 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
Rob
Halpern
Rumored Place
ISBN 1-928650-20-1
$14.00
113 pages
|
|
Rob
Halpern |
|
Rumored Place, Rob Halpern’s first book, combines a near confessional narrative of physical passion with the documentation of “social fact.” It inscribes a subjunctive locale situated in an impossible nowhere space and time. “The book,” he states, “is situated between subjective desire and objective need.” “I’ve tried to activate the untimely tension between a present in which it is impossible to live humanly, and a collective future that exceeds our ability to grasp.” The writing takes aim at an unrepresentable moment from whose standpoint alternate histories will have emerged-and life will be other than we can imagine it now. Shame attends writing in such a place, but shame doesn’t mean hopelessness. Any reader making way through Rumored Place will feel intimations of transformation creeping all around the dark horizon. Here history is both fantasy and nightmare and this examination of it “a bad conscience that needs to become critique.” *** With an extraordinary
soulful ferocity, Rob Halpern’s new work commits itself to
a lyric interrogation of power. The abjection
of lyric is brought to bear as critique in
a sensationalism of pure intelligence. Filling
throats with so much rock. Sustained and yet
overcome by their porousness, the poems struggle
in the grasp of our violent polity—indeed,
they register defeat, even as they bring into
relation incommensurate scales of experience—erotic,
economic, political. The result is a work for
our moment: exhilarating, and edged with grief. Rob Halpern implodes
new narrative tenets, collapsing all views
of our condition and the
means to express these views into each sentence
at once: learned, aroused, mournful, and
full of hope. His book conveys the intolerable
crush
of the ongoing, the grand brawl of contending
institutions and concepts hectically alive
past their deaths. Meanwhile the self continually
gains and loses ID. The intensity of what
is said displays the extent of what can’t
be said. This emptiness travels along with
the story in the future perfect tense, a negative
space that has not been, an arcadia that cannot
have been lost, beyond knowing but not beyond
needing. It is also an orifice in the mind
or body where the unspeakable of history might enter and speak. Rumored Place risks itself in its entirety at every turn,
in a project
of writing beyond
our moment’s sad overproduction of historical
ends. Central to this project is a range of
new meanings for lyricism and embodied eros.
The writing enacts Oppen’s “shipwreck
of the singular,” aligned with a displaced
echo that names the ongoing wreck of a resurgent
empire. I have been waiting a long time for
such a book, and have found it waiting for
me in each of its beautifully demanding sentences
and lines. Finally, a place from which one
day to have begun! |