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Overview
The acclaimed poet, memoirist, and essayist Maureen N. McLane here charts a new path into vital genre-bending territories. Not a novel, not a memoir, not a lyric, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes offers something else—“life . . . a continual allegory” (to invoke Keats): a life intense, episodic, female, sexual, philosophical, romantic, analytic. Tracking the growth of one poet’s mind, switchbacking its way through American English, Mz N toggles between story and song. This is a poetry both “furious /&alive.”
Alive to the lash of love, the longueurs of adolescence, the limits of identity, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes is a bravura experiment in life-writing—an assaying, a testing, a transforming, an honoring of the tentative and the torqued. What is it to be contemporary, to be “one / among other ones” in a “cracking world”? How does a body vibrate into being? How is a mind made out of other minds? Seizing the queer realities of any life, Mz N explores how one is surprised, seduced, and struck into speech, thought, song, silence. “Then, what is life?” cried Shelley. So too Mz N.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374714796 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 200 KB |
About the Author
Maureen N. McLane's books of poems include More Anon, Some Say, Mz N: the serial, and the 2014 National Book Award finalist This Blue. Her book My Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in New York.
Read an Excerpt
MZN: The Serial
A Poem-in-Episodes
By Maureen N. McLane
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2016 Maureen N. McLaneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71479-6
CHAPTER 1
PROEM: Mz N Contemporary
Mz N tries
each day very hard
to be contemporary
One must be
absolutely
contemporary
they've harangued
her for over
a hundred years
& who is she
to object?
She admires
after all
beyond Rimbaud
Yvonne Rainer
who in an interview
somewhere sd something like
I am so happy
to have been able to be
contemporary
or was it she was happy
to have made an art
wholly contemporary?
Well.
You're too young
to think so much
Yvonne sd
to Mz N
about death
Mz N felt oddly
abashed but what to do
You thought
whatever you thought
about. That's an evasion
the cognitive therapists
could flush out
of Mz N very swiftly
with their meta-mind techniques
and surely Zen Buddhists
and their American epigones would also say
let the thought pass through
just observe the thought as it passes
That was one
of many mistakes
Mz N kept making she held on
to a thought
as to the sharp end
of a knife
which puts her in mind
of an old Setswana proverb
Ellen Kuzwayo taught her
Mmangoana o tshwara thipa ka fa bogaleng
the child's mother grabs
the sharp end of the knife
but Mz N was not a good
enough mother to her thoughts
They raged and sliced
her barely surviving for years until
they didn't. A thought
isn't irrevocable
Arendt sd Only action
Mz N would take action
against her thoughts
You think
too much her sister
sd which meant
why don't you
chill out?
Why
not?
Mz N
was no riot grrrl
there was no club
she could join to align
herself with weird sisters
or brothers. The three
punkish kids in high school
were heroes
in her private pantheon
but they like odd gods
were remote
as a loon calling
from a far Adirondack
lake. O there's a loon
on the lake I look at
right here right now
Now I am being contemporary
I can bring the now
right into this poem
& when I say
as I now do
with how sad steps
o moon thou climb'st the skies
I am still very contemporary
which is to say
I am alive
as long as this poem
I & the loon & the moon are alive
All the artists
Mz N knows
who are alive want to be
contemporary
It takes effort
to be contemporary
simply being alive
doesn't cut it
One artist made a piece
This Is So Contemporary
which is elegant
and funny like him Tino
Sehgal a piece both contemporary
and a critique
of the enforcement of the law
of the soon-to-be-obsolete
now which consumer
culture and deep structural
forces of finance capital
sustain or so Mz N's been told
— O tempora O mores!
Dance and political economy
and game theory are intricate
choreographies of the now
Critique is dead
Poetry is dead
Tino told her
no one in Europe reads books
It is contemporary
to ironize the contemporary
but in a light way
no one bothers
anymore with the past
There is no longer an Oedipal
pathos or rage to fuel the now
sprung from the paternal then
Sometimes depth
is just depth
Brecht sd
to Benjamin when depth
was still an option
Mz N's deep
inwardness
is positively
German an unfashionable
Innerlichkeit
best cordoned off
in the foreign
dead field of lyric
Inwardness
an effect of repression
but hey
Don't fence me in!
the little dogie
of Mz N's soul
cried to the postmodern
cowboys lassoing
up the language
of reference & branding
it for sale
Sometimes Mz N even feels
conceptual
What is a concept
What is a conceptual artist
An artist
with a concept
Some days
one can't help being Horace
& writing
an ars poetica
All day
Mz N has been eating cherries
of a kind she first saw
in Cambridge 1989ish
when her friend Polly
with higher standards for fruit and men
and clothes went to the beautiful shop
on Huron Avenue and bought
these golden cherries
I now eat
as my memory is the fact
of my being alive
& her & you too
& the cherry ripe
I gave my love and that stone
I gave my love still ring
that song that cherry song
still ripe in our live mouths
Mz N Nothing
This is a tale
about nothing
Let's pretend
we have to establish
the scene & characters though movies
do it so much better
to the despair of the novelizing tribe
But let's say
the midafternoon sun
is striking the leaves in the woods
visible from a screened porch
such that the maples liquefy
into a queer green flame.
In the foreground
are ferns, a few daisies,
a black-eyed Susan
or two. Mz N regrets
what she drank
almost as much as what she said.
And then there's what
she didn't do — kiss
for example
the lithe lovely
in the purple sheath that hugged her ass
like the plumskin the plum.
She bites
the plum in her lunch
a lunch someone else
made. Further chapters
will unfold the full ecosystem
of labor and erotics
that structure the whole panoply
of exchanges
that make up "life"
which is the contract
I make with you reader
hungry as we are for the fruit
of the real
Mz N Triumph of Life
Some are alive
easy and slip
into the world's skin
as their own and plums'
Mz N isn't one
or wasn't
Then what is life?
I cried
cried Shelley
in one version
of "The Triumph of Life"
the title of which from one angle
is a satirical title
triumphs in those days
like Romans'
a chance to parade
the victims in this case
the victims of life
which are in the end
from a mortal angle
everyone
Better never to have been
the old sage said
and each world
rediscovers
No river
No river twice
and yet it seems the same river
however
much you are not the same
He's not so bleak
that sleek and laughing
vegetarian poet
O could you not learn
to swim you idiot
singing yourself
aboard ships
you could sail
but not sail home
Just like you
to learn to sail
and not to swim
Just like Mz N
to dive in
after him
Mz N Growth of a Poet's Mind
Like all children Mz N lived
in archaic
mythic zones
and all the neighbors and kin played their parts to a T
although they never were able to tell her
the whole story.
* * *
The child Mz N sat on her bed
and wondered: that tree
outside her window
shifted
when her eye
shifted. What to make
of that?
* * *
Mz N and her siblings
had a dog for some time.
They went on vacation &
when they came back
no dog.
They asked the parents:
the dog?
who replied:
what dog?
And some people wonder
why others distrust the obvious.
* * *
One year Mz N began her great project
of investigative
touch. Like everything
it came about
through reading
and happenstance. Mz N had a friend
who said I do it and then
I worry
what if my roommate
hears?
What if?
Mz N wondered
went home
and discovered a new octave.
* * *
Mz N sometimes thinks
what N stands for: Nothing.
One day she said
nihilism
in school & the teacher
paused, chalk between her fingers
like her longed-for cigarette.
What's nihilism
Another student said I thought
it was neehilism.
This was another example
of Mz N bringing up topics
that went Nowhere.
* * *
the blackest black
is not so black
it cannot take
a blacker black
so Mz N thinks
the void would speak
if void could speak
or of color think
* * *
Mz N is writing what she hopes will be
a masterpiece: Mispronunciation:
the definitive
autobiography. She only includes
the bloopers she remembers.
She is very strict that way.
What's vá-gi-na
— hard g —
she called to her parents
age five
when they'd plopped her on the sofa
with a picture book
to help her learn
where babies. Some years later she told a story
at dinner
about being very angry
with a persecuting
teacher. I spoke
she sd
with great ve-hé-mence.
Her father laughed
a somewhat unkind laugh
and asked her to repeat it.
She did & once again
he laughed.
Mz N vehemently
objects to the making fun of children
who struggle every day
to get their words
and bodies aligned
* * *
one day after sex
in a century of bad sex
the other one asked Mz N
did I leave you
on the edge
never having had an orgasm
as far as she knew
she sd
quite definitively
no
how would she know
such an edge
are you sure
the other persisted
Mz N thought again
she could say
quite definitively
o yes here I am on the edge
where you left me
the edge
of a certain
abyss
but this
she knew was the answer
to a question
no one was asking
* * *
Mz N embarks one day upon a sonnet
attracted by the knowledge that it's dead
extinct like dinosaur dodo or bonnet
long replaced by baseball caps on heads
that centuries ago were piled with curls
birds powder wires and such machinery
'twould blow the minds of tattooed boys and girls
who cruise the streets of this new century
Mz N concedes she's antiquarian
old hat old news — "hoarder of ancient dirt"
to quote the mouldy Scot John Pinkerton
but from her dead-end path she won't divert
the airplane made the train a living fossil
relict herself she listens for its whistle
* * *
Wordsworth never took a plane
but Mz N takes a plane with Wordsworth
on her mind
and other matters: love,
fear, a wish
to die.
Wordsworth had a very sturdy mind
and legs that took him far
into the mountains,
Scottish glens, German
towns and yes across
the Alps. Mz N has never seen
the Alps nor Snowdon
nor a mountain
anywhere beyond the ancient
Adirondacks Wordsworth too she thinks
would like their worndown humps
their pathless woods the rowboats by the shores
of placid lakes ready
for exploring. Young Wordsworth stole
a rowboat
rowed out on a lake one night and found himself
appalled
the mountain strode sublime
after him
and he trembled and his mind
as Burke had said it would
before sublimity
near failed. There are passages
in life
in Wordsworth
he called spots
of time and Mz N has some spots
she sometimes
recollects. But now
she's happy incredulous
in love
and in strange anguish
wants to recollect
nothing. If it were now
to die
'twere now to be most happy
she murmurs
with the engine
nearly exploding
with the fragility
and perverse strength of all that lives
and moves and has its being
in the air on the ground in the sea.
Having reached a floating state
of grace, surprised
by joy
she wants to die
life
can only get worse
the mountain
receding below them as they climb
Mz N History of Philosophy
Some are fated
to live out the history
of philosophy in their sex life.
In the cave
of illusion Mz N sensed
the realm of pure
ideas elsewhere
immanent in the sky
she would see only once
she'd left the cave and felt
the sun burn her eyes
into truth. Few
can bear
this truth
said Plato brilliant
monster and everyone
philosopher or no
makes her way
back into the cave
enlightened
or not. For her
there were no ideal forms
no ideal table
which all mere tables
could but imitate —
a real
behind the screen
of the real —
There was this god thing
He was personal
She took it personally
as if she were a Calvinist
or capitalist
and salvation and all profit depended
on her alone
her faith alone but faith
in what. Credo
in unum deum
for a long while and then
no credo. Mz N
recapitulated the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation
and several previous
minor and major heresies
in her soul inquiries & agonies years
seven to fourteen
as she would years later discover
through reading
— seven the age of reason
sd the ancients
or was it Shakespeare's Jaques
or was it eleven in Augustine —
They are always trying to fix
reason and the age of reason
so one could consent
to be reasonable about things
one was supposed to be reasonable about —
& one can't help but reason
said genial David Hume —
no other reason!
She would have
being Catholic
a confirmation
She'd be confirmed
if she'd be confirmed
in her faith. Kierkegaard
brought doubt into the heart
of faith though it had coiled there
a long while
not least in those anguished
souls who unsure
of their salvation
in the seventeenth century
drowned themselves.
Look into thy heart
All the historical things
may have happened
but they happen
specifically
to you
a most historical
unpoetical
thing.
A family
can create a world
sustained by other
institutions
can weave a weft
and warp of world
no other air
can penetrate
a while. Only a while
The thing
about the mind
it tunes itself
to secret strings vibrating
elsewhere. If elsewhere
another thing's ringing
or waving or wavering the mind
plucks it out
framing a harp and harpist
out of alien air and singing strings.
The grandfather died
and then the other grandfather
leaving the fatherless parents
flattened.
Where is he
& where is he
I suppose you are going
to tell me
he's gone to heaven
skepticism
a native faculty
of even a four-year-old mind.
They told her
he'd gone to heaven
with the other one.
They uneasily remember
this sometimes the pestering
long-gone child
who can question
without authority
Suffer
the children and suffer
the parents
What is the grass
I think it is the ancient hair
of graves
I think it is the lawn
the twentieth century unrolled
over America
It is a weed that sucks dry the water table
& the grass is the wind in the grass
a green handkerchief
dropped by an absconded god
* * *
Mz N can think herself
a blank slate
generating a world
out of sense impressions
but for the fact she feels
so uncertainly
she can't trust her senses
Are there five
Are there eight
The humans have devised
so many systems for sensing
and extra-sensing and taxonomizing
Anyone
who awaited stigmata
is a queer empiricist
Mock on mock on
Voltaire Rousseau
And when in a frat house
at fifteen
with a hapless drunk man
a boy really but large
technically and legally a man
how could she know
if he stuck it in
Wouldn't she have felt it
Wouldn't there have been blood
the palpable
something
Wouldn't there have been
as the novels and movies and daytime dramas insisted
blood?
Wouldn't there have been?
not to mention pain
There was nothing
a big fat nothing
Shakespeare's nothing
is a big fat thing
worth killing for
Hero
is a heroine of nothing
Voices drifted
up through a small
window open
a crack the older girls
singing don't do
don't do anything
your mother wouldn't want
you to Her mother
wouldn't want
her to and that's enough
for her to want to
A perfect oppositional logic
of an already enclosed field
of desire.
But what happened?
Whatever happens?
History is what happened
Poetry what could happen
The probability
is they'd fucked
or she'd been fucked
or he'd fucked her
or even in a wild unlikely construction
though one must in strictness admit it
she'd fucked him
And yet
She never really knew
what happened
And there was really no one
around to ask
This
was one of many episodes
in which Mz N had little grasp
of events
much less plot
Why not say what happened?
Why not say
what happened?
What happened?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MZN: The Serial by Maureen N. McLane. Copyright © 2016 Maureen N. McLane. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Epigraphs,
I,
PROEM: Mz N Contemporary,
Mz N Nothing,
Mz N Triumph of Life,
Mz N Growth of a Poet's Mind,
Mz N History of Philosophy,
Mz N Evil,
Mz N Highschool Boyfriend,
Mz N No Permanent Mind,
Mz N Enough,
II,
Mz N Goodbye Hello / Mz N Considers the Years and the Centuries,
Mz N Monster,
Mz N Hater,
Mz N Hermit,
Mz N Woman,
Mz N Song,
Mz N River Interval,
Mz N Thirteenth Floor,
Mz N Trans,
Mz N Therapy,
Mz N Baby,
Mz N Calling,
Mz N What,
Mz N Abyme,
Mz N Love Lies Sleeping / Moon,
Mz N Meadow,
Mz N Palinode,
Envoi / N-Voi,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Maureen N. McLane,
About the Author,
Copyright,