Between Ulysses and Edgar Allan Poe

Truitt continuedfrom previous page Detailfrom cover truth—to be true. It's a matter of slant and oblique angles ofaddress. Cant, then, as a means to sincerity, truth, is complemented in Miller's work by dovening, a Yiddish word referring to the bobbing, "angling," of the torso with the head attached in audible prayer. Knowledge, like song, in order to be realized, must be worked into the body: it must be experiential. While this cant form recurs through the book and constitutes its most driving poems— including, with the above, "'The Hustle' and Its Liquid Totems of Holocaust, Suburb, and Computer," "Overflowing Pockets" and "All Visual Materials Emit Countless Cartoon Bubbles" — its sway and polemical style are most evident in the book's first fifteen-page poem, the title of which, offset across the top of the page, is divided into three parts: "I'm Trying to Get / My Phoney Baloney Ideas about / Metamodemism into a Poem." Proceeding in undulating offset lines, visually reminding one of dovening, its first grammatical line reads: "I forget / our SeaWorld / discounts." We begin, then, to get at Miller's metamodernism, or the state of "beyond new," with an absence at the moment of a commercial transaction : in this case, the lack of promotional chits at SeaWorld's entrance that would have led to cheaper admission. The "I forget" rhymes with the first part of the title, "I'm Trying to Get...," which reinforces the importance of this loss and implies that in order to "get" it, one realizes a loss—in this case a lack of presence. But what's specifically lost is "our SeaWorld / discounts." While SeaWorld is a specific location —namely an oceanic zoo founded in 1964— it is also "see world," or the act of perceiving the world. Further, "discounts" introduces a new fold, for as a verb it means to "leave out of the account": or, the way we "see the world" leaves a thing or things unaccounted for. From that under-see reading, Miller is suggesting either that he has forgotten what has been left out of how we perceive the world, or that how we see the world leaves things out; part of recovery, in either case, is to realize this loss. By reverse implication, however, Miller's antennae transmit that to "see world" you, in fact, can discount no part of it, including your presence in it. This is reinforced by the hefty role Miller's thirdgrade son Noah plays in the poem, with his savant rejoinders and commentary peppering each pivot of the poem, as well as much of the book, subverting the forms and words that encode and overlay—or direct—our normative experience. Noah's bons mots remind his father of what he is ostensibly missing—direct vision and contact—each recurrence of which sets the poem off in another direction: Bruno Latour, the etymology ofIsrael, the relationship of sand castles to "winning," and the relationship of drugs to natural science via Nazi laboratories and Utopias. But while Noah's interjections come off as sardonic, much as Burroughs's insights into society, there is something more sinister: our cultural frame is what twists a child's words into irony. One is apt, then, to assume that Miller 's loss is of innocence—and this is true, in part, as many of the poems comprise a postwar generational exegesis of the violent hippieto -neocon flip—though not in the conventional sense. Rather than naïveté, what is really being presented is our era's loss of direct vision, or the capacity to know things as they are simultaneous with how they seem, or are interpreted. This amounts to the capacity to see world both as origin, as experienced, and as its origami stand-in. Such loss is underscored by the line and computer drawings of Noah that illustrate the book, deepening the implication that to read Skinny Eighth Avenue you need in part to enter the Wordsworthian child-is-father-to-the-man realm. The drawings lend a terrific unprofessional quality, bordering on a children's book format, which is reinforced by the book's title, as "eight" may well refer to Noah's age...