Multiple Choice Alejandro Zambra

  I’m not quite sure what to make of Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice. It’s a really unique project that turns a standardized test into an authentic literary enterprise. Zambra explores the possibility of a standard set of A-B-C-D-E options turning into something more profound and interesting, blending poetry, autobiography (maybe), and fiction.

The book is divided into five sections. The first requires readers to pick the term that doesn’t match the heading or the other terms. The second is about putting sentences into their correct sequence. The third is about completing the sentences (fill-in-the-blanks), while the fourth requires readers to eliminate a sentence or sentences within a short story. The final section is reading comprehension and offers some more substantial (though still only roughly 5 page) stories. 

But Zambra is tricky. While there might be a bubblesheet to fill in at the back of the book, there is no answer key, nor could there be. The questions put readers into challenging positions and the stakes feel even bigger than actual standardized test questions. Consider, for example, the excluded term question for “Teach.” Readers are expected to pick one of the following that does not fit: A) preach, B) control, C) educate, D) initiate, E) screech. Now, I’d like to think that as a teacher I don’t “screech” but if I take that out it leaves “preach” and “control” still in the mix; there’s no good option. Similarly, some of the options double-up. Like for “Promise” the options read from A-E as complete / silence / promise / complete silence. Conversely, Zambra includes questions where all of the options seem good. For instance, the word “Letter” has the options for A) uppercase, B) lowercase, C) cursive, D) dead, and E) silent. Likewise, “Cut” allows for erase / annul / blot / expunge / wound. All of them are viable choices, and so it forces you to reflect on what your personal biases are. What seems most poetic to you?

Zambra is able to make use of structures to allow for multiple options, a choose-your-own-perspective with carefully crafted options. For instance, in one of the fill-in-the-blank questions, he provides the statement, “And if they have any ________ left, that’s what _____________ for.” The options offer very different possibilities for engaged readers. The options range for innocuous and innocent to politically charged to deeply depressing. Here’s what the options say if filled in:

And if they have any energy left, that’s what sports are for.

And if they have any hope left, that’s what reality is for.

And if they have any illusions left, that’s what the void is for.

And if they have any dissent left, that’s what the cops are for.

And if they have any neurons left, that’s what crack cocaine is for.

The cynicism and nihilistic mindset allows readers to choose their fate, but almost none of them are good ones. Each adds dimension in an interesting way.

When asked to sequence statements into a cohesive narrative, there are similar disruptions to our thinking. Some resequencing questions are standard and legitimate, but they all seem just a little bit off from what you might want to conclusively decide. For instance, in the piece “The second” you’re given the following sequence:

1. You try to remember your first Communion.

2. You try to remember your first masturbation.

3. You try to remember the first time you had sex.

4. You try to remember the first death in your life.

5. And the second.

The answers put you in a position where you have to “try” to remember something “and the second.” It feels a little bit off because if you’re remembering the second, then surely you’d remember the first, no? It also places you in a position that implies that you have to forget the others. For your reference, and to decide what selective forgetting you’ll engage in today, the available answers are as follows:

1. 1-5-2-3-4

2. 1-2-5-3-4

3. 1-2-3-5-4

4. 4-5-1-2-3

5. 4-3-2-1-5

The sequencing questions really help to emphasize how the order of presentation can impact our perception of a narrative. Several of the pieces are essentially flash fictions, but flash fictions that offer multiple paths at once. For example, there’s a piece called “Two hundred twenty-three.” It reads as follows:

1. You remember the freckles on her breasts, on her legs, on her belly, on her ass. The exact number: two hundred twenty-three. One thousand two hundred and seven days ago there were two hundred twenty-three.

2. You reread the messages she used to send you: They are beautiful, funny. Long paragraphs, vivid, complex sentences. Warm words. She writes better than you do.

3. You remember the time you drove five hours just to see her for ten minutes. It wasn’t ten minutes, it was the whole afternoon, but you like to think it was only ten minutes.

4. You remember the waves, the rocks. Her sandals, a wound on her foot. You remember your eyes daring from her thighs to her eyelashes.

5. You never got used to being with her. You never got used to being without her. You remember when she said, in a whisper, as if to herself: Everything is OK.

Option D is to go 2-3-4-5-1. Reading it in that mode seems to create a greater sense of loss, an intimation of time passing, and the degeneration of a relationship. Reading it start to finish (option E) feels, in some ways, like a more complete story—although I feel like section 2 should be closer to the end. It’s difficult to make a choice. 

In other sections, Zambra maintains a playfulness that makes this poetry test impossible to grade. In a piece called “A kick in the balls”, the statements are presented as follows:

1. You think of all the people, living or dead, near or far, men or women, from your country or abroad, who have reason to kick you in the balls.

2. You wonder if you deserve a kick in the balls.

3. You wonder if you deserve to be hated. You wonder if anyone really hates you.

4. You wonder if you hate anyone. You wonder if you hate the people who hate you.

5. Insomnia wounds and accompanies you.

Each of the answers, though, is mutually exclusive. You either get to choose 1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2 or 3-3-3-3-3 or 4-4-4-4-4 or 5-5-5-5-5. Despite there seeing to be a connection between the items, you’re only able to put yourself into a repetitive rumination. In “Rhyme”, the answers present uneven outcomes. The options are A) 5-1-2-3-4, B) 5-4-3-2-1, C) 1-2-3-4-5, D) 1-5-2-3-4, or E) 1-2-3-4. That’s a tricky one because it prevents you from selecting the statement that “you are not crazy”. If you’d like the statements for rhyme to try to the poem at home, here they are:

1. You search for words that rhyme with your first name.

2. You search for words that rhyme with your last name.

3. Your first and last names do not rhyme, but you search for words that rhyme with both your first and last names.

4. You search for words that don’t rhyme with either your first name or your last name, or with anything else.

5. You are not crazy.

Additionally, at least one poem in the sequencing section gives the same sequence for every option—and yet you might feel the resistance popping up in you that you want to revise, you want to create an option that isn’t there. The book is tricky in how it invites your contribution and then, when it doesn’t, you realize you’ve been trained the principles of rebellion: find the path you want, even if it isn’t there. In the poem “Scars,” the only option you’re provided is to read it sequentially, which goes like this:

1. You think about how the shortest distance between two points is the length of a scar.

2. You think: the introduction is the father, the climax is the son, and the resolution is the holy spirit.

3. You read books that are much stranger than the books you would write if you wrote.

4. You think, as if it were a discovery, that the last point in the line of time is the present.

5. You try to go from the general to the specific, even if the general is General Pinochet.

6. You try to go from the abstract to the concrete.

7. The abstract is the pain of others.

8. The concrete is the pain of others colliding with your body until you are completely invaded.

9. The concrete is something that can only grow.

10. Something like a tumor, or the opposite of a tumor: a child.

11. In your case, it’s a tumor.

The fatalism of the piece matches the fatalism of the options. You can only go so far, and yet…

At times, Zambra plays off this interactivity in a meta way. In one of the sections where you have select one for deletion, there’s a discussion of being a reader, a writer, a censor, all at once. Again, it’s a tricky one because the option is to delete none of the options. Every option after that refers to the previous option, meaning that no matter what you pick, you don’t get the power to delete any of these items:

1. I didn’t want to talk about you, but it’s inevitable.

2. I’m talking about you right now. And you’re reading this, and you know it’s about you.

3. Now I am words that you read and wish did not exist.

4. I hate you. 

5. You would like to have the power of a censor.

6. So no one else would ever read these words.

7. I hate you.

8. You ruined my life.

9. Now I am words you cannot erase.

There’s another section that is about the relationship between writing and truth and whether we have the power to remove portions of the narrative. It’s a complex and playful interplay of the details.

In one of the short stories in the reading comprehension section, there is a whole section about Chilean students learning to cheat that feels relevant. Zambra writes, “Even if we did nothing but study, we knew there would always be two or three impossible questions. We didn’t complain. We got the message: Cheating was just part of the deal” (66). What is really compelling here is a critique (or reflection, at least) of the education system that demands compliance with correct answers. The reflection continues, though, into a meditation on individualism: “I think that, thanks to our cheating, we were able to let go of some of our individualism and become a community. It’s sad to put it this way, but cheating gave us a sense of solidarity. Every once in a while we suffered from guilt, from the feeling that we were frauds—especially when we looked ahead to the future—but in the end our indolence and defiance prevailed” (66). I think this book could really help us to connect to those feelings of individualism and community. On the one hand, we are all creating individual answers (there’s no answer key, so no standard) but at the same time we are in dialogue with an extant discourse over which we have no control. 

Now that we have reached the end of the review, what would be the best way to summarize this text?

1. Which text? The review or the book?

2. Multiple Choice is a poetic experience that demands

3. Readers to engage with writers.

4. Writers to plan multiple avenues at once.

5. Happy reading for the audience of this review.

Eunoia by Christian Bök

    Over the last twenty years, Christian Bök’s Eunoia has come to be hailed as a watershed moment in Canadian avant garde poetry, and it feels impossible to discuss its merit without an understanding of Bök’s self-imposed constraints.

    The first constraint is obvious to the general reader: in each of the sections of the book, Bök limits himself to just one vowel. For example, the A Section only uses words where A is the only vowel. Likewise for E through U. That in itself is an impressive enough feat, but the book’s true magnitude only becomes obvious when reading Bök’s notes on the text:

“All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire [...] The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once)” (103-104). 

It is impressive enough that each section restricts itself to the use of one vowel, but to use 98% of the words that meet the criteria is just incredible, all the more so because of how cohesive each of the sections is. While reading, I noticed the motif of the “culinary banquet” emerging (which, before knowing the 98% rule, seemed a bit of a cheat for populating the poems with a lengthy blazon), some of the other motifs are less clear on an initial read-through but shine more brightly on reflection.

    Eunoia, the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, means “beautiful thinking” (103), and the book is written as a “univocal lipogram” that is “inspired by the exploits of Oulipo [...] the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints” (103). The risk of such experimentation is that the ‘heart’ of the poems will be lost in the name of its self-imposed higher authority. While that is sometimes the case, it’s impressive just how well Bök is able to craft narratives through each section of the work.

    If you’re familiar with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Eunoia may inspire some resonance. In Chapter A, Hassan Abd al-Hassad goes through an entire rise and fall in just 18 pages. By contrast, Chapter E focuses on Helen and the Greeks. Surprisingly, “I” is a mere 8 pages, though “I” elsewhere seems to offer so many poetic possibilities. The “O” chapter is the zenith, I’d argue, of the “prurient debauch” that emerges in other forms in earlier works. Taking on the the challenge is admirable, though I have to admit that Ubu and the “U” chapter is the least compelling of the bunch.

    All said, I am truly impressed by Bök’s seven year project. It’s hard to take a sampling of the work and do it justice, but here is an excerpt from the “E” chapter, chosen at random, to illustrate how clearly the narrative progresses, despite the constraints:

“Helen remembers Crete – the Eden where senescent shepherds (les bergers des betes) herd bellwether sheep; there, Helen sees the pebbled steppes (the eskers where chert screen bestrews the ledges). Helen treks wherever herdsmen trek. She sees the veldts where ewes, when fleeced, chew the sedges. She sees the glens, then the dells, where elk herds chew the vetch. She helps the herders erect fenced pens where hens peck feed; then she helps the shepherdesses sell the eggs. The sheep-herders mend fences; the sheeptenders tend hedges. The sheepbreeders even breed steer, then geld them” (47).

Who needs other vowels, anyway?

    Returning briefly to Bök’s notes on what each chapter must include, he lists the following: 

1. Allusions to the art of writing

2. A culinary banquet

3. A prurient debauch

4. A pastoral tableau

5. A nautical voyage

    Each chapter opens with #1, and I find that he effectively captures the spirit of writing, if not the individual letter, in a way made all the more impressive since it’s comprised entirely of that letter. The combination of words for the start of “Chapter A” is particularly incantatory and illuminates the project as a whole. Bök writes the following:

“Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh – a handstamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark” (12).

Honestly, at a certain point the craftsmanship is just showing off. From the very first sentence condemning “awkward grammar”, Bök anticipates critics of his work before meditating on the connection his avant-garde process shares with art movements like Dada. Describing the A itself as a “slapdash arc and a backward zag” seems to capture its spirit in a cheeky self-referential approach. Outlining his constraints with the constraint (“a law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark”) is that perfect touch of rebelliousness and showmanship that makes the project work.

    In less capable hands, Eunoia is a text at which people would balk. Bök, though, handles it with such care that the entire collection weaves into a complete image, a well-achieved machine.

    Admittedly, the personal resonances may be less frequent than in a collection that sticks to free-verse lyrics, but in imposing these additional rules of language upon himself, Bök seems to strike at the core of a hidden network of connections that continually underlie our language. Whether or not there’s a complete logic to language, Bök certainly gives the impression of one, characterizing the vowels in their own particular ways. (We do call letters characters, after all.) In some ways, it reminds me of some of Jan Zwicky’s work in Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences, where her poems characterize the letters on a musical scale. It’s a reason for optimism that all is connected, all can be explained.

    Overall, Bök’s Eunoia is a worthwhile experiment that pushes language to its limits. It’s an incredible statement on the possibility for meaning—even when it’s confined to such harsh limitations. Not all avant-garde projects “work”, but I can safely say that Bök’s ought not be ignored, if for no other reason than to revel in the possibilities that defy all constraints.

    Happy reading!

the correct fury of your why is a mountain by kevin andrew heslop

    Please read this in the most positive tone possible: it took me a long time to read this short book. I first started it—twice—right as I was going to bed. The opening poem in kevin andrew heslop’s collection gives a gentle, playful opening and the second is a demanding, extended, beautifully wrought and inventive piece. I knew, I just knew, this was not a before-bed kind of read. This was a book that commanded slow, thoughtful consideration. With that in mind, I restarted my reading. Again.

    the correct fury of your why is a mountain is replete with double and triple readings that are as playful as they are insightful. I’ve already alluded to the opening poem of the collection, presented as a forward, which reads: “a thought, barefoot //// slips ///// along a / painter’s /  tendon, // pools /// at the risk. //// Wrist” (ix). In addition to that auditory echo, heslop’s cheeky love of language is elevated, too, by the placement of the words on the page. It’s hard to replicate the organized chaos of the arrangement, but it takes me back to a special time in life where I was experimenting with form—largely to no purpose—and it’s nice to see heslop capitalizing on the visual side of poetry, particularly when it feels like so few poets (myself included) are making use of the page, truly, like a canvas.

    The second poem, “i cavalloni”, dives into language by exploring the Italian word for high waves; the opening line says it doubles as the word for horses. The rest of the poem builds an incredibly imagistic scene of waves coming in like horses. The use of the word “doubles” in the poem is particularly potent because so many of the lines can be read in secondary ways. Because of the spacing of the words and their lack of punctuation, the emphasis falls in places sometimes unexpectedly. The style forces a second read and the secondary interpretations of lines prove fruitful. I often think great poets teach people how to read them, and “i cavalloni” serves as a perfect primer for the collection; you learn to get used to the spacing and the cadences and the lack of punctuation and the layering that comes through in each piece.

For instance, here’s a sample from “the prettiest the most tangential now”:

makes more             sense                       than the former

               blur of         endeavour as                     the con

--temporary surplus autopilot clusterfuck              edits                                                               a mere         boy (5)

The brokenness of the lines gives a gentle ambiguity that allows for possibility. We could make more sense than the former blur, or we could make more blur of sense. The brokenness of con— and —temporary is also engaging for several reasons. Of course, we recognize “con” as a kind of deception, and to me the line suggests that the contemporary is a con. What makes it more compelling to me is that, usually, hyphens are placed at the end of a line to help signal to the reader that the word continues on the subsequent line. By placing it at the start of a line, heslop accomplishes something I find very interesting; he gives a sense of finality in the line that continues. We expect to end on “the con.” With the hyphen at the start of the line, our reading starts in media res, as it were, with a new thought, a “temporary surplus.” The approach requires a good deal of mental juggling that allows multiple truths to co-exist. Another example is in “actually listening ducks is preferable to the predicated pinprick religion”, “the river   its referred   countenance horizontal gravity ducks  seem to prefer / sidelong pinnacle gymnastics of light on water turning like recall i was won // -dering about the manifested of it  meanwhile this radical white indivi– / dual inclined smallpox folk the western world must have longed for escape” (6). The line “i was won” suggests a completion—a kind of entrancement, a giving over of oneself. The moment is then immediately undermined when the word is revised to wondering. No longer is the speaker of the poem given over to the ducks, but instead the ducks are turned into an object of an interrogation, a mode which is, by necessity, incomplete. Notice also that indivi— / dual gets split up differently. Instead of the hyphen appearing at the start, we are given a sense of continuation. And where do the words continue? As a ‘dual,’ a doubling.

    Look at how much I’ve already written about this book. Now take a moment to appreciate the fact that I’m working through the book chronologically and I’ve made it to page 6.

    heslop’s inventiveness with line breaks and page arrangement is only one element of his work, though I do think it contributes to his creative and political project as a whole. There is a resistance to some concerning trends of modern life, including the extremes that arise when people fail to take time to think slowly and carefully.

    One poem, “oh that’s the universe in absolutely radically caps lock accordance with forever” (9), heslop addresses “the masked static of our time” and considers “the question of the edge is of precise diptych / of whether remote chaos without     order    is    possible” (9). The poem continues entrancingly, where “the discrete infinities of language bubbles” are “suspending in sanitizing gel.” Subsequently, “we are / disordered and  ordered  the   crystalline     kin        we    are   just    now as one // community without impulse to you  me my your us  them viral binaries thin— / king English distinction requires  as a syntax of sunlight in italics on the river” (9). heslop works on multiple levels simultaneously, but we also see in this poem a resistance to “viral binaries” — I read the word “viral” in its sickly sense here — and the addition of the word “thin” there shows just how little binaries can be taken seriously. The erosion of distinctions between you, me, my, your, us, them seems to be an impulse here, and what better way to generate political change than with some gorgeous imagery like “a syntax of sunlight in italics” (9). Just fantastic. Actually, in “all the wrong ghosts live here” there’s another beautiful image the draws on text feature imagery: “Bumper cars like ampersands guided by chance / and circumstance in a threadbare ballet” (41). Holy moly what an image. Sliding back over to “oh that’s the universe in absolutely radically caps lock accordance with forever,” the whole poem is great, but I worry that if I cite too much I’ll just overwhelm everyone. I’ll take that risk: “disorienting  grammar      like      love    consciously    trans / —piring the masked   infinities   we    are   can         will      go on forever here” (9). I love the way the poem weaves together issues of identity and language in a non-didactic way, illuminating the issues with wonderful turns of phrase: “you can’t take the edge off a sphere” (9). 

    The poems I’ve cited until now are among the more strange and challenging pieces. That said, heslop shows some great range. Several of the poems are more direct in their formatting, whilst still being compelling. There’s a wonderful, short, piece called “in lieu” that has a lovely sentimentality that balances the more political / socially conscious bent of some of the other poems:

A truth is we hold memories too meaningful

to punish with the anecdotal telling of translation

Into brittle words, as equally there are some memories

too scared for review: the ilk of faces they contain,

held wrapped in neural silk, suspend above the storm

of harms the world can be, like a perfect eyelash

on a sleeping baby’s cheek, untouchable

because of that concern that sleep would not return

after a wakening—so sleep, a little, memory: sleep. (24)

The gentleness of the poem is a refreshing ‘reset’ in partway through the collection. While it still references some issues of language and translation, some of the tender imagery really elevates the piece. The idea of being “wrapped in neural silk” is lovely and the apostrophe addressing sleep in the final lines is a delight.

    In addition to the political and sentimental, there are some aphoristic pieces, some poems in inspired by other poets and some more personal-sounding pieces. In “about the twice-bent blast of that good night”, heslop presents a poem in two parts that is a blend of texting between two characters and a meditation on language and the way heslop mixes the parts together gives the poem a wonderful sequence. The closest analog I can identify is with John Ashbery, whose poems similarly hold a mix of different elements woven together like an intricate handmade basket. I couldn’t possibly do the poem its justice except by rewriting it all here, as I’ve done for my private notebook, but there’s a lovely call-and-response between the first and second part of the poem. In the first part, “That night, / abacus was from the Hebrew word for dust; // calculus, a pebble, from the Latin” (21). There’s then a throwaway mundanity question, the second part starts, and there’s a gut punch: “Grief is a time zone without a calendar. / ‘But define dust’” (22). I love the parallels and mirroring between the two parts and within them. I also like the line “Acrylic / runs from every dog’s mouth on every side / —walk in every city in the world and hear, / brother, in every endless tongue, in every style // of union or revilement, the text of the world: / Fuck” (22). Notice again the breakdown of side-walk. It ends the dog image and then starts an imperative to act, to walk in every city. The poem operates as a kind of spiral and it’s a pretty incredible ode to English speakers’ favourite profanity.

    Really, I can’t rave enough about the imagery of the collection. The poem “back in town” paints such a vivid picture that, again, I could only do justice to by quoting the poem in its entirety. It’s a beautiful ride on the bus. heslop paints the scene beautifully and then gives it that perfect personal touch, that tiny hint of narrative: “With that sentence, / I hoped to tell you how I felt—of particular relevance / is the first line break. Also the distances” (30). After 13 lines of poetry, the personal address is jarring. There’s something about the poem that reads like a prolonged sonnet. A lot of the lines are a syllable too long, and the whole poem is about three lines too long. Both elements combined feel like a lingering longing, a prolonged desire. It’s a poem I’d love to delve into with some of my students—I think they’d really be able to provide some excellent insight. Similarly, “Astoria” offers a personal touch that feels so vulnerable and authentic to be irresistible.

    The creativity of the collection doesn’t even end with the poems. I’ve never seen an acknowledgements section like heslop’s. heslop provides a poem that stretches over several pages in bursts of one or two lines. The poem’s lines are provided with footnotes. In the footnotes heslop thanks a number of his loved ones and influences. I loved that inventive approach to elevate a humdrum “thank you”s section to a creative act in its own right. Incidentally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an acknowledgements section that thanks so many people that are personally known to me and so many places I’ve been. I hope my experiential overlap with heslop will allow us to one day come into closer contact and talk poetry.

    On that note, there’s a poem in the collection called “observing how you went a few steps at a time to parchment” that has an epigrammatic inscription: “a found poem in four acts for the disabled poem-making entity known as Roxanna Bennett which bears this very went-to-school smart person subtitle you are reading now” (17). As an aside, I absolutely adore Roxanna Bennett’s work, as well, so this meeting of the minds seems, to me, fortuitous and for them outright inspiring. In that poem, there’s a line that reads as follows: “to decide whether ot not / the organization of hope / is poetry” (17) and I quite like that formulation. The idea that poetry gives shape to a particular kind of experience is a worthwhile exploration. I like, too, that “organization” could be used as a noun here in multiple ways. It could read as either Institutional or, as I prefer, the conscious, craft-like act of putting things in place.

    If poetry is the organization of hope, I see a tremendous hopefulness roaming through the correct fury of your why is a mountain. The collection is so wonderfully constructed and embodies a particular kind of ethos, a slow thoughtfulness that serves as both a personal and political imperative. The medium, as the adage goes, is the message here. Everything heslop does seems purposeful while not being limited to a particular interpretation, and I really value that.

    As I mentioned, it took me a long time to read this book, despite it being relatively short. Luckily, it took me a while to read for all of the right reasons and it was a blessing to feel time expand before me while I mulled over the turns of phrase, images, and implications of these poems. This is one of the best, most interesting poetry collections I’ve read in a long while. While it may be hard to adjust to heslop’s style, once you’re immersed you are bound to linger in these lines and it’s worth every minute of it.

    Happy reading!