Frank’s Bruised Mandarin

Monday March 9 marked the 7^th installment of Karl Saffran and Mike Houser's reading series, Salacious Banter with an excellent reading by newcomer Magdalena Zurawski, Aaron Kunin, and veteran Phillysound poet, CA Conrad – a stop on the Midwest leg of their Frank's Bruised Mandarin Tour (the title is a mash up of their current book titles). Operating out of Karl's loft apartment in Milwaukee's Walker's Point neighborhood, Karl and Mike have been serving up these part Happening/part poetry readings with excellent food and cutting edge verse for nearly a year now. Run on a shoestring budget, Salacious Banter has amazingly garnered not only up-and-coming talent, but also better known poets as Aram Saryoin, Brenda Ijima, Brandon Downing, and old-garde New York Schoolers like John Koethe, and Lewis Warsh. This time around was no exception.

After the crowd had finished devouring the tasty tamales and guacamole the festivities centered on sofas and chairs around the poets. What seemed to mark this reading from the rest was that roughly the first half of the reading was dedicated to fiction, which while not out of the realm of unthinkable in non-mainstream poetry circles, is at least unexpected. For instance, Josh Corey has recently posted on his blog, Cashiers de Corey (here and here), about his reasons for disappointment with work that falls under the labels "fiction" and "novel" – that attention only to plot and character alone is akin to playing with wind-up toys (only without the awareness one is doing so). While even he admits that his gripe is more knee-jerky and reductive, it is more difficult to find prose writers willing to take the kind of chances with form and method that you see in scores of small press poetry magazines today. In fact, compared to poetry there are very few magazines solely dedicated to pushing fiction writing beyond its generic craft, and most magazines that include fiction only choose the most marketable pieces – which inevitably are content driven. One viable alternative is flash fiction or prose poetry, but both of these are more closely related to poetry in both length and linguistic play, so much so that Josh's question still begs to be answered – can there be, these days, a viable experiment in fiction along the lines of Stein, Joyce, or Beckett (and to keep up the Irish theme, maybe Flan O'Brian)?

I bring all this up because both Magdalena and Aaron's prose seems to investigate the very generic constructs of fiction writing that Josh Corey and others (myself included) find clichéd and dull. These novels that the writers were reading from – Magdalena's debut novel The Bruise(Fiction Collective 2) and Aaron's new novel The Mandarin(Fence Books) – are both structured self-reflexively in that the plot of the novel, if one can speak of plot in these books, focuses on the coming into being of the book itself. In fact, the first passage that Magdalena, the first of the readers, performed locates itself in a creative writing workshop with students discussing meta-issues of story formation, and yet the self-reflexivity of setting takes a back seat to the larger linguistic formation of the book. In an aural encounter it is hard not to notice the Steinian recursivity of the sentences in which, nouns in particular, get repeated from one sentence to the next but each time in a different direction or register as if the sentences were folded and stitched together to create a seam, making the rhizomic shape of the narrative hold the sharpness, or color, of its lines, much like the diffuse yet defined mark of a bruise on the surface of the skin. And yet, I would still categorize The Bruise as a novel – there is a "story" at work here, complete with characters, setting, and dialogue, only these are not merely vehicles replete with cushioned harnesses and scripted voices shouting "enjoy your day here at Updike Land!" The sentences bring us into the story almost as participants in the larger discussion of what a bildungs roman represents.

Aaron deftly followed this with a reading from The Mandarin, a novel told almost entirely in dialogue about a novelist writing a novel that puts people to sleep. The irony of the plot becomes far more apparent in performance than even on first read. While in concept the structure of the book sounds somewhat like an MFA student waxing Hemingway-esque, in which one expects efficiency – dialogue pounded out such as to negate the need for elaborate set and character description, a dictum I've more than once been rapped on the knuckles with when experimenting with dialogue. Here, the dialogue services something other than traditional plot and setting, and instead attempts to map the shape of memory. As the characters try to rouse the sleeping heroine from her "novel" boredom, we get the memories of once inhabited locales in what appears over time to be an intersection of different idealizations of Minneapolis. In short, Aaron's focus on the potentiality of dialogue to do more than serve plot, creates a detourè in which we as listener's are asked to participate in set construction, which may be as good a set up for the conceit of the evening personified at its most hilarious in the poetry of CA Conrad.

Conrad, as he prefers to be addressed, read from his new book, The Book of Frank (Chax Press), in which to tell the story of a semi-fictional Frank, he takes everyday objects as points of meditation, though meditations run through many mystic filters – one poem was written during an evening when Conrad ate only blue foods and listened to Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" on a 12-hr loop. In fact, all of Conrad's work involves this type of methodology, whether he's locked himself up ozmosifying the logic of his '45s, or touring the alleys and estranging signage and sounds of cities like his home-town Phili, or even traipsing through Memphis reading all the sites through the hangover sunglasses of the King. And yet, it struck me that despite the crazy approaches to writing that appear to loosen the writer's control over the movement and content of piece, Conrad's poems (and Magdalena's and Aaron's prose) was remarkably easy enough to access. By ignoring oft cited demands of writing workshops and mass circular publishers, all three writers were able to focus attention on something more substantial than a clever turn of plot – the lively and colorful, almost oxymoronic turns of language and the reality we use words to uncover. While "real" fiction often puts me to sleep or drink at a live reading, these authors' negotiations of what function the component parts of "fiction" can serve has had my mind rolling for days. Praise be to the readers and to Karl and Mike and to poetry in living rooms and on sofas instead of behind lecterns and in theatres.