NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews
The Cosmopolitan by Donna
Stonecipher
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis,
2008)
Author,
poet, translator and critic Donna Stonecipher grew up in Seattle and Tehran and
lived in Prague from 1994 to 1998. She graduated from the University of Iowa
Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in 2001 and completed her PhD in English and
Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. She now lives in Berlin. Her
publications include The Reservoir (University
of Georgia Press, 2002); Souvenir de
Constantinople (Instance Press, 2007), Model
City (Shearsman, 2015) and Prose
Poetry and the City—an extended essay exploring the prose poem (Parlor
Press, 2017). The Cosmopolitan, published
in 2008, was selected by John Yau for the National Poetry Series.
The Cosmopolitan consists of a sequence
of 22 prose poems which Stonecipher calls “inlays” —a term borrowed from the
traditional crafts of weaving, wood inlay, embroidery and metalwork, being a
design, pattern or piece of material such as wood, gold, or silver that has
been inlaid into the surface of an object. In a note to the reader, the author
says that the poems were written while she was thinking about “my generation’s
relationship to quotation and collage.” The idea for the book came to her after
a visit to the Metropolitan Museum’s furniture collection and an encounter in
another museum with one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes.
In The Cosmopolitan, Stonecipher takes texts
from books that she was reading at the time and places them among her own texts
as an “inlay” on the surface of the paper. These embodied texts come from works
as diverse as The Trial by Franz
Kafka, Tristes Tropiques by Claude
Lévi-Strauss and The Seven Lamps of
Architecture by John Ruskin.
The whole
idea of the inlay permeates this book, from the collage on the cover by Jiří
Kolář to the numerous ways in which Stonecipher interprets or defines the word
“inlay” in her texts. This is especially made apparent through the idea of
enclosure: mention is made of the insides of flowers, a picture enclosed in a
locket and crickets in cages. Other descriptions of what could pass for a type
of inlay include a face on a photograph, reflections on water and snow-covered
mountains on a paper placemat. Her use
of words such as “tunnels,” “mazes,” “pockets,” “umbels,” “corollas,” and “cupolas”
convey the idea of some kind of receptacle into which something else can be
placed. The location is sometimes a
museum or an art gallery, places that house or enclose objects of beauty.
Stonecipher’s
symmetry is particularly interesting. Every paragraph of prose takes up the
space of either three or four lines, mostly four. There are repetitions of
groups of words that convey a satisfying feel for balance when voiced inwardly
or aloud, for example:
from Inlay 3:
[6] London has its Rothko, and Paris has its
Rothko. New York has its Rothko, and Des Moines has its Rothko. Tokyo has its
Rothko, and Berlin has its Rothko. Venice has its Rothko, and Geneva has its
Rothko. After walking among imperial fountains she felt that if she opened her
mouth a jet of water would suddenly come spurting out.
from Inlay 7:
[7] The silent majority stared hard at the vocal
minority. More and more, there were eyes closing as velvet curtains descended
upon screens. More and more, there were hands turning on electric lights in the
daytime. More and more there were cosmopolitans carefully examining tropical
flowers in the dark.
[10] He travelled to France but he didn’t see any
existentialists. He travelled to Italy but he didn’t see dolce far niente. He
travelled to China but he didn’t see any panda bears. He travelled to
California but he didn’t see a single surfer. Nevertheless his shell
collection, with every vacation, grew.
from Inlay 8:
[1] He was born in Kaya, Burkina Faso, but now
he’s living abroad. She was born in Frankfurt, Germany, but now she’s living
abroad. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, but now she’s living abroad. He was
born in Vancouver, Washington, but now he’s living abroad.
from Inlay
22:
[9] We bought china in China. We bought cognac
in Cognac. You bought turquoise in Turkey, and I bought an afghan in
Afghanistan. I bought india ink in India and you bought an Indiaman in India.
But nowhere did we relinquish any little of ourselves.
Like “the
historian who had a rage for order” Stonecipher also has a penchant for
palindromes.
Allied with
symmetry, architecture is another recurrent theme. Indeed, Inlay 11 carries a
quotation from the writings of the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid:
“Architecture is really about well-being”.
In Inlay 11
[2] Stonecipher writes:
The formal garden was a fitting antidote to the
disarray growing in her own mind. Wasn’t symmetry a “natural” phenomenon, as
natural as a replica, as a graph? He had always thought we’d be happier like
snails, coiled up tightly inside spiral shells.
Later, in the
same prose sequence at [7] comes this revelation:
Blue pencil poised, she kept forgetting that
there are no right angles in nature.
Early on in
the book, in Inlay 2 [9] Stonecipher states
The citizen has ideas about the architect, but
the architect has ideas about the citizen. The architect needs the citizens to
people the plaza. But do the citizens need the architect? Yes, for the
architect tells the citizens precisely how far they are willing to trust
modernity – and precisely how far they are not.
Throughout
the book, everything transmogrifies into something else. Who will remember our
cities as they once were? Cities sink without trace. Their names change, the “voices” change, the
architecture changes, buildings burn down and are rebuilt. In some sections, these
observations extend to wider issues such as the decline of nation states. At
times there is a sense that the past was a more beautiful place.
Stonecipher
is herself a true cosmopolitan. In this respect, it is fitting that she should
be the author of this book where the content ranges effortlessly through a
number of different locations from Venice to Tokyo, New York to Paris and many
other places in-between.
In The Cosmopolitan, all the “voices” are
anonymous and it is impossible, other than by gender or profession, to distinguish
one from another. This leaves the reader with a sense of detachment and
disconnectedness. It is for this reason that I am not fully convinced that
these prose poems, beautiful though they are in themselves, add up to a
satisfactory whole. Throughout my reading of the book, I was looking for a
point of focus and I could not find one. Aside from that, it is Stonecipher’s
phrasing, her recurring patterns of imagery and the attention to detail with
regard to symmetry that makes this book such a joy to read.
Full
credit should be given to the staff at Coffee House Press for the way in which
they have accommodated Stonecipher’s long lines and set out each poem on the
page.
*****
Neil
Leadbeater is an author, essayist,
poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and
poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and
abroad. His books include Librettos for
the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014) and Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press,
2017).
