Rachel Levitsky's Realism duration press ebooks http://www.durationpress.com/bookstore/ebooks/ http://www.durationpress.com/bookstore/ebooks/rlevitsky/realism.pdf Rachel Levitsky's work in general hovers between poetry and prose. The poems in Realism form a narrative, but they are experimental free verse poems, despite some prose passages. They are not metered and rhymed as formalist "New Narrative," which is perhaps exemplified by Vikram Seth's novel-in-sonnets, The Golden Gate. Levitsky also writes and publishes experimental "New Narrative" prose, and some of her statements about her narrative practice are online at the San Francisco State University eZine Narrativity. In Realism, Levitsky employs word play, line breaks, initial caps for word beginning some lines, and placement on the page as effects. This work is the complement, in poetry, of the experimental "New Narrative." So divided is the poetic terrain after the "poetry wars" that two groups of writers, working at a high level of craft and investment in order to produce art, have adopted the same label, New Narrative, and invested it with different meanings. Experimental new narrative can be said to have begun with Kathy Acker's novels and continued with fiction, poetry, and theatre works written by Carla Harryman. Experimental new narrative resists closure and traditional form. It explores the ramifications of recent feminist narrative literary theory. Some of it embodies Ron Silliman's "new sentence" by accruing tension and structure in a nonlinear manner and establishing meanings separate from interpretations of plot points or character traits or actions. In this way, it tests narrative itself. The formalist new narrative applies traditional theories and techniques of poetry; it develops narratives characterized by "closure" by utilizing rhetorical figures and sound patterns to emphasize and delineate plot points. Levitsky's characters are spun from the writer's self, and so are neo-Freudian. Levitsky uses them to explore gender and genre within a larger exploration of sexual tensions within texts and culture. Her texts do not find their source in other works of literature; they are not "plagiarisms" like Kathy Acker's Don Quixote. Levitsky's character, Turtle, is sometimes "she" and sometimes "he." While Turtle is not convincingly or perhaps not persistently gendered, Lady is always female, and characterized by her physical lack "her lack / which for the lady / is physical." Levitsky introduces her characters in the first poem of Realism, "Under the Moon," as lowercase generics before she names them: In this room the correspondence always begins with the turtle. (In the serial novel.) The turtle is herself always. Apparent in a physical way despite her lack which for the lady is physical. One day she decides to meet the turtle and makes a trip on a plane to do so. Lady flies... This book forms a single narrative across many poems, not a lyric sequence or a serial novel. In the passage quoted above, Levitsky establishes the text's major constraint, that of narrative. She establishes it as a logic of correspondence, "In this room the correspondence always begins with the turtle." This correspondence is based upon the more masculine and working class character, Turtle, who works in a diner. Levitsky also establishes Freudian and structural tensions, decisions (one day she decides to meet the turtle), and transportation. The poems are full of Lady's plane rides, which are through clouds representing her consciousness. This compares to Philip Whalen's image of his attempt to use poems as a "cloud chamber" to capture his thinking. Narrative and character (although characters disappear and reappear) move Realism "forward." This is a book that is also a "work in progress." While relationships in general are associations, this narrative is built of emotional events which make connections more sturdily than free association might. Whereas in genre fiction, plot is a constraint, an irreal artifice, Levitsky negotiates far more freedom for herself using narrative alone as a constraint. She shows that if any narrative can be realistic, a writer's self-conscious narrative about a relationship is most realistic. When the "I" of the narrator interrupts, it interrupts as a self-conscious narrator schooled in the issues of class and gender and textuality of experimental new narrative theory: ... a line of letters, a pile of wordings. some fiction. the entire class now knows what we've been up to. I am not messing around, nor playing around, nor getting around - but need a method for this relationship which will make not mess the ego. I am the ego here. ... While multiple-genre writer Thalia Field leverages her playwriting skills by depicting interpersonal relationships and cultural rituals that bear emotional freight, Rachel Levitsky's poetry is at its best when it alternates with her prose, forming eddies in the progress of the narrative. Her settings are good. Most word play is well-balanced, as in this passage from the poem "Mother Love": ... my body's absorptive remarkable do not punish for the sound okay though the cost I understand Infidelity. Indefinitely. The body determines the limits of recherché. ... and observations keen ("bodies type bodies"). A sign of the risks she takes are the text's minor failures, which are largely slight faltering in tone due to overreaching effects. These are not Ackerian "failures" which can be as tiresome as the reader manipulation inherent in confessional narrative's lies "to tell an emotional truth." Levitsky, overall, is not reaching for the sublime. Realism and honesty - emotional realism, too -- are values communicated in this work. Confessional narrative and both new narratives have eroded the separation of poetry from fiction. New narrative introduces fiction into poetry; confessional narrative introduces fictional techniques or devices into poetry. Confessional narrative has gradually debated, through presenting opposing viewpoints, truth, emotional truth, lies, and exaggeration in poetry by privileging shocking misfortune and dramatizing events which did not occur, especially incest. Levitsky has a lighter touch - perhaps bad same-sex sex is the only type of relation which does not have a master narrative. Perhaps the erotics of a narrative suite of poems have more in common with those of Anais Nin's novels which were not supposed to be erotic as her erotica. While Levitsky does not use overwrought image, she uses setting, poetry technique, and Freudian sexual tension. A small note: Levitsky occasionally misspells or mis-spell checks "heels" "heals." Electronic publication, in any field, but especially poetry, and paper published poetry, too, is increasingly not proofed or edited by anyone but the author. - Catherine Daly Home