Donna Stonecipher, The Ruins of Nostalgia

 

THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 2

We had been to the secret service museum, to the shredded-documents-being-pieced-back-together museum, to the museum of the wealthy family’s Biedermeier house from 1830, to the museum of the worker family’s apartment from 1905, to the museum of the country that no longer exists, to the museum of the history of the post office, to the museum of the history of clocks. We had seen the bracelets made of the beloved’s hair, the Kaiserpanorama, the pneumatic tubes, the hourglasses, the shreds, the microphones hidden in the toupees, the ticking, the gilded mirrors reflecting our faces, the two rooms eight people lived in, the eight rooms two people lived in, the shreds, the trays of frangible butterflies carrying freight, the silvery clepsydras, the ticking, the simulacra, the shreds, the vitrines, the velvet ropes, the idealized portraits of the powerful, the ticking, the pink façades, the upward mobility, the shreds, the plunging fortunes, the downward spirals, the ticking, the ticking, the shreds, the shreds. We had been to the museum of the ruins of nostalgia.

I’m deeply behind on the work of American-expat Berlin-based poet Donna Stonecipher [although we did hang out that one time in Berlin], having gone through her Transaction Histories (University of Iowa Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], but not yet seeing copies of her books such as The Reservoir (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance Press, 2007), The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House Press, 2008), Model City (Shearsman, 2015) or Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017). At least I’m able to get my hands on her latest, The Ruins of Nostalgia (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), an unfolding of sixty-four numbered self-contained prose poem blocks, each sharing a title. As the cover flap offers: “Sparked by the East German concept of Ostalgic (nostalgia for the East) and written while living through unsettling socio-economic change in both Berlin, Stonecipher’s adopted home, and Seattle, her hometown, the poems mount a multifaceted reconsideration of nostalgia. Invented as a diagnosis by a Swiss medical student in 1688, over time nostalgia came to mean the notorious backward glance into golden pasts that never existed.” Stonecipher composes her sequence of prose poems as a weaving of lyric, essay and image, examining the very act of remembering the past, focusing on periods and geographies in the midst of change, ranging from the intimate to the large scale. “It was before the city built traffic circles at every intersection to prevent accidents,” the piece “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 21” begins, “like the one she’d heard one Sunday afternoon that sounded like someone shoving her parents’ stereo to the floor, but she’d run downstairs to find the stereo intact, her brother in front of it as usual, practicing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the guitar, headphones on.” Her prose lines extend and connect to further lines and threads held together, end to seeming end. “Of course it was a little odd to be glad of the bombs that had enabled the holes to remain holes,” she writes, as part of “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 7,” “to be grateful for the failed bankrupt state that had enabled the holes to remain holes, so lying on the grass of an accidental playground, one just listened to the ping-pong ball batted back and forth across the concrete table. And thought idly of one’s own surpluses and deficits.”

The notion of the repeated title is one I’m fascinated by, something utilized by a string of poets over the recent years, from Peter Burghardt, through his full-length debut (no subject) (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2022) [see my review of such here] to the late Denver poet Noah Eli Gordon’s Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Johannes Göransson’s SUMMER (Grafton VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. There is something compelling about working this particular kind of thread, attempting to push beyond the obvious across those first few poems under a shared title, into an array of what else might come. As well, Stonecipher’s line “the ruins of nostalgia” repeats at the end of poems akin to a mantra or chorus, running through the foundations of the sequence like a kind of tether, stringing her essay-poems together in a singular line of thought. It almost reminds of how Richard Brautigan used language as an accumulative jumble into the final phrase of In Watermelon Sugar (1968), a novel that ended with the name of the book itself; or the nostalgia of Midnight in Paris (2011), a recollection that sought a recollection of a recollection, folding in and repeating, endlessly rushing backwards. As with nostalgia, the phrase is repeated often enough throughout that it moves into pure sound and rhythm and away from meaning; to look too far and too deep into an imagined recollection, one glimpsed repeatedly and uncritically, is to lose the present moment. It is, by its very nature, to become ruin. As “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 11” writes:

We were able to be nostalgic both for certain cultural phenomena that had vanished, and for the time before the cultural phenomena had appeared, as if every world we lived in hid another world behind it, like stage scenery of a city hiding stage scenery of tiered meadows hiding stage scenery of ancient Illyria. For example it wasn’t answering machines, or the lack of answering machines, or the sight of tiny answering-machine tape cassettes that triggered our nostalgia, but the realization that our lives had transcended the brief life of the answering machine, had preceded and succeeded it, encompassed it, swallowed it whole, which meant we had to understand ourselves not as contained entities, but as planes intersecting with other planes, planes of time, technology, culture, desire. One plane had waited by the phone for our best friend’s phone call before answering machines, and then one plane had recorded outgoing messages on the answering machine over and over, trying and trying to sound blithe. How many tiny tape cassettes still stored pieces of our voices like pale-blue fragments of Plexiglas shattered into attics and basements across any number of states? We still owned a tape cassette with the voice of our first beloved on it, or a version of it, and remembered the version of the girl who kept rewinding his message over and over, under an analogue wedge of black sky and endlessly delayed stars. She was listening and listening for answers the answering machine could not provide. When we felt our material planes sliding to intersect with immaterial planes, or vice versa, we bowed our heads and submitted to the pile-up of the ruins of nostalgia.

 

Transaction Histories, Poems by Donna Stonecipher

            In Europe around the turn of the last century, all upper-class boys were ceremoniously photographed wearing sailor suits. Now flea markets all over the continent overflow with little blue sailors who cannot save themselves. All up and down the diverted and straightened canal, some Romantic had once planted willows. Meanwhile, the lily flower had long since been abstracted into the fleur-de-lys. (1., “TRANSACTION HISTORY 3”)

American poet and longtime resident of Berlin Donna Stonecipher’s latest collection, following The Reservoir (University of Georgia Press. 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance Press. 2007), The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House Press. 2008), Model City (Shearsman. 2015) and Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017), is Transaction Histories (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2018). Reminiscent of the work of Cole Swensen for her use of the extended, single line, Transaction Histories, as the back cover offers, is a gathering of “six series of poems that explore the disobedient incongruities of aesthetics and emotions,” yet this is also a collection constructed as a single, ongoing prose sequence, pushing further and further through the possibilities of the sentence. There is something of Russell Edson’s prose-poem influence in her work (an influence I’m not entirely fond of), but one that borrows as part of an array of influence, as opposed to something replicated. Stonecipher’s prose-explorations exist more in the fluid space, it would seem, between Edson’s narratives and a more lyric strain, akin to a poet such as Cole Swensen, or even, given her focus on sentences, Lisa Robertson. The lyric elements of her sentences have the most intriguing ebb and flow, moving through her prose like water.

            The emotion bottling up in the champagne Marxist was either going to explore, skyrocketing him into the stratosphere, or sink him like a stone in his Gucci jeans. There were fates worse than being too clever by half, such as being insipid in spades. Or being a head buried and reburied in sand. We hated the developers, true, but that didn’t mean as soon as we got any money we wouldn’t buy the fanciest new apartment we could. (9., “FOUND TO BE BORROWED FROM SOME MATERIAL APPEARANCE 1”)

There is a fine tension she explores as well, between “aesthetics and emotions,” moving between and among landscapes of history, vision, artwork and writing, shifting across a wide field of interpretations and responses, as well as the collisions that occur between seemingly unconnected thoughts, images and sentences. “It is not possible to map a coastline,” she writes, to open part 4 of her poem “TRANSACTION HISTORY 5,” “because the closer you zoom in, the more complexly intricate is the tracery of the coves and jetties, the sandbars all sliding off the map to be swallowed up by the great Unpredictable.” Stonecipher’s Transaction Histories explore the prose poem through multiple entry points, utilizing the building blocks of sentences to accumulate into stanzas, stanzas to accumulate into sequences, sequences to accumulate into sections, and sections to accumulate into a single, stunning, book-length work.

            If you make a declaration of love under a waterfall, does anyone hear it? The anthropologist disdained the phrenologist, though he had one of those porcelain phrenology heads on his mantel. It took almost three years to dismantle the building. She was trying to get funding for a research project in which she would determine from exactly how many apartment windows in the city the TV tower, or even part of it, could be seen. (1., “FOUND TO BE BORROWED FROM SOME MATERIAL APPEARANCE 4”)

Berlin notes, or, Achtung, toddler!

[Rose, during our 3-4 hour Frankfurt layover]

Berlin: how different from so many other trips we've taken this year, from Washington D.C. to Boca Raton to Toronto to Glengarry to Sainte-Adele; so much adventuring! (I'm not entirely sure how we do it all either.)

Friday, October 9/Saturday, October 10, 2015: The first day was a blur; what do I remember?

A week in Berlin, for the sake of a work-related conference on conservation (book, paper, etc) Christine is attending. Eighteen hours from Ottawa door to Berlin hotel, including: a stop-over in Frankfurt, and Berlin cab drivers we weren't able to communicate with. Apparently cab drivers can't take wee children without carseats (which we eventually did understand), but didn't bother relaying (either cab driver we spoke to) that one can order a cab with a carseat. They moved on, leaving us standing on the corner with our many bags and sleeping child. Two buses later, a protest blocked us, and we rode two subway trains before a walk finally saw the front doors of our hotel. Two hours from airport to hotel, and we were dead tired. Mid-afternoon, and barely a wink of sleep in twenty-four hours. We crashed. Or at least, we attempted to crash.

I think we arrived on Saturday. Was it Saturday? I suppose, if we left on Friday afternoon.

Rose and I headed out for supplies, given our hotel kitchen-less, leaving Christine to get a bit of rest while we out. A block down, Rose cranked and complained, and then crashed in the grocery cart just as we were to leave.

Saturday made no sense. But it took a few days before anything became clear again. Oh, jetlag.

 And all the time, thinking: what did I know of Berlin? What was I expecting? Very little clue. U2 videos, perhaps (including the one for my favourite U2 song). Falco, perhaps. The first night we were ensconced in hotel, I played a variety of musics, including Marlene Dietrich, what I knew of Kurt Weill (this and this), and multiple other tracks, until I nearly drove Christine mad. There was much laughter (not shared by the group).

Sunday, October 11, 2015: Our first full day in Berlin made a bit more sense. We wandered some, including just south of our hotel, which ended up being a very cool building, the Kammergericht, and adjoining playground. The park was even named after a poet, although one of the German Romantic ones that eventually took his own life (after taking the life of his terminally-ill partner, at her request).

I've heard Berlin a haven for children, and we've seen enough parks and playgrounds to believe it, although numerous ones have been attached to apartment buildings, or even the rare public one that looks really, really sketchy (Rose and I found some people sleeping in an early morning park, one overrun with graffiti as well). The playground structures were impressive, and for children a bit older than Rose, but she and I climbed up to the top of one (some three storeys up, I'm sure) for the sake of the slide (Christine got some good pics she posted to facebook).

Really, our first full-day in the city was simply hazy. We tried to figure out if sleep was even possible, somehow (but the bar downstairs is open 24/7, by the by).

Monday, October 12, 2015: As Christine began her conference, we attempted to find things for the young lady to enjoy, including Kurt-Hiller-Park, another park near our hotel, and park named for writer Kurt Hiller (1885-1972). Are all parks in Berlin named after writers? Marvellous!

Not exactly the best park for the sake of things to entertain the wee lass (this was the highlight, and not exactly a 'ride,' per se: but there was a cool green-coloured concrete snake circling the entire sand patch).

Before we returned to the park from the day prior, Rose climbed and descended the steps of a sculpture erected to honour Hiller as one of the co-founders of the gay civil rights movement.

At the previous day's park, the toddler swing had disappeared, forcing us to utilize the 'big girl' swing, which she enjoyed for the first time.

And, at the end of the day, some Turkish Kababs from a stand down the street, which I enjoyed far more than I would have expected (I had it twice more during our week).

Tuesday, October 13, 2015: Today was the zoo; an hour or so in the morning, where the young lady saw lions, monkey, giraffes and other creatures.

We saw a lion that roared a low, rumbling, incredibly powerful roar, shaking the room and more than a few of the folk standing in the lion's path. Rose, of course, laughed, said 'more?' and then roared in response.

And: you like the wee hat I picked up for the young lady? Colder here than we expected. It came with mittens and a scarf (which I've been using).

During our wanderings, I saw a couple of things on the street that amused me, but otherwise, it was a rather quiet day. It was getting too cold for the park, and the rain was starting to mist. Christine, as part of her conference, went to a reception of some sort, so, post-nap (and post-postcard writing), Rose and I eventually returned to the Turkish stand, where she enjoyed what we call "French Fries" (she repeatedly requested such from them), but they call "pommes" (pronounced "pomme-ez"). She was very happy in our little room.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015: Our first ambitious morning outing, which of course coincided with the first days of cold, wet, rainy (the worst of our trip). Rainy cold, we braved a walk and three buses to make the Berlin Wall Memorial. I find the whole history involving the Wall to be rather confusing, and even troubling (I suppose that is the appropriate response); how does one divide an entire country, culture and city? And how do the divided sides react, and shift? And how might they ever attempt to come together again? They are two halves of a single whole, which might always be separate, despite their reintegration.

Curious, too: have there been studies done at all around those who left East Berlin once the wall fell, against a percentage of return? Certainly, the reasons for leaving might have fallen once the wall did, but the itch couldn't be helped; the desperation, one might imagine, too strong to consider any option other than escape. But after more than two decades, have any returned? Ten percent? Less? More? Any at all? The city still stands, with a population and people. Are they but the ones who remained? I'd be curious to know.

We got a couple of pics in front of the wall, including ones where Rose would rather be stomping in puddles (the one with her tongue out is when I asked her to "smile").

From the observation deck, another view of the wall, and environs. It startled me to see just how bare and large the space between East and West were, and yet, how thin the wall itself. Less the Berlin Wall than the kill-zone, the no-man's land that kept anyone from crossing.

By later afternoon, we braved the cold again to meet up with Christine at her conference (XIII IADA Congress: the International Association of Book and Paper Conservators), and Rose drew pictures as we waited.

Heading over to Potsdamer Platz, we discovered the Mall of Berlin (really?) where we dined on German fare in their food court.

Thursday, October 15, 2015: Christine didn't have any conference until 11am or so, which allowed us to wander a bit towards downtown as a unit, heading north towards Potsdamer Platz to see what was what. Once our breakfast mess was cleaned, we headed toward the Brandenburg Gate (we got lost, slightly). It was raining, cold, but neither as bad as when Rose and I attempted the Berlin Wall; and the wee lass passed out asleep in the stroller, cold.

Somehow, I feel as though I look like a character from a James Bond film; a Bond Villain, perhaps?

And the obligatory selfie (I usually ask passers-by to take photos; I never get the aim right in a "selfie").

And did we mention we're expecting in April? I mean, Christine did announce a few days ago on Facebook... (I swear, the last one).

And then the Holocaust Memorial, which was incredibly powerful. Beyond even words.


By then, we exhausted, and Christine headed off to her conference, and Rose and I returned to our hotel, for her nap (and a bit of mine).
Post-nap, given Christine gave us a handful of money, Rose and I headed off to the Mall of Berlin for a repeat of the previous night's dinner, and frozen yoghurt, which made her clap and clap and clap. Ice cream! she yelled.

She ignored the sausage, and we both ignored the McDonalds (ugh) behind us. And then, the main purpose to our outing: LEGOLAND DISCOVERY!

I was very impressed with this place, even though Rose was a bit small for parts of it; she didn't care, and it was well worth the sixteen Euros we (I) paid to get in (she was free). I was amazed at all the new colours of Lego bricks: Orange! Purple! Pink! I had some when a kid, but never as much as I wanted; and certainly never as much as the kid down the road, who had a bedroom completely filled. Oh, to have that much (x2, for the sake of Rose etc to have their own, obviously).

She built things and then climbed on other things and then ran around and then ran around some more and then ran around even more climbing on things. After more than an hour (realizing how late it was getting), I quite literally had to drag her out of there.

[post-drinks, in the train station nearing midnight, a selfie with Donna Stoneciper] Later in the evening, I was able to meet up with the utterly charming American poet and expat Donna Stonecipher, who has lived in Europe for much of the past two decades, in Berlin for much of the past decade. We met up on the former East Berlin side of the scar-once-wall, and she showed me some of the differences, still, between. There was the former squat, various Jewish graveyards, and the remnants of other remnants. Some buildings were new, but others hadn't really been kept up in years, and the bar where we had drinks was dark, smoke-filled, and covered with a post-wall graffiti that remained, deliberately, as a reminder of what was. She showed me plaques on the cobblestone, each with the name of the Jewish dead who had lived in the adjoining apartments, and the dates and locations where they had been killed. A powerful and remarkable acknowledgement of an incredibly painful history.

Donna and I traded books, and stories; we know far too many of the same people. Taking four trains to meet her, she showed me how to take only two home, and I made it in half the time.

Friday, October 16, 2015: Am I writing? Oh, don't even ask. I've been working on about a half-dozen interviews for various purposes (mostly Touch the Donkey), but that's about it. Perhaps when we're home.

Christine didn't have to be at her conference until noon, so we headed towards Museum Island (or somesuch) for the sake of looking. She immediately directed us to the Pergamon Museum, which houses the infamous Ishtar Gate, which was breathtaking. It immediately made me think of the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, given it was the name of her posthumous selected poems; I miss her, sometimes.

Rose was very much running low on patience, so we couldn't get through much of the museum (the palace under glass immediately made me think of that first Indiana Jones movie), but for the Ishtar Gate; I showed her some of the animals in carvings and figurings, and we made a variety of animal noises, but it was merely attempting borrowed time. We made for muffins, and then found an aquarium, where we ended our outing, before hotel and naps and a very quiet evening in.

Saturday, October 17, 2015: Today we fly to Amsterdam for a few days, where Christine is doing a talk. Auf Wiedersehen, Berlin. I have enjoyed you.