Rick Moody Considers the Poetic Collage & Novelistic Pleasures of Paul Metcalf's Genoa

At Paris Review Daily, Rick Moody encounters Paul Metcalf's innovative novel Genoa, "something that feels completely new." The book, originally published in 1965 by Jonathan Williams's Jargon Society, has just been remade in a 50th anniversary edition by Coffee House Press (with Moody introducing). "Often the reason we read is in the hope of having these experiences of the truly, unmistakably original," he writes. Metcalf is that, "[a] writer of the new, the surprising, the arresting." Also:

There are echoes in this fraternal dramatic crisis of the America that we know well from Cormac McCarthy, the America of Blood Meridian, and thereby we recall the bloody reconstruction of Faulkner, but for me the most potent pretext for the savage conclusion of Genoa is William Carlos Williams’s epic of quotation and historical imagination In the American Grain, where the exploration of our continent, and its founding as a nation, is never without bloodlust. That work begins like this, with Erik the Red, settler of Greenland:

Rather the ice than their way: to take what is mine by single strength, theirs by the crookedness of their law. But they have marked me—even to myself. Because I am not like them, I am evil. I cannot get my hands on it: I, murderer, outlaw, outcast even from Iceland. Because their way is the just way and my way—the way of kings and my father—crosses them: weaklings holding together to appear strong. But I am alone, though in Greenland.

Where does it come from, this Metcalf work of poeticized collage? The William Carlos Williams of In the American Grain and Paterson is certainly there, and the poetical points of reference are certainly easier to come by: Pound’s Cantos, with its rich substratum of Chinese poetry and untranslated lines from the Romance languages, Louis Zukovsky’s experimental later work, Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, and of course Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems. Olson was known to Metcalf, and appears briefly therein.

But to think of Metcalf only in a poetical context, which he himself certainly did later in his career, understates the novelistic pleasures of Genoa, and makes it seem more like a slightly acrid literary syrup that is “good for you,” rather than a narrative of two brothers and the way the literature of this continent shapes their lives. The question of what this book is—whether it’s even a book or something more intimate, like an act of whispering, or one of those late nights when a friend tells you everything until the early hours of the morning—is an open question. But let us not forbear to report that the act of reading these pages is exceedingly pleasurable and full of event, full of the kinds of insights into the real of consciousness, if in fact there is a real that is not an effect of literature itself. This book is not work, but it is a work of joy.

Read the entire piece at Paris Review Daily.