696860 ISBN 13: 9781940696867

Verlag: Wave Books, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Through heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, Rachel Zucker trains her relentless attention on marriage, motherhood, grief, the need to speak, depression, sex, and many other topics. Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay—and not limited by any of these categories—SoundMachine is a book written out of the persistent feeling that the human voice is both a meaningless sound and the only way we know we exist.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachel Zucker is the author of many books, including SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019), The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014), and Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the co-author (with Arielle Greenberg) of the nonfiction title Home/birth: a poemic and co-editor (also with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Zucker currently teaches poetry at NYU. In 2016 she was a Bagley Wright Lecturer and wrote and delivered a series of talks on poetry, photography, confessionalism, motherhood, and the ethics of representing real people in art. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship in 2016, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center in 2018. Zucker lives in NYC with her husband and three sons.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

SEVEN BEDS SIX CITIES EIGHT WEEKS
Yesterday I began writing a poem in The Book of Nothing called “Facebook or the
End of Espionage.” The first line, “They already know all about you,” is all I
wrote. Then, nothing.

By “yesterday” I might mean last year. This is a characteristic problem with
reportage.

Many true things are difficult to write or offensive to others but The Book of
Nothing is not intended for a general audience so I can write anything but I
suspect the idea of a “general audience” might be offensive & fallacious.

For example, I got into trouble with a collaborative, collaged, lyric essay that I
wrote with AG. We hurt B’s feelings so we apologized & took out all references
to B. (B’s not even her real initial.) Even so, B said she was shocked & saddened
that we’d used her story as “creative fodder.”

I take The Book of Nothing with me when I leave the city. It isn’t heavy, is hardly
anything. Even so, everything is changed by its presence.

Once I told someone, Poetry is my way of making sense of my surroundings, of
paying attention.

I might have said that more than once or never. I can’t remember. And to
whom?

Fodder:
1) something fed to domestic animals; especially: coarse food for cattle, horses,
or sheep
2) inferior or readily available material used to supply a heavy demand

Whereas writing prose, I said, requires that I shut out the world. I could be
anywhere.

Supposedly, Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections blindfolded in his basement.
Or was that David Foster Wallace writing Girl with Curious Hair?

Jim Galvin said, Writing prose is just typing. He said it right after I’d told him
how much I liked his book The Meadow.

The Book of Nothing briefly adopts a pastoral soundtrack but cannot maintain it.

The Book of Nothing is not a poem. It is also not not a poem. It is nothing, after
all.

My friend Ilana has fluid in the tissue around her lungs & heart that cannot be
drained. Also a tumor in her brain & several metastases. But she is living. Not
nothing. Not for nothing. Nothing to sneeze at. Nothing is as nothing does.

I knew something was wrong but didn’t want to ask anyone for fear of seeming
like the stupid city girl. The cow’s belly was twitching & convulsing & her eyes
were closed, her neck at an odd angle. The other three cows in the pen
gathered around her as I approached & then scattered to the far edges when I
came closer. Finally I worked up the courage to ask the young woman sweeping
out another pen & she told me the cow had been treated earlier in the day &
just as she said that the cow keeled over & fell, with a thud, on her side.

Thud, I thought, “Thud” is the name of that sound.

The cow had been treated for pneumonia & was lying on her side in the mucky
pen. One thousand pounds down, I thought. Her breath was white vapor around
her snout. Labored breathing, someone said. The cow grew quiet, then
shuddered & relaxed.

Might not make it, said the camp director who’d been called over by a counselor.

That cow’s dead, I thought.

Might not make it till evening, he said.
The poet John Ashbery is nowhere in sight but as far as I know, living.

My friend has decided to decide by the end of June whether to get married or
break up. What if the fact that I have so many doubts means getting married is
the wrong choice? he asks. I try to explain the idea of a characteristic dilemma. I
say, How could you not have doubts?

I’ve been married for eleven years & thirteen days.

I am asked to write a blurb for a book by a poet I know slightly. I like the lines,
“this room / will always be the ghost of right now for as long as we carry it.” I
like the whole book, which has a spooky, sensual immediacy. But I hate writing
blurbs.

CNN online reports that a seven-year-old boy went swimming with his family at
a local pond. On the way home the boy seemed unusually tired & asked to lie
down. A few hours later the boy died, in his bed, from drowning. The story says
unusual fatigue or changes in behavior can be signs of water in the lungs.

I decide this story has no place in The Book of Nothing but it’s too late now.

I decide to write a series of prose poems about everything I can remember from

my childhood. Each poem will be a distilled snapshot of my past which disappears
as I watch. I cannot think of a single memory.

I write: Does one’s memory degrade more quickly and more completely if one
has children?

The director climbed into the pen & patted the cow’s belly & then kicked the
cow. Not gently, not hard, in the side. He covered the animal with a blue tarp
just as the Peapods & Seedlings entered the barn to pick up their backpacks.

Yesterday I saw a cow die, I say to my friend Erin on the phone.
I’m sure that will end up in a poem, Erin says.

I decide that this exchange is how I will begin the essay about teaching poetry
workshops that I’ve been asked to write, if I decide to write that essay. I might
decline the assignment in which case I should stop wasting time thinking about
how to support my argument that description is fundamental to good writing.

There are at least ten frogs in a small pond near the house we’re renting in
Brunswick, Maine. When I venture near the pond the frogs stop moving & stop
making sounds so it is difficult to count them. For seventeen days I’ve been trying
to describe the sound they make. It is nothing like “ribbit” or “croak” or any of
the other onomatopoeias we use for frog noises.

Finally, it comes to me: they sound like a wide rubber band snapping once—a
quick, low, single twang—a boing, reverb without consonants.

The Book of Nothing is like a postcard sent to no one, with a frog’s real sound.

The Book of Nothing sounds Buddhist but is not. At least it is not intended to be
Buddhist as such although Buddhism or some watered-down version of Buddhist
principles has seeped into art’s groundwater, so maybe it’s unavoidable.

They say memory is the spring that feeds good literature. Being memory
impaired I can’t say who “they” is or if, indeed, anyone actually said this. Let’s
hope it’s not true.

I give my son a notebook for his ninth birthday.
What do you think… what kinds of things should I…? he asks.
Nothing, I say, Unless you want to.
What’s in it? says my other son, pointing at the notebook.
Nothing, the birthday boy says, looking down.

I think about the difference between lemonade & citron pressé. I think about the
fact that I like scrambled eggs but not omelets, prefer peaches to nectarines but
only if they’re cut into slices. I think about the phrase “constituent elements.”

Paris exists but I do not go there.

“Yesterday I saw a cow die,” I write, beginning a microessay on...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wave Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1940696860
• ISBN 13: 9781940696867
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar