The cover image, Speeding Monorail: On the Precipice by Kikuzo Ito, illustrated a magazine article, “World Transportation Invention Competition,” in a 1936 issue of Shonen Club, a Japanese boys’ magazine.
The Earthquake She Slept Through: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka tells the story of Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes to find he has turned into a giant insect. When he fails to leave for work on time, his sister Greta talks to him through his closed bedroom, asking, “Ist dir nicht wohl? Brauchst du etwas?” (Are you not well? Is there anything you want?)
Costumes Exchanging Glances: Bertrand Russell said, “Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul’s Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.” Walter Benjamin said, “Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness, with the base and the banal.” Walter Benjamin, Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline 1927–1934, “Protocol II: Highlights of the Second Hashish Impression,” 1928, trans. Scott J. Thompson, 1997.
You Know: The poem is an ekphrastic response to Jessica Stockholder’s outdoor sculpture Flooded Chambers Maid, mixed media installation, 2009–2010. This poem, along with “In This Box,” “The Elastic Moment,” “A Technical Drawing of the Moment,” “An Autopsy of an Era,” “Scene I: A Hall in the Temple of Justice,” “The Numbers,” and “A Structure of Repeating Units,” first appeared in Jessica Stockholder: Grab Grassy This Moment Your I’s: Assemblages by Jessica Stockholder, poems by Mary Jo Bang. St. Louis Laumeier Sculpture Park, 2011, published in conjunction with the exhibition, Jessica Stockholder: Grab Grassy This Moment Your I’s, February 12 to May 29, 2011.
Masquerade: After Beckmann: Max Beckmann, Masquerade, oil on canvas, 1948.
The Storm We Call Progress: The title is taken from Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay, “On the Concept of History,” in which he describes a painting by Paul Klee: “There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Some of the language, including this list—“varicose veins, rubber knickers, douches with bulbs, douches with bags, girdles in a choice of pink, red or white, and in rubber, silk or twilled linen, enemas, clysters … etc.”—comes from a translation by Simon-Watson Taylor (Paris Peasant, Picador: 1980) of Louis Aragon’s Surrealist text Le Paysan de Paris (Gallimard: 1926). Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) was influenced by Aragon’s book. “Benjamin etceteras” echoes the end of Aragon’s list, and includes the many items that fill Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.
Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) is a term that refers both to the title of a 1776 play by Friedrich von Klinger and to a German literary movement that flourished in the 1770’s. The literature and music responded to Enlightenment ideals of a humane society that elevated the social and moral good (reason and tolerance) over prejudice and religious ideology. It was also a protest against the oppressive restrictions of tradition in a system defined by a powerful aristocracy and a vast peasant underclass.
“He stared sadly at the ruins of his house” is a usage example taken from the German translation for the word sad from Cambridge Dictionaries Online: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english-german/sad.
Provisional Doubt as an Architectural Space: The poem takes language from Raphael Rubinstein’s article “Provisional Painting Part 2: To Rest Lightly on Earth” in Art in America, February 1, 2012. The poem is dedicated to him.
Lions and Tigers: The Escaped Animal Was Bent to the Trainer’s Will: The poem’s title is a photo caption on page 83 of a “Little Big Book” titled Lions and Tigers: With Clyde Beatty (With pictures from the Carl Loemmie production “The Big Cage.” Based on the story “The Big Cage” by Edward Anthony) (Whitman Publishing: Racine, Wisconsin, 1934). Thanks to Carl Phillips for the book.
The poem was originally posted at 350.org on October 24, 2009, as part of an “International Day of Climate Action.”
The Blank of Reason Produces Blank: After Goya: The poem title alters the English title of an etching by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos), Plate 43 of Los Caprichos (The Caprices), etching, aquatint, drypoint, and burin, 1799.
The chorda tympani is a branch of the facial nerve that travels through the middle ear and crosses the tympanic membrane (eardrum).
In Dante’s Inferno, Canto XIII, line 84, Dante says to Virgil, “ch’i’ non potrei, tanta pietà m’accora” (For I cannot, such pity is in my heart.)—trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Let’s Say Yes: The six poems in this series were composed of words found in a 296-page paperback edition of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Javanovich, New York and London: 1985). “Scene after Scene” uses words found on pages 1–50; “This Bell Like a Bee Striking,” pages 50–100; “The Nerve Fibers,” pages 100–150; “To Write a History,” pages 150–200; “Opened and Shut,” pages 200–250; and “There She Was,” pages 250–296.
Explain the Brain: The title of the poem and some of its language is taken from Carl F. Craver’s Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience (Oxford University Press, 2009). The book is concerned with neuroscientific explanations of causality, especially how to determine which ideas are logically sound and which are not. He invokes Aristotle’s example of something that is associated with the sunrise but doesn’t “explain” it (a rooster’s almost invariable crowing at dawn) and compares that to Sylvain Bromberger’s example of something that does in fact mirror the explanation of the sunrise—changes in the length of a shadow cast by a flagpole as the sun moves higher in the sky.
All through the Night: The title, and We have no past we won’t reach back, is taken from the song “All through the Night” on Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 debut album, She’s So Unusual. (Words and original music by Jules Shear.)
Pussy Riot, a social-activist feminist punk rock group, partly inspired by the 1990’s Riot Grrrl movement in the US, was founded in Moscow in 2011. On February 21, 2012, to protest the re-election of Vladimir Putin, the group entered a near-empty Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow and danced up to the altar while singing a brief expletive-laced song with the refrain “Holy Mother, send Putin packing!” Three of the group’s members, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were later arrested and charged with “premeditated hooliganism.” All three were found guilty and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. In October 2012, Yekaterina Samutsevich was released on appeal; in December, 2014, in advance of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the remaining two women were released in a general amnesty for non-violent offenders and mothers of young children.
Reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: In spite of a multilateral CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) treaty that went into effect in 1975, continued demand for elephant-ivory products has resulted in a global underground economy that fuels poaching in Africa and Asia and threatens large numbers of elephants.
As in Corona: The poem takes some of its language from entries in Volume VI: Comines to Deaf-Mute of the Funk & Wagnall’s Universal Standard Encyclopedia (c. 1953–56). It was originally commissioned by Mel Chin and Nick Flynn for Mel Chin’s encyclopedia collage project (published as The Funk & Wag from A to Z, Menil Collection: 2014). Thanks to both of them.
A Room in Cleopatra’s Palace: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra begins: “Scene I. Alexandria. A room in Cleopatra’s palace.”
Scene I: A Hall in the Temple of Justice: Aïda, a four-act opera with music composed by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni (after a scenario by Auguste Mariette), begins: “Scene I: A hall in the Temple of Justice.” The opera was first performed at the Cairo Opera House on December 24, 1871. A 1953 film version of the opera starred Sophia Loren as Aïda, an Ethiopian slave; the music was lip-synched. O patria mia (Oh, my country) is part of an aria that Aïda, who is in love with her Egyptian captor, sings in the third act.
Close Observation Especially of One under Suspicion: The title is taken from the definition of surveillance—Noun: close observation or supervision maintained over a person, group, etc, esp one in custody or under suspicion—found in Dictionary.com. Collins English Dictionary: Complete & Unabridged, 10th Edition. HarperCollins Publishers. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/surveillance (accessed: July 10, 2014).
Sure, it’s a little game. You, me, our minds: The poem was written as the first part of a six-part exquisite corpse published in Tin House for an issue called “Games People Play” (No. 43, 2010). The other participants were Nick Flynn, Matthea Harvey, Alex Lemon, Eileen Myles, and D. A. Powell. Thanks to Poetry Editor Brenda Shaughnessy.
The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, helps prisoners prove their innocence through DNA testing. The Project has helped to exonerate more than three hundred people in the US, including eighteen who had served time on death row. The average time between imprisonment and exoneration and release has been thirteen years.
An Individual Equinox Suitable for Framing: The poem is for Kathleen Finneran.
The Disappearance of Amerika: After Kafka: The quoted material in the subtitles is taken from Mark Harman’s 2008 translation of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika. Written between 1911 and 1914, Kafka had intended the book to be titled Der Verschollene (The Missing Person or The Man Who Disappeared); his literary executor Max Brod changed it to Amerika. The first chapter was published in Germany in 1913 as Der Heizer (The Stoker).
Filming the Doomsday Clock: The Doomsday Clock is a clock face that was established in 1947 by an international group of scientists called Chicago Atomic Scientists. It has appeared since then on every cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The hands are set closer or farther from midnight depending upon political—and since 2007, ecological—global events that threaten the planet. On January 14, 2014, it was set at five minutes to midnight.
An earlier version of this poem was published as “Doktor Strangelove.” The 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb starred Peter Sellers. An instrumental version of “Try a Little Tenderness” played during the opening credits. Kubrick, describing the development of the script said, “And it was at this point I decided to treat the story as a nightmare comedy. Following this approach, I found it never interfered with presenting well-reasoned arguments. In culling the incongruous, it seemed to me to be less stylized and more realistic than any so-called serious, realistic treatment, which in fact is more stylized than life itself by its careful exclusion of the banal, the absurd, and the incongruous. In the context of impending world destruction, hypocrisy, misunderstanding, lechery, paranoia, ambition, euphemism, patriotism, heroism, and even reasonableness can evoke a grisly laugh.”