Transaction Histories

Transaction Histories

by Donna Stonecipher
Transaction Histories

Transaction Histories

by Donna Stonecipher

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Overview

Reveling in the paradox of the formal prose poem, Donna Stonecipher’s Transaction Histories gathers together six series of poems that explore the disobedient incongruities of aesthetics and emotions. Stonecipher’s carefully sculpted forms and exacting language are held in tension with an unruly imagination to provoke a vision of experience densely layered with bodies impinging upon and altering each other, engaging in transactions that unfold in poetically complex and emotionally startling ways. By turns wry and melancholic, playful and acerbic, erotically charged and politically skeptical, Stonecipher’s poems marry a deeply felt lyricism to a fascination with the mechanisms of narrative. The result is akin to Roland Barthes’s notion of “the novelistic”: writing that flirts with the gestures and spaces of the novel without the trappings of plot, character, or action. Narrative fragments dart in and out of sight, spectral figures and motifs recur in fugal patterns, and habits of ruthless observation are brought to bear on the details of both intimate life and social organization. 

Stonecipher lays claim to a stylistic achievement and vision that are entirely her own, transparent and elusive, casual in address and rigorous in design. Whether training its eye on fetishized polar bears, illegal garbage dumping, or ideological debates around rose chintz wallpaper, Transaction Histories tracks the fitful and tragicomic relationships that exist among objects, landscapes, texts, and people, and lays bare the ways in which our transactions keep our lives going. 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781609386023
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publication date: 09/10/2018
Series: Kuhl House Poets
Pages: 102
Product dimensions: 7.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Donna Stonecipher is the author of The Reservoir, Souvenir de Constantinople, The Cosmopolitan, Model City, and Prose Poetry and the City. She lives in Berlin, Germany. 

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

PERSIAN CARPET

PERSIAN CARPET 1

1.

Months after the breakup, she wondered, how long into the future am I going to keep longing to go back into the past? There was one lock out there, somewhere, iconic in its escutcheon, velvet in its machinery, and fistfuls and fistfuls of keys. On other days there were locks upon locks in rows as in a locksmith's dream, and one key so slippery it kept falling out of her hand into the sky, floating up into the deeps.

2.

The past with its black plastic perfections, its ashtrays and princess telephones. She woke up and mentally listed the pleasures awaiting her: sex, bath, French toast. Or perhaps: sex, French toast, bath. Or, she used to wake up and mentally list the pleasures awaiting her. What's past is never past, but moves from room to room in the blue honeycomb of the brain, or blooms in domes that crown the fretted space of her thinking.

3.

In the photograph there were long rows of hooded horses, their eyes like great dark romantic marbles glistening out into the unromantic crowds. One must "break" a horse to tame it. She wanted to banish and punish and finish the past, but the future kept vanishing out of her grasp. The policeman had a soft spot for the procuress, the senator for the chestnut. Too often it seemed her only esprit was l'esprit de l'escalier.

4.

Like the real black swan that fell in love with the plastic black swan- shaped boat and refused to leave "her," even over the winter, in Germany. She read about the swans in a newspaper while sitting on an airplane and wishing she could get all the way to her destination by speeding down the runway, that the plane would just keep violently hurtling her forward and never, ever lift off.

5.

The island where no cars were allowed was crisscrossed by "broken" horses ferrying tourists to and from the decommissioned lighthouse. Inside the lighthouse was a blue dome they could only glimpse through a broken window. One tourist had an abandoned honeycomb in his luggage. The past was a Persian carpet arabesquing into the future, losing her in the ornamental present.

6.

The portrait of the dethroned demagogue had been put out on the sidewalk in the rain. The useless coins filled an old porcelain teacup printed with a skeleton key. She lay in bed wanting to cut the past out of her body like a cancer, to strangle its power with fasts. The black plastic swan-boat bobbed gently on the lake as the real black swan glided next to it, the cynosure of enduring adoration.

PERSIAN CARPET 2

1.

The old bespectacled teacher asked his young bespectacled pupils to imagine what history might look like written by the losers. His star student stared abstractedly out the window, reliving every detail of the previous evening, when she'd had sex for the first time. Touring the foreign city, they were struck by all the obelisks commemorating men who'd fallen in a war they'd never heard of.

2.

It happened at the garden in Normandy in which every flower ever mentioned in Shakespeare had been planted by a solitary gardener who barked at you when you stepped on a blue primrose by mistake. But you knew that just beyond the garden lay the sea, full of its own blue mistakes, its own glowering gardeners and flowering compendia, and you laughed in the gardener's piqued face.

3.

The only thing on TV that night was an interview with a childlike Leni Riefenstahl aged 100. The only thing on the radio was a reportage on the diseases of the seven seas. The dark streets were deserted, though the neon globe revolving slowly on its rooftop axis looked like it would slowly revolve off into some more magnanimous galaxy before the endless night came to some kind of end.

4.

But were their aims so divergent, really, the stargazer and the navel-gazer? Land-locked, she sent frantic mental SOSs to the sea. O she missed its dispassion disdaining her abandon, its translucent sand-crabs scrabbling toward the gullets of the seagulls, its neritic plumes salting crescive shorelines, the shells and the fragments of shells and the fragments of the fragments of shells.

5.

Another man's obsession with Shakespeare brought a cage with two starlings over to America on a boat, which led to the greatest avian invasion of the century. Couldn't one man have been content with one starling? The starlings whose dark feathers' gold flecks go snowy in winter, as if snow and gold were dialectical, as if she had opened her gold locket and found it full of snow.

6.

He read history books late into the night and felt like a winner, while she wrote tear-stained elegies downstairs alone chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes, happy that the damage she could do to her body began to match the damage that had been done to her soul. The starlings nested in the eaves of the old Queen Annes, the old Georgians and Victorians gently rotting in heartland towns.

7.

For years, the man thought that "Persian carpet" meant "magic carpet." Which is why, years later, he lined his apartment with such carpets and why, years after that, he broke up with a girlfriend who spilled whiskey on a particularly beautiful pale blue one in the hall. On one wall there was a portrait of Sacco, on the opposite wall a portrait of Vanzetti, and underneath him: seventeen floors.

8.

And the floating ocean of plastic in the upper Pacific Ocean, twice the size of Texas, floated there by all accounts with extreme decorum, reproaching no one, sufficient society unto itself, the zenith of peacefulness, quietly dilating day by day. From the lookout tower the guide pointed out the bombed steeple that had been left there, jagged and verdigris, in the middle of the rebuilt city.

9.

Damage. Wasn't that the skeleton key? Damage. Darker than the starling's estival feathers, darker than the whiskey stain spreading across the carpet, darker than eaves, than attics, than cellars, than the interiors of damaged steeples. He let the screen door slam shut as he walked out into the garden to pick four o'clocks and foxgloves, unaware of the poison using beauty for its sepaloid ends.

PERSIAN CARPET 3 (FOR SARAH)

1.

She walked with her seven-year-old niece over the "skybridge" and then through the business "park." Suspended in the sky she looked down at the river, the lake, the freeway and knew what perpendicular longing the sky does anything but abridge. Was it the deer or the decoy, bounding silver- footed through the trees? He admired the reproduction Greek temple set on the hill.

2.

The psychologist said mildly to his client: I see you've lived in an awful lot of different places. So are you running toward something, or away from something? The client reclined deeper into the divan. The lecturing British jeweler with Lebanese ancestry was building a watertight case via slide show that the whole of Victorian ornament had been viaducted from the Orient.

3.

Nothing terrifies the book like the speed-reader. It was getting harder and harder to find a greenfield. We had lain down for a spell on the Persian carpet to begin woolgathering les neiges d'antan. She asked him to please push his signet ring into the block of wax placed in her soul by Mnemosyne. He thought gleefully of the day when this civilization would exist only as pot fragments.

4.

There are more Victorian houses in San Francisco than in all of England. There have never been more than three types of columns. Two days after her daughter was born, her childless aunt died. Nothing terrifies the book like the shelf. The librarian was both angel and fallen angel, shelving and shelving. The client liked the psychologist, but knew things really would be better in the next city.

5.

What was it like? — It was like hearing a foghorn while deep inland. She lay in the cool dark with her heart pounding, thinking: Soon on my block of wax there won't be any unsignetted space. It was like spending all day at the German Valhalla, which had been modeled on the French Panthéon, which had been modeled on the Roman Pantheon, which had been modeled on the Greek Parthenon.

6.

She walked hand-in-hand with her seven-year-old niece to the walled garden's digital rose mallows. Nothing terrifies the book like the moving box. The crystal palace's windows were broken. Through frayed fronds the girl glimpsed the deer's brown glass eye. Wasn't the worst proxy in this ersatz world the artificial flower? The bombyx agreed. (But the polyurethane fern demurred.)

CHAPTER 2

LANDSCAPE AND PORTRAIT

LANDSCAPE (JACOB VAN RUYSDAEL, ZWINGER, DRESDEN, MID-1600S) Six incidences of landscape arranged in two rows of three, arrangements of arrangements of nature haloed in velvet oval mats goldenly contained, ovals suggestive of ponds possibly lurking among the luxuriously dark copses

PORTRAIT Three container ships packed with household garbage from France depart Rotterdam at 12:13 p.m. bound for India CHAPTER 3

TRANSACTION HISTORIES TRANSACTION HISTORY 1

1.

They walked around in the foreign city looking for someplace to have dinner: there was an Italian restaurant, an Indian restaurant, a French restaurant, a Vietnamese restaurant, and a Thai restaurant. Just like in their own city. And in every city they'd ever been to. There were some hungers no restaurant could quiet or curb or quell, and she'd walk out even hungrier than she'd gone in.

2.

Sometimes — we couldn't deny it — life surprised us, presenting us with a sheep in sheep's clothing or a wolf in wolf's clothing. But even this surprise would turn out to be, in the end, a wolf in sheep's clothing, for we would thenceforth mistrust our mistrust, upon which we had come to build our houses. There were only two kinds of birds left in the neighborhood: seagulls and starlings.

3.

The light in the sky was bleu mourant — "dying blue" — a term for a particular shade of powder blue he'd learned while working in an antiques shop one summer. When his girlfriend left him that winter, he went around in the snow saying how all the blood in his heart had turned bleu mourant overnight. And his heart had turned into an antique, for now it had carnal knowledge of time.

4.

From below, the snow looked like it had been on its way for centuries. People from the small towns dreamed of driving into the city to have their choice of Italian, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, or French restaurants, but people from the city dreamed of driving to the small town's one restaurant with its three choices of entrée and its view of the derelict Greek Revival library across the street.

5.

Under the bleu mourant sky, the sad woman said, "When I wake up at night, I'm like a self-destructive squid, shooting the ink of melancholy into my own heart." Her interlocutor answered: Nec piscatorem piscis amare potest. The small town's populace had long been bitterly divided into those who called the town's main body of water a small lake, and those who called it a large pond.

6.

After dark, people gave the antiques stores a wide berth. As he slid behind the wheel of his black Subaru to drive home to dinner, he tried to remember the last time he'd truly had an appetite. Every last Christmas ornament on the tree had been made in China. Perhaps it was time to reinstate the humble popcorn garland, the gingerbread house. Perhaps it was time, once again, to eat Christmas.

7.

The antiques owed what value they had to those people who believed that objects could give them carnal knowledge of incarnate time. Some countries were winners and some losers in the cosmopolitan restaurant sweepstakes. There were, for example, no Norwegian restaurants in the cities. There was a hunger that just got hungrier and hungrier. Unquellable, nodded the self-destructive squid.

8.

The city-dwellers found that they would regularly sleep peacefully through a succession of sirens, garbage trucks, and trains — only to be awakened by the small barking of a faraway dog. Her secret inner structuralist was delighted when her daily errands took her to the department store, where she'd find the sum total of the material world organized and taxonomized down to the last hazelnut.

9.

"The fish cannot love the fisherman" implies that the fish has tried. Notice no one asks if the fisherman can love the fish. There was one hunger hungrier than any other: hunger without appetite. Some small towns on the peninsula now consisted only of a few rows of antiques stores. When the city people left the cities, all they really wanted was to acquire reminders of incarnadine time.

TRANSACTION HISTORY 2

1.

The dark-haired gardener said, I started to sleep better at night when I moved into an apartment across the street from an art museum. Knowing that, hundreds of years after the fact, a green-eyed merchant still looked out aloof from a fur coat, a butterfly still perched on a pomegranate next to a skull, and a blue view of distant hills still hovered behind an annunciation scene with a stunned Mary calmed me down in the deepest unlocked vault of my being.

2.

Certain people were starting to find the sun oppressive, filling the world with its idiosyncratic version of reality as it did day after day. Never mind that it was summer. Looking back through her notebook, she saw that she'd written down "The architects say to the doctors, at least you can bury your mistakes" at least three times in the past year. In 2010, the visiting Chilean president wrote "Deutschland über alles" in the German president's guestbook.

3.

As the city densified, they found themselves looking for non-places. They kept getting obsessed with filing cabinets. They were bewitched by the debt spiral. There still seemed to be some cups in the cupboard, but there were no more gloves in the glove compartment, and hadn't been any in years. One night she found herself sitting in a house high on a hill with spectacular views, but in the dark, the only thing she could see in the windows was herself.

4.

The famous artist told us that he had never slept better in his life than the year he lived in a house opposite a zoo. All he had to do at night was pretend that his wife lying next to him was one of the nearby zebras, ponies, or llamas, all of them sweetly sleeping, and he himself would slip off easily into a deep furred sleep. The little girl, upon closer questioning, turned out to have just one wish for her tenth birthday: an entire box of fortune cookies to herself.

5.

Day after day: sun, clanging through the windows like a relentlessly cheerful succession of garish carillons, whether certain people liked it or not. "Keep working, and do not despair," wrote Brecht. Beware the voluptuousness of the demand curve. Happiness is a golden section. A lot of people seemed to like to go to the New York Public Library, establish themselves at a desk surrounded by books, and spend all afternoon stroking their smartphones.

6.

It wasn't that hard to walk through the city with the eyes of a developer, evaluating the organization of space according to maximization of profit. Or you could walk through the city with the eyes of a disappointed Romantic, that wasn't hard either, prizing a grassy empty lot bejeweled with dandelions, or a brick building caught in mid-ruin still faintly advertising "Coal." Nothing was very hard, when you came right down to it. Except sleeping.

7.

I never slept better in my life, the green-eyed veterinarian told us, than the years I lived across from a graveyard. In the evening my boyfriend and I would sit on our balcony with bottles of dark beer and drink in the deep peace emanating from the headstones, whose names had all been effaced by time. In India, a man opened a restaurant called "Hitler's," not realizing, he later said, that "Hitler" was anything more than a "famous European name."

8.

Sun, again. And again. There wasn't a single dress in the dresser. "Bureau" his dead mother had called it. "Chesterdrawer" they said in the South. His mother had larded their bureau drawers with bars of unwrapped perfumed soap. This was all long before he'd realized he felt most at home in airports. The girl was willing to share most of her possessions, but not, oh, not the box of fortune cookies, which she carefully stashed under her twin bed.

9.

A glass, a debt, an absolute ceiling. In truth, there were far more suitcases in the city than suits. "Summer afternoon," wrote Henry James, were the two most beautiful words in the English language. But for the heartbroken, the overworked, the underemployed, the grieving, and the lonely, "summer afternoon" was not two words but a sentence. And the schadenfreude they exuded on a cold and rainy July day hovered over the city like an extra layer of cloud.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Transaction Histories"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Donna Stonecipher.
Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

PERSIAN CARPET,
Persian Carpet 1,
Persian Carpet 2,
Persian Carpet 3,
LANDSCAPE AND PORTRAIT,
TRANSACTION HISTORIES,
Transaction History 1,
Transaction History 2,
Transaction History 3,
Transaction History 4,
Transaction History 5,
Transaction History 6,
LANDSCAPE AND PORTRAIT,
ENZYKLOPÄDIE DES UNGESCHMACKS,
Enzyklopädie des Ungeschmacks 1,
Enzyklopädie des Ungeschmacks 2,
Enzyklopädie des Ungeschmacks 3,
LANDSCAPE AND PORTRAIT,
FOUND TO BE BORROWED FROM SOME MATERIAL APPEARANCE,
Found to Be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance 1,
Found to Be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance 2,
Found to Be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance 3,
Found to Be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance 4,
Found to Be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance 5,
Found to Be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance 6,
LANDSCAPE AND PORTRAIT,
SNOW SERIES,
Snow Series 1,
Snow Series 2,
Snow Series 3,

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