“Damn it, she wants hope like everyone else does, to peek/corners, dream calls. She’s ticklish with want. But at night/she is filled with a bitter juice that goes through her like/a cold silver pole, a high silver wind. It is keen, and she/is keen on it,” Primack writes with acute yet knowing, warm clarity in the shorter poem, “Cold Keen Pole.” “Wasting goes through, hurt does, waste./All along her outsides, time is a fire, a lonely light/ spent so fast it makes her sick…”
The poet here may reference as wide a world of poets and natural phenomenon as many better-known or ostentatious poets out there these days, but she nevertheless hits nerves closer to home through a focus on the deepest feelings that matter. Which moves her from someone local, tied to today’s issues and movements, into something grander and, as such, more possibly eternal. Ever noticed that new earnestness in so many younger folks around, captured most maddeningly and bittersweetly in the Occupy movement of a few years back? She hits that tone…yet with an eye to perfection and no major axes to grind.
Which brings us, once more, back to the Golden Notebook, after a fact…where Kingston-based artist and recently MFAed writer Mimi Lipson reads from her first collection of short stories, The Cloud Of Unknowing, at 5 p.m. Saturday, May 24. Like Primack, she’s on to something current in this tight, sharply observed and well-honed little book of contemporary beat lives unfolding in a world where something is constantly unraveling. Yet instead of Purcell’s enthusiastic dives into past and future, or Primack’s attempts to earnestly face down what might be best, Lipson’s prose goes after what has gone wrong around all of us by focusing on the beauty and pain hidden in the easily-overlooked.
Already getting notices in top trade and downtown hipster journals, Lipson’s book plays with narrative, as well as the modern adoration of memoir, yet tweaks and sometimes pinches each possible genre it meets. There’s a reoccurring female character, who seems to carry the moral center of Lipson’s writing like an alter-ego; attempts at a time-lined narrative emerge; one section is all first-person and observational, scene-setting, mood-enhancing. Settings range from dive bars to greasy spoons, cross-country buses to unintentional cold water apartments with used minivans outside and hip music playing off a boom box or I-pod. Some take place on the West Coast, in Portland and L.A.; some of it is in Boston or Philly. The dialogue is sharp and real; occasionally someone recounts a tale we know from the movies succinctly enough to be recognizable, but idiosyncratically enough to tell us oodles about whoever’s telling it. The idea of secret histories comes up and lingers.
“What is this is not adult life,” the protagonist, Kitty, muses at one point. Or at another, a third person narrator interjects, “She’ll make him see that nothing is inevitable.”
Lipson’s a strong writer, and there’s a sad beauty that gets imparted by these stories. Yet part of that sadness, like so much imparted by our culture these days, may not be intentional. What substitutes for heroism here is often attitudinal; people read great literature in funky transvestite bars. They look out windows as writers, imagining the world they’re in as something they, and that world, gain meaning from through the very act of appreciative yet largely emotionless observation. They survive small things that gain stature by being small.
Which, one could say, is one of the main points of all modernist culture…stretching back to The Beats and a whole litany of similar spirits long before them.
The structure of The Cloud of Unknowing feels like one of Jim Jarmusch’s loose-knit but tightly controlled films. It’s akin to Auster and Moody…or Burroughs.
Yet for some, what The Beats had that is missing much these days, yet hinted in all three of these writers’ works, is that extra oomph that a Kerouac brought to all he wrote. Or Saroyan, Wolfe, Salinger and so many others who roared with delight as they wrestled all around them.
We look forward to Mimi Lipson’s next book very much.
Mimi Lipson reads from The Cloud of Unknowing (Yeti Press) on Saturday, May 24 at 5 p.m., at the Golden Notebook, 29 Tinker Street in Woodstock. 679-8000; www.goldennotebook.com.
