Novel Lines 101: 101 alphabetical poems
Through 101 novels and metafictions, each poem in this collection riffs, literally, on its subject texts’ opening line(s).
An innovative, sassy, but deadly and pointedly serious tour through late 20th and early 21st centuries’ fiction from the Americas and from West, Central and East Europe. A mash-up of signifiers and signifieds, numerological flakiness, and PoWorld’s bland, Mega-church hegemonies—all encountering, in the midst of our present-day cocktail-hour capitalism, some of the truly great novelists of our times.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery… frogged and braided cavalry jackets… one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil… screeching and yammering… [as] the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
All the trash talk in the world
caint save ’em from they’s selves
Droolin’ deplorable (tut tut)
Sweet-smelling hacks
lip-sync na’kid in the attic
(under my umbrella, tra la)
Stranger, your time has come
your condition is permanent
Skinned ’n stocking eyes’ wander
“a wonderful sign from God”
(Kill me now, or later?)
Here come der 4chan Calvary
on the way, a hey hey
frog-march’d up the hill
I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong
all the way through you.
Screech, they yammered
them lippy twerkin’ jerks (1)
(1) Italicized lines, also from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
Ian McEwan, Solar
He… was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken. His fifth marriage was disintegrating, and he should have known how… to take the long view… Weren’t marriages … tidal, with one rolling out just before another rolled in? …. An early sign of [his] distress was dysmorphia, or perhaps it was dysmorphia he was suddenly cured of.
Yup, 1994 sure felt dead to me
Mono-blunted ?
Zip on dysmorphia rising, at least
But more kenophobic flatness
another floating infamy
Watchin’ the tide roll — no rocking
(you come & you go ’oh) (2)
spurred a fourth on cue
The hoarding boards at the ground today say
SPURS WOMEN vs MAN UNITED
(2) Self-ref: SongBu®st, p.35
Blink… you’ll miss it (3)
(3) Clinical depression on the spectrum nowadays? But at least without body-loathing, insist our mega pharma ads. It’s all slo-mo smiles while we sell the cure.
David Markson, Reader’s Block; This Is Not a Novel; Vanishing Point; The Last Novel
(a quadruple-hinged open trapdoor poem)(4)
Gray’s Elegy is 128 lines long. Gray spent seven years writing it.
Balzac wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years.
Mozart composed his last three symphonies in six weeks.
Taine said he had read The Charterhouse of Parma fifty times.
There are 260,430 words in Ulysses.
Dostoievsky wrote The Gambler in sixteen days.
Harold Bloom’s claim… that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages an hour.
Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961…edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!
Watch Professor Bloom eviscerate… Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds flat! Guaranteed.
Did Professor Bloom take away any books with him, do you know? Someone said he had a twenty-six- volume complete Joseph Conrad. It’s only a weekend cruise.(5)
Num(b)erology 128 say “the condition you are in is not
permanent” (good to know!) But it is spiritual
Nice one, Cyril; nice one son. (6)
Sonny doors open while others close (good to grow)
(4) These four highly experimental David Markson novels (metafictions, really) consist entirely of interesting quotes, dribs & drabs related to the lives (& deaths) of writers, artists, musicians, &c, ancient & modern—each “seminonfictional semifiction” (Micheal Dirda, Washington Post) narrated, respectively, by Reader, Writer, Author, Novelist.
(5) Numerology in heavy use here—follow along from the header quotes; go ‘by the numbers’ (literally!)
(6) Cyril Knowles, Spurs’ left-back (1970s); & Son Heung-Min (circa 2018): “Nice one, Sonny / Nice one, Son / Nice one, Sonny / Let’s have another one”
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Acceptin dealin with the sit’uation heads up to
“reasonable improvement in one’s wealth” (!!)
(who cld ask for more?)
Ate five’s a thirteener
one luck / unluck, who can be sure?
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We’re at sixes & threes here
A magnetic heart (oof) (7)
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At fifty, it’s “New beginnings” but who
tamed Traine? (was it the Trane?)
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Which six numbers — no play, no win,
Amts to blah (respectively)
(7) More numerology, ahh (factoids or myth-toids?): choose 3 for charisma, magnetism; 6 for embodiment of the heart
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Sweet 16 we’ll go a’ gamboling
for yin & yang we’ll bin & bang
CanPo’s B&B — boring & bland aint all bad, lad
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Significant changes make “a wonderful sign from God”
I would walk 500 miles (ta dum)… Plus good Good GOOD
Vibrations on da BB’s
Wuz signified v. signifier is the question (& the problem?)
No can do, PanCo’s Bee & Bee bonnet
Poet, your time has come
Mr. Markson — Mark II — pls come back!
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Work / life balance from 1961 hon
a “manifestation number”?
(Big question Begs question)
Motown, add ’em up one & seven lucky 8’s (8)
One mo’ time: “suck’cess in bus•i•ness and the
mater•i•al ass’pect of life”
(Sugar bye, honey punch / You come & go go-oh…) (9)
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You can play one 33 rpm but for gawd sake
“Stop looking for approval”!
—————————
None don’t compute 8—2—9’er But an extra two does!
“Time to make amends… a friend needs support”
(in need, indeed… make CanPo yr can-do!)
Ate a twenty-niner — “Let go all of the bitterness
and anger… after a while”
Udderwise, dras’tic con see quenches:
CanPo Megachurch!
(8) Numb-ology: 1961 = 17 = 8 (a lucky strike)
(9) SongBu®st, p. 24
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Is all down to the one word poem (a gnome):
Mr. Markson say (play, weigh)
Fundamentalismbecility
to Saroyan lighght (10)
(nowhere’s for CanPoLite)
Would it be too lame to add (á la good ol’ pig pharma)
Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma ?
495 pp. in 52 days @ 9.5 pp. per day
On point, hey (11)
(10) From Aram Saroyan’s wonderful Complete Minimal Poems
(11) Markson’s Vanishing Point: not to be confused with Marshall McLuhan’s Through the Vanishing Point: space in poetry and painting, which neatly dances the watusi, among other musings
Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 26 books in print from BlazeVOX, Chax, Spuyten Duyvil, Ekstasis Editions, Thistledown Press, & others. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is stephenbett.com
