Haunted America

A Public Space is a quarterly literary magazine launched in 2006 by former Paris Review executive editor Bridget Hughes. It features poetry, fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and art. Produced in downtown Brooklyn out of a beautiful office that may have once been a garage but with its wide wooden front doors feels more like an old stable, the magazine’s view extends from its Dean Street address outward to the international. Previous issues have contained features on various countries and continents (Antarctica). Unlike many literary magazines, A Public Space is relatively agenda-free, though of course it has its preferred styles and writers—MFAs figure prominently in its authors’ bios. In fact, the magazine as a whole seems less interested in proposing a literary or political program than in seeking to provide a shared space for others to fill.

Last Thursday night the magazine hosted a poetry reading by Cathy Park Hong, Matthea Harvey, and Peter Gizzi in its office. Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution is one of my favorite poetry books of the past year or so. I reviewed it in last September’s issue of The Believer, and while the full review isn’t available online, the first couple paragraphs, which give a basic sense of the book, are. Dance Dance Revolution revolves around a fictional Korean dissident participant in (and survivor of) the 1980 Gwangju uprising who has since moved to a futuristic city called the “Desert" to work as a tour guide of sorts—a Blade Runner-esque Virgil to increasingly obsolete Dantes. The most amazing aspect of the book is the imaginary language Hong has invented for this character to speak. After opening her reading with a couple new poems, Hong mostly focused on Dance Dance Revolution.
Somewhat coincidentally, the next morning I went to the media preview for Okwui Enwezor’s Gwangju Biennial, at which he talked about how some of the work in the exhibition deals with the “social iconography of mass movement," a phrase not entirely inapplicable to Hong’s work and its language of the multitude(s)—messy, hybrid, creole-ized, at times incomprehensible and at cross-purposes (I mean each of these positively). At a talk Enwezor gave a week earlier as part of Night School at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, he described his work on the Gwangju Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, and Documenta as dealing with artistic reflections on recent historical upheavals in the respective host countries. Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution is a literary version of this, as well as of the intimate, personal disruptions that occur when shifting between different cultures (the theme of Hong’s first book, Translating Mo’um).
I’d never seen Matthea Harvey read, and she mostly focused on the “The Future of Terror" and “Terror of the Future" sets of poems from her book Modern Life. On an airplane a couple years ago I half-watched Vin Diesel in The Pacifier, and was stunned at how explicitly it rendered—more than any Bush-administration rhetoric, more than any left-wing political analysis—the militarization of everyday life in the United States post-9/11 (but, then, I’ve always felt that more than any other cultural form Hollywood film—intentionally or not—has the finger closest to the pulse of the collective U.S. psyche). In any case, Harvey’s blending of the war on terror with the domestic quotidian might be subtitled “bringing the war home" if Martha Rosler hadn’t already used the title for her photomontage series first made during the Vietnam War and now again for the current Iraq War; they, too, juxtapose images of U.S. military imperialism with domestic interiors.


The poems Harvey read were some of the most intelligent, sophisticated, and compassionate (it’s important not to forget the last of these) political poetry I’ve encountered recently.
Peter Gizzi is a friend of mine, and I’ve heard him read numerous times over the years. What most struck me about his reading on Thursday night was how fully he’s honed a unique voice (which isn’t a style) that at the same time is an emptying out of what in poetry is conventionally termed "voice." This isn’t such a surprise given Gizzi’s long-term commitment to the work of Jack Spicer, who similarly treated poetry as a form of dictation. For Gizzi (and perhaps for Spicer as well) it’s an idea of self that’s both a void and a social construction in much the same way that a nation is with its dreams, its failures, its mythologies, its real and its false binding agents. On a more formal level, there’s a careful spatiality to his work that involves a painterly balancing of light and shadow along with the ability to see his own body as just another object in space. Like Hong and Harvey, though perhaps with a longer historical trajectory, a concern with American-ness haunts his work—and the evening as a whole.