The Borderless Empire of the Interior

Gunslinger: 50th Anniversary Edition by Edward Dorn
Duke University Press, $29.50.

For years, glancing at my copy of Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger yielded nothing but anger. After chancing across it toward the end of my undergraduate degree, I spent a long time picking it up and just as quickly throwing it down, my frustration increasing with each failed attempt to squeeze some sense out of it. The plot, such as it is, was hardly difficult. The Slinger, a hard-nosed pistolero whose soliloquies sound like Heidegger by way of Dirty Harry, is on a quest to find, and presumably kill, Howard Hughes Jr., America’s most wanted billionaire. Slinger and his entourage—“I,” the poem’s narrator; Lil, the boomtown madam; the Poet-Singer; the Stoned Horse; LSD-proselytizer Kool Everything; the mad scientist Dr. Jean Flamboyant; and sidekicks Taco Desoxin and Tonto Pronto—journey from Mesilla, in southern New Mexico, to Truth or Consequences, then Four Corners, and finally Cortez, where they fail to catch the elusive Hughes, who’s fled to South America. So far, so good. Yet as Marjorie Perloff’s introduction insists, Gunslinger’s real genius lies in being “understood as a poetic Sourcebook on postmodern discourses,” an opinion no doubt inspired by passages such as: “I rarely use/ordinary ammunition” Slinger informs Digger, the drifting guitarist, only “Straight Information./What?/You sound like the impact of a wet syllojsm.”

Instant underground classic or no, I couldn’t find any purchase on the smooth, ninety-degree wall of Dorn’s phenomenological excursions, despite the deceptive fluency of the poem’s druggy syntax and the unlikely charm of Slinger’s Merry Pranksters. Even Gunslinger’s cover was suspiciously hip: plain black with the title’s silver letters vertically splayed on the right, like a Guns N’ Roses album. Trump’s inauguration as president, however, changed all that. As the circus of fake news and truthiness got underway, Gunslinger’s scenes and themes began to assume fleshly form on my screen: White House scandals, an unrelenting military-industrial complex, a paranoid billionaire with a fondness for fast food, interminable conflicts abroad, and war on the concept of facts and standards of language at home. My rereading of the following scene radically altered my idea of Gunslinger’s true appeal. As Slinger and his crew approach Truth or Consequences, a “band of citizens,” driven by “an old appetite/for the Destruction of the Strange,” blocks the party’s path:

Look! they shouted,
his name is missing
from his shirt pocket
and his Managers name
is missing from his back,
He must be a Monster! Look
His pocket meters show Red
and they all laughed and screamed
This Vagrant, they shouted,
has got nothing, has no cash
and no card, he hasn’t got a Pot ...

Here lay the heart of Dorn’s critique of American exceptionalism and all the materialism, xenophobia, and ignorance that went with it, finally bared. Nonplussed, Slinger coolly stares the mob down and bows, thanking the citizens for their welcome, before proceeding to nail the following “Proclamation” around the city’s main plaza:

the gunslinger ... has concluded that the prescription for your sick heads can best be filled by your personal attendance five minutes hence in the tanner’s yard at the s.e. corner of this “plaza” to see the poet recite the above allusion. your presence is more than required.

In the poem that follows, entitled “The Cycle of Robart’s Wallet”—“Robart” being a play on Hughes’s middle name, Robard—we finally catch a glimpse of the mercurial recluse. Dorn, in fact, skillfully mythologizes Hughes’s secretive journey by private railway car in 1966 to Las Vegas into verse:

In the sacred Commerce of South Station
Where he walked, exempt of mortal care
To his leased car through the taint of small owners
And human hands first mimicked and then mocked

For He was decoyed as the cheeze in a burger
Upon a long white stretcher ferried by two poodles
While he shuffled along with his feet encased
In kleenex boxes

Here we see the paranoid, pajama-wearing Hughes as the cameras never captured him. Dorn even manages to work in a reference to a scandal that kept Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1960, when it emerged that his brother Donald had taken a quarter million of Hughes’s money to rescue his burger franchise from bankruptcy. Substitute the Kleenex boxes for KFC buckets and the cheese in the burger for Stormy Daniels and the pee tape and the overlap is nearly perfect.

Aside from Hughes, one could argue that the West itself is Gunslinger’s other great subject, but unlike America’s Modernist poetries of place—Jeffers’s California, Williams’s Paterson, Olson’s Gloucester, Lowell’s Boston, Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island—Dorn’s West only exists in the imagination. There are no histories to uncover, no topographies or distinctive flora or fauna. Instead, one finds oneself navigating a hoard of pop-culture references drawn from comics, Spaghetti Westerns, and Dorn’s breathtakingly broad sources of inspiration—philosophy, physics, and philology—the unlikely patchwork producing a psycho-cultural map of America circa 1969 as the country’s psyche was torn between competing visions for its soul and its future political direction. That being said, although Duke University Press replaced the 1989 cover with a clichéd rust-red canyon for their fiftieth anniversary reprint, those wishing to learn more about the West will come away disappointed. In fact, Dorn’s “West” feels as hollow as an abandoned movie set—does the West exist, or is it just a figment of our imagination? the poem asks at every turn—as landscapes recede to make room for exercises in bending language back to meaning, experiments which typically fall flat on their faces, although that is part of the joke:

               Mean?
my Gunslinger laughed
Mean?
Questioner, you got some strange
obsessions, you want to know
what something means after you’ve
seen it, after you’ve been there
or were you out during
That time? No.
And you want some reason.

Or take these lines from the opening pages, where Cocaine Lil, the dance-hall madam, takes offense to “I’s” highfaluting manner of speech: “and who is this/funny talker, you pick him up/in some sludgy seat of higher/learnin, Creeps! ”

As far as I can tell, Perloff may have confused Dorn’s playfulness for a serious attempt to craft a theory of poetics out of postmodern discourses, as it is difficult to find evidence to support that idea without projecting extraneous elements onto Dorn’s work. My own initial impression proved inadequate, too, however. Gunslinger isn’t a funny poem at all, it’s a poem that dances around the idea of humor, usually at the expense of “I.” Take this scene, where Claude, AKA the Stoned Horse, interrupted from his usual snack of “Horse chestnuts with the/spiny covering intact/and 38 stalks of celery/in a large bowl” tells “I”: “Don’t enquire boy/It can be unhealthy/pass the salt.” For my money, Gunslinger sits neatly between Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975): an exciting snapshot of a transitional moment connecting the modernist old to the postmodern new. If poetry is news that stays news, Gunslinger tells you what the news feels like when language has lost all grip on reality, “like trying to read a newspaper/from nothing but the ink poured into your ear.” If poetry tends to find its own moment, then Dorn may finally be due his.

—

Hey, Marfa by Jeffrey Yang
Graywolf Press, $20.00.

Although Slinger absconds on a “timetrain” at the end of Gunslinger, he reappears roughly a third of the way through Hey, Marfa, Jeffrey Yang’s third collection. “Marfa is no arid La Jolla, no Palm Springs decoy,” “Slinger Stra” explains, one of Yang’s many Virgils as he explores Marfa, a small town in West Texas now best known for its Prada Marfa installation and its artistic residency program. “No, not even a crude tract of La Mancha,” Stra continues, instead it is “An art-/island that depends on poor locals and neighboring islands/to keep costs down,” a place populated by

Emigrants, illegals, crewelers and crafters, adobe-
mixers, daytrippers, homesitters, hydroponic tomato pickers,
ranchers, loners, passing celebrities and photoshooters (if
passing quickly), registered sex offenders (if not offending),
poets and failures, javelina sausage-makers, bond-makers, readers
and home-birthers.

Despite borrowing from Dorn’s metaphysical satirism, Yang’s Slinger is more of a laidback tourist guide, as evidenced by this slapstick scene: “Gunslinger Stra steps into the bar/and asks me if I have any last words./I say, ‘No...,’ but then he shoots me/(with his open fingers of course)” and before there’s even any hint of aggression, Stra stresses, over beers, “I actually practice nonviolence. No/other way out of the quagmire we’re in,/you know, exceptionalism, the connected/collective.”

Emerging as a railway stop in the 1880s, Marfa saw much of its activity wind down following WWII, when the local Army airfield was shut down. Salvation of sorts arrived in the seventies when minimalist artist Donald Judd (1928–1994) swapped the New York art world for the Wild West, setting up in a ranch in Marfa and becoming the germ of today’s artistic community. This is a scene Yang enters as a guest of the Lannan Foundation, and the book’s opening lines reveal as much: “Arrived at El Paso airport/hours away, first-time resident/for a month to stay.” As such, Hey, Marfa’s beginning is slow and diaristic, showing Yang traversing “vast, flat desert/scrub,” as he is driven past minuscule dots on the map like Valentine, with its “1 pecan farm/1 gas station/1 drive-in theater.” Nevertheless, when Yang enters Marfa in his chauffeured Prius, he ushers us down a rabbit hole of the city’s history, unleashing a series of investigations that fuel this prosimetrum’s lyrics, newspaper clippings, and memoirs—and paintings and drawings by Rackstraw Downes—to present a kaleidoscopic portrait of this iconic little city situated at “the end of the world,” as one Ms. Mitchell put it in 1894, according to Yang.

Over nearly one hundred and fifty pages, as the poet tours “the low hills we’ve/settled, town to town,” Yang’s depictions of Marfa’s landscape reveal an “engineered desert” framed by “rose-soft mountains,” where the human obsession with conquering the unlivable is enabled by a grid of “high voltage danger zones.” Yet whenever Yang’s lens shifts to the realm of the living, an intensely Western ephemerality enters the picture. As in “Lechuguilla,” where an agave variant native to the Chihuahuan Desert “flowers for maybe four days/before it dies,” life in this landscape exists in a dimension governed by a transitoriness that defies the human will. Take “Ruperta Gongora,” a historical portrait of a curandera, or traditional healer:

She watched Villa’s occupation of Juárez
from El Paso, heard the music mingling with gunfire,
saw the dead bodies along the river banks

Her husband was killed by a horse

She mourned the capture of Mescalero
Apache Chief Alsate by Mexican soldiers

Gongora died in 1960

She’s buried at La Cementerio de la Merced,
where San Antonio Street crosses Austin.

In a few lines, Yang cuts across more than a century of history, bridging Marfa’s founding days with the present through the figure of Góngora, who expresses grief over the murdered last chief of the Mescalero Apaches, allowing Yang to depict the contested nature of the territory he’s describing.

There is arguably no better visual backdrop for America’s illusion of the West than the Trans-Pecos, which might explain why Hollywood has used it as a location for There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Nevertheless, Yang is set on shifting our perception of Marfa from a place where “tourists come to look/at the edge of the dirt/where artists play and work” to one where “the blood of the defeated” flows through the earth, “Conquistadors,” and where

Most of the residents’
first tongue is Spanish

others have come and gone
over the years

like those found sealed in a freight car
of copper ore, dying of thirst,
jailed, then deported with thirty more.

While there is even less of a narrative thread in Hey, Marfa than in Gunslinger, the book is held together by Yang’s warm, considerate lyricism, and even though it can occasionally feel as if the author has lost himself in his subject, his admission to that effect produces some of the book’s finest moments:

There are moments of feeling

as if this town arranges itself
under a glass vitrine, as you

walk, the public assembles
somewhere out of sight

like a Fourier phalanstère.

—

Eye Level by Jenny Xie
Graywolf Press, $16.00.

In stark contrast to Yang’s Hey, Marfa, Jenny Xie’s Eye Level finds the author utterly unmoored from all notions of geographical specificity. Born in China and raised in New Jersey, Xie takes the reader from Phnom Penh and New York’s Chinatown to the Greek island of Corfu in her debut. “Rootless,” the book’s opening poem, finds Xie on a sleeper train traveling from Hanoi to the hill-station of Sapa in the northwest of Vietnam. Nevertheless, as the author freely admits, “there’s nowhere to arrive.” “Me?” Xie asks at the poem’s close, “I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Later in Corfu, Xie tells us that signs of history’s disorder—in this case the old wars between the Ottoman Turks and the Venetians—have given way to sights where “the white sailboats of the rich” are “moored in the quay like grains of rice.” “Here,” Xie confesses, she is “a face unknown,” which “swells [her] appetite for this island.” However, not long after losing herself in a panegyric of Corfu’s “pit-colored roofed verandas,” Xie finds herself compelled to reflect on the homogenization of global culture which has reached even this tiny dot on the map: “on the bus ride back,/we pass a store named Ni Hao, selling pelts./Hello in all directions.”

While Xie’s is a poetry of arrivals and departures, the impressions she records aren’t fleeting, they’re indelible. In “Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season,” Xie combines the lightness of a carnet de voyage with the incisiveness of a documentary exposé: “There’s new money lapping at these streets./Thirsts planted beneath the shells of high-rises,” she writes, before zooming in on a motorcade where she sees a minister’s son “in the backseat of a gold Lexus/... his eyes shut/dumb with honeyed sleep.” Somewhat similarly to Gunslinger, Eye Level is an investigation into what Xie calls “the borderless empire of the interior” in her poem “Private Property,” or in other words, one’s self. Yet while Dorn sought to escape Cartesianism, Xie is firmly rooted in it: “Everything is mind” she writes in “Borderless,” although “Invisible Relations” sees her admitting that “there are no simple stories, because language forces distances.” “Cloak the eyes” Xie commands herself in “Visual Orders,” “Close them, and seeing continues,” she carries on, before conceding that “a disembodied eye cannot be confined/to the skin and to what it holds captive.”

As the settings change in Eye Level, Xie remains the only constant, and as such the collection is studded with tense reflections on the guilt arising out of her transience. In “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season,” Xie finds herself in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, sweating “over plates of pork dumplings and watery beer”:

Can you fix this English?
the Chinese restaurant owner asks, pushing a menu toward me.

The men here chew toothpicks like uncles on both sides of my family.
They talk with their mouths full.

I translate what little I can, it’s embarrassing.

Just passing through?
asks his eldest daughter, as she turns away to the fan.

The notion of artificial selves also rears its head in Xie’s autobiographical miniatures of immigrant life. “Envelopes arrive from a university overseas,” she writes in “Lunar New Year, 1988,” which is about her father,

a new life activated.

The husband will go first. He purchases the family’s only suitcase.

Already he knows when he boards the plane
this city will appear small, as will his life.

Four years later, in “Naturalization,” her father is still coming to grips with English and “confuses/snacks for snakes, kitchen for chicken,” before Xie brings the poem to a close with an ingenious metaphor that embodies the recent arrival’s unease: “The new country is ill fitting, lined/with cheap polyester, soiled at the sleeves.”

Eye Level ’s greatest strengths lie in the questioning nature of Xie’s curiosities, as well as her riveting use of adjectives—“medium-rare insomnia,” “fatty grief,” “itchy blue,” to name only a few—which glide atop an alliterative style that compels one to read the book cover to cover in a single sitting, like a novel. Her penchant for the aphoristic is also nothing short of infectious: “Love’s laws are simple. The leaving take the lead,” she writes in “The Hunt,” “The left-for takes a knife to the knots of narrative.” There is a carnal, sense-driven immediacy to Xie’s lines, like in “Chinatown Diptych,” where “four noodle shops on East Broadway release their belches collectively,” creating “a hankering for family life.” Still, despite Xie’s highly successful rendering of the unrooted cosmopolitan’s inner life, there are indications her future work will take an even more lyrical direction: “I’ll rinse later this afternoon in the sea/then compose lines to you of reasonable length” she writes in “Epistle,” “to say the opening you left is wide enough for me.”