The Prose Poem: An International Journal will be reading for Volume 10 between December 1, 2001 and March 1, 2002. Unsolicited work submitted before this date will be returned unread. Please include an SASE and a two-sentence biographical note. Please send no more than 3 to 5 poems.
1 Bonus Factoid and Suggestion: It so happens that you can occupy a bright child for most of a very quiet morning by challenging her to use that five times in a row in a single coherent sentence, to which stumper the solution is all about the present distinction: “He said that that that that that writer used should really have been a which.” (You can up the challenge to six in a row if the kid is old enough to know about the medial-question-mark-in-sentence trick: “He said that? that that that that that writer used should have been a which?”)
1 Of course, Borges’s famous “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
2 Actually, these two agendas dovetail, since the only reason anybody’s interested in a writer’s life is because of his literary importance. (Think about it — the personal lives of most people who spend fourteen hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill-rides to hear about.)
3 This is part of what gives Borges’s stories their mythic, precognitive quality (all cultures’ earliest, most vital metaphysics is mythopoeic), which quality in turn helps explain how the stories can be at once so abstract and so moving.
4 The biography is probably most valuable in its account of Borges’s political evolution. A common bit of literary gossip about Borges is that the reason he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize was his supposed support for Argentina’s ghastly authoritarian juntas of the 1960s and ’70s. From Williamson, though, we learn that Borges’s politics were actually far more complex and tragic. The child of an old liberal family, and an unabashed leftist in his youth, Borges was one of the first and bravest public opponents of European fascism and the rightist nationalism it spawned in Argentina. What changed him was Perón, whose creepy right-wing populist dictatorship aroused such loathing in Borges that he allied himself with the repressively anti-Perón Revolución Libertadora. Borges’s situation following Perón’s first ouster in 1955 is full of unsettling parallels for American readers. Because Peronism still had great popularity with Argentina’s working poor, the exiled dictator retained enormous political power, and would have won any democratic national election held in the 1950s. This placed believers in liberal democracy (such as J. L. Borges) in the same sort of bind that the United States faced in South Vietnam a few years later — how do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting? In essence, Borges decided that the Argentine masses had been so hoodwinked by Perón and his wife that a return to democracy was possible only after the nation had been cleansed of Peronism. Williamson’s analysis of the slippery slope this decision put Borges on, and his account of the hatchet job that Argentina’s leftists did on Borges’s political reputation in retaliation for his defection (such that by 1967, when the writer came to Harvard to lecture, the students practically expected him to have epaulettes and a riding crop), make for his book’s best chapters.
5 Be warned that much of the mom-based psychologizing seems right out of Oprah, e.g., “However, by urging her son to realize the ambitions she had defined for herself, she unwittingly induced a sense of unworthiness in him that became the chief obstacle to his self-assertion.”
6 Williamson’s chapters on Borges’s sudden world fame will be of special interest to those American readers who weren’t yet alive or reading in the mid-1960s. I was lucky enough to discover Borges as a kid, but only because I happened to find Labyrinths, an early English-language collection of his most famous stories, on my father’s bookshelves in 1974. I believed that the book was there only because of my parents’ unusually fine literary taste and discernment — which verily they do possess — but what I didn’t know was that by 1974 Labyrinths was also on tens of thousands of other U.S. homes’ shelves, that Borges had actually been a sensation on the order of Tolkien and Gibran among hip readers of the previous decade.
7 Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, doubles — so many of the elements that appear over and over in Borges’s fiction are symbols of the psyche turned inward.
1 A subcorollary here is that it’s a bit odd that Houghton Mifflin and the Best American series tend to pick professional writers to be their guest editors. There are, after all, highly expert professional readers among the industry’s editors, critics, scholars, etc., and the guest editor’s job here is really 95 percent readerly. Underlying the series’ preference for writers appears to be one or both of the following: (a) the belief that someone’s being a good writer makes her eo ipso a good reader — which is the same reasoning that undergirds most blurbs and MFA programs, and is both logically invalid and empirically false (trust me); or (b) the fact that the writers the series pick tend to have comparatively high name recognition, which the publishers figure will translate into wider attention and better sales. Premise (b) involves marketing and revenue and is thus probably backed up by hard data and thought in a way that (a) isn’t.
2 (usage sic, in honor of the term’s source)
3 For example, from the perspective of Information Theory, the bulk of the Decider’s labor actually consists of excluding nominees from the final prize collection, which puts the Decider in exactly the position of Maxwell’s Demon or any other kind of entropy-reducing info processor, since the really expensive, energy-intensive part of such processing is always deleting/discarding/resetting.
4 It’s true that I got to lobby for essays that weren’t in his 100, but there ended up being only one such outside piece in the collection. A couple of others that I’d suggested were nixed by Mr. Atwan — well, not nixed so much as counseled against, for what emerged as good reasons. In general, though, you can see who had the real power. However much I strutted around in my aviator suit and codpiece calling myself the Decider for BAE ’07, I knew that it was Mr. Atwan who delimited the field of possibilities from which I was choosing… in rather the same way that many Americans are worried that what appears to be the reality we’re experiencing and making choices about is maybe actually just a small, skewed section of reality that’s been pre-chosen for us by shadowy entities and forces, whether these be left-leaning media, corporate cabals, government disinformers, our own unconscious prejudices, etc. At least Mr. Atwan was explicit about the whole pre-selection thing, though, and appeared to be fair and balanced, and of course he’d had years of hard experience on the front lines of Decidering; and in general I found myself trusting him and his judgments more and more throughout the whole long process, and there were finally only maybe about 10 percent of his forwarded choices where I just had no idea what he might have been seeing or thinking when he picked them.