Garments against women

POETRY AND POLITICAL economy would seem to be odd bedfellows, but they've been consorting at least since Thomas Malthus quoted Alexander Pope in his "Essay on the Principle of Population" and Wordsworth wrestled with Adam Smith in "The Prelude." Within "political economy" lurk the oikos (household) and the polis (the city); our reigning algorithmic savants and financial quants too often forget this. Anne Boyer has not forgotten this. She has written a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of literature and of life itself. This sounds dry, abstract: It's not. Boyer's book moves as if the contents of a brokenhearted country song were mediated through the ferocious mind of a Hannah Arendt. Boyer offers a self-portrait of the artist in a time of "indentured moods," debt collection, chemical spills, amid her attempts at and refusals of writing, sewing and the daily care of herself and her small daughter. Does one have to be a "property owner" to make "literature"? Write memoirs? Poetry? These are perverse questions, perhaps, but they are Boyer's, and should be ours. This is a deeply, quietly, savagely perverse book, "perverse" in the sense of turning away: from the given, the mandated; from "things conferring authority," the logic of property, capital, productivity, the obligation to be happy, to be "working on yourself," to want things. A writerly book about refusals and failures, it entertains "the refusal of accounting altogether," of any making-good-on (promise, investment, children, one's own talents, opportunities, indeed, life). Accounting "gives the wrong forms to desire," Boyer suggests. This is a book of poetry (or is it lyric prose? Essay? Must one decide?) that also turns away from poetry: It has no interest in meter or prosody per se - rather, it is interested in the measuring of thought and feeling, in a slow amazing and amazed rendering of the negative space of official life. Boyer is fond of short forms and compressed forays - aphorism, epigram, vignette, list, fable, allegory: "Poetry was the wrong art for people who love justice. It was not like dance music. Painting is the wrong art for people who love justice ... Information is the poetry of the people who love war." "It was a time of many car troubles, so I waited for tow trucks and saw a squirrel with a marble in her mouth. It was a time of many money troubles, so I wrote about money or wanted to." I first encountered Boyer in her conversation this summer with Amy King on the Poetry Foundation website titled "Literature Is Against Us." A preposterous thing for a writer to claim, perhaps, but not when one thinks of the great, expanding, against-all-odds literature of dispossession. The Boyer of this book has been ill and poor and "so lonely" and has experienced profoundly the edges of what many on this our earth long have - a precarious life. "I was at the edge of cities. I was at the edge of economies. In those days some even accused me of googling my dreams." This book is a monument to many things, notably to what the scholar Anne-Lise François calls (in "Open Secrets") "uncounted experience." Boyer counts negatively, registering the underside of being and doing, honoring dream, vision, horror, the quotidian. "I think mostly about clothes, sex, food and seasonal variations. I have done so much to be ordinary and made a record of this." Where does a woman think, and when? "In the kitchen I was chopping vegetables and thinking about how discourse is a conspiracy, then how discourse is a conspiracy like 'taste,' then how taste is a weapon of class." Descartes at his stove, Boyer in her kitchen. The careful regulation of sentences, the tunneling into uncomfortable states of mind and feeling, could threaten to asphyxiate, but Boyer has a dark wit and knows when to shift modes. The dramaturgy of the book bestows enormous power on apparently small moments - as when Boyer shares a recipe for "A chocolate cake for when you own only one small round pan." That recipe is the totem of an alternate ars poetica, an ordinary making, a writing of the shareable, edible ordinary - which on some blessed days tastes good. This is not to fetishize the ordinary or the humble, for Boyer is unusual and has great literary ambition. An ambitious woman is, scandalously, a scandalous thing. Behind her poems lie intense engagements with writers and philosophers - Plato, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Artaud, Arendt, Agamben. It is no accident that she takes her epigraph from Mary Woll-stonecraft, the great feminist thinker. Midway through her book, Boyer writes: "I will soon write a long, sad book called 'A Woman Shopping.' It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature's uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. ... But who would publish this book and who, also, would shop for it?" Ahsahta Press has published this book, and you should shop for it, but if you can't afford it - can you not afford it? - you can contact Boyer, who will send you a pdf. "I wanted to keep unfashionable experience alive," Boyer writes. She has. Boyer offers a self-portrait of the artist in a time of debt collection and chemical spills. MAUREEN N. McLANE is the author of two books of literary criticism, a memoir and three volumes of poetry, most recently "This Blue."

In this textual hybrid of rhythmic lyric prose and essayistic verse, visual artist and poet Boyer (The Romance of Happy Workers) faces the material and philosophical problems of writing-and by extension, living-in the contemporary world. Boyer attempts to abandon literature in the same moments that she forms it, turning to sources as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the acts of sewing and garment production, and a book on happiness that she finds in a thrift store. Her book, then, becomes filled with other books, imagined and resisted. "I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day and all of the night," she declares, and concludes that "writing is like literature is like the world of monsters is the production of culture is I hate culture is the world of wealthy women and of men." This text is in constant upheaval, driven in equal measure by the poet's insistent questions and by her refusals, as she recalls "the days when we believed information." Of course, Boyer cannot resolve the problems she faces, but in providing new frameworks to think about them, her writing rewards readers with its challenges. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.