Something Like a Manifesto
- By Michael Thurston
A Review of Donna Stonecipher's Model City (Shearsman, 2015).
How many poets are there in the world that you go looking for online, checking regularly, even impatiently, to see whether and when their new books will be out? Not many. Among the poets whose work I anxiously await, Donna Stonecipher has long been near the top of the list. Ever since I first read her third collection, The Cosmopolitan, in 2009, and then rushed out to read her previous volumes (The Reservoir and Souvenir de Constantinople), I’ve been tapping my foot, glancing at my watch, and surfing the net for uncollected poems and news of a new book. At last the wait is over. And with Model City, published by the English press Shearsman last year, Stonecipher demonstrates that the wait has been worthwhile.
Model City is comprised of 72 four-part prose poems, each of the single-sentence parts answering the question that opens the volume: “What was it like?” The “A:” that closes the frame opened by this “Q:” is “Berlin and elsewhere / 2010-2014”; with the volume’s epigraph from Le Corbusier (“We are waiting for a form of town planning that will give us freedom”), this frame situates us in the modernist experiments in living associated with a variety of central European locations. What was it like, then, to inhabit – in reality or in imagination – any of the model cities designed, proposed, or dreamed up in modernist Europe? It was – and isn’t this the value of poetry in general? – estranging:
It was like passing by a small shop under an overpass one afternoon in an unfamiliar part of a familiar city, and noticing that every single artifact for sale in it is blue (17).
Or, sometimes, familiarizing:
It was like driving around a model city in which each house is required to have a porch and forbidden to have a lawn, and thinking about the loveliness of lawns, the sound of lawn-mowers out of childhood (41).
Though even when we are brought to such nostalgic markers as lawns, lawn-mowers, and childhood, the diction (“required,” “forbidden”) alerts us to the construction of the home we long for, and the codes that govern such construction.
Those codes are often dictated by history, and Stonecipher’s poems often reveal the labor and loss obscured by our assumptions and habits of inattention. In “Model City (52),” she notices, and invites us to notice, the way one season’s flowers are torn out of a public flowerbed to make way for a new season’s flowers, which will be torn out in turn, and the thinking comes around to the inextricability of power and beauty that has long bedeviled poetry and poets:
It was like sitting at home after work thinking of one’s own meaningless labor, of all the money spent on public gardens, of this social contract upon the meaning of beauty, one of the few on which the many agree (65).
And the explicit attention to that relationship rejuvenates even the most classic or timeworn (a word carefully chosen at this moment) of tropes. For example: poets have for millennia set their preservative work against the ravages of time, the stasis promised by poetic form against the mutability of progress, decline, decay, or politics. In the artificial spaces of model cities, Stonecipher is able to chart the relationship of art and time in ways that remind us of the presence of power, ways that revise the terms in which the problem has been inherited:
It was like walking one evening through the violent anachronisms and disused clocktowers of a city that had once tried and failed to impede the march of time, and finding yourself invaded by a feeling.
It was like taking in the vanquished clocktowers and further markers of the vanquishing march of time as you realize that the feeling is nostalgia – for a past not your own, all the more potent for a double displacement (45).
Often, the history whose influence the poems trace is the rise and fall of empires, revolutions, and regimes, each leaving its architectural traces like the ruined features of Shelley’s Ozymandias:
It was like walking past a building that had been built by one regime and then used by three regimes in succession, and thinking about the idea of ownership, of a building as an exoskeleton of a regime (63).
Sometimes, though, the history to which Stonecipher turns is the history through which we all are living now, the neoliberal expansion of market values into all judgments of value, of corporate tastes and logos into every corner of the lifeworld:
It was like trying to find a café that was not a Starbucks or Balzac or Einstein in an unknown city known for its coffeehouses, and finally giving up and ordering a tall skinny latte with the familiar chaste mermaid on the cup.
It was like resuming your walk through the unknown city holding a cup of global capital, your familiar chaste mermaid added to the thousands of chaste mermaids parading through the city (44).
The role of poetry, of literature, of art, of thought in this constant colonization of consciousness is a problem Stonecipher worries, one to which she offers no real solution, one in which she finds herself, and poetry and literature and art and thought, implicated.
Perhaps the best that can be hoped for – in a world so completely colonized, in a Europe so inured to revolutionary hopes, so disappointed by revolutionary failures, in a form so typically content with its own impotence – is just the jostling out of comfort and some practice, through the imaginative habitation of model cities, at living in motion, change, and discomfort. It is at this that many of these prose poems aim. Here, for example, is something like a manifesto, the opening and closing sentences of “Model City (69)”:
It was like feeling very uncertain one afternoon outside a non-model city, like that feeling of uncertainty one gets while riding in an elevator that opens on both sides.
And, after two intervening sentences:
It was like standing inside an elevator outside a non-model city one afternoon, disturbed by the excess of apertures and openings, points of access and multiple entries – by the triumph of flow (82).
If, as I do, you read that “excess of apertures” as a positive, if you take comfort in a capacity for being discomfited, then you read this Stonecipher’s flow – from sentence to sentence, poem to poem, city to city – as a triumph indeed.
Michael Thurston is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Smith College and the author of, among other works, The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
