English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul by Martin Corless-Smith (review)

173 Book Notes staplers and lives here about three hours each day. There are vital concerns to the evolution of this place and its inhabitants—obvious social functions are the least of it, there are other factors, moments of rediscovery , individual work. Dutton’s writing is sparse and spare, taking her readers into these mundane lives but not losing us in them, or their terrifying truth. Sprawl lifts our veils to the sun, but not simply blinding us, instead carefully opening our eyes to what is a blazing furious star. Sprawl expands inside itself, modernizes Thoreau and Sherwood Anderson and Spoon River, makes for us a beautiful home inside a quickly decaying set of beliefs and traditions and worlds: The sidewalk grows bigger and bigger. I see it reaching up through the window, growing bigger in the moonlight . “How do I look?” it asks. We could take a train together and disappear in the city outside. It’s impossible ; it lies outside the envelope of my own special case. So in a little while I lose my head on the sidewalk, in the lamplight. An owl plunges from the branches toward the asphalt and via a series of similar accidents I lose my head. English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul by Martin Corless-Smith Fence Books, 2010 reviewed by Broc Rossell The back cover of Martin Corless-Smith’s English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul reads, “The final installment of a trilogy of ‘alternate selves and alternate literary histories.’” Corless-Smith simultaneously employs the various vernaculars of ours and past centuries; multiple fonts; various modes, such as notebook-style prose entries and verse; fabricated quotations ; historical quotations attributed to Kant, Petrarch, the Upanishads, and the like; and attributions to initials (T. S., W. W., etc.) that hint at identities never explained. There are even colorado review 174 relatively fleshed-out, Pessoa-like heteronyms; a figure named Thomas Swan, who first appeared in Nota (the trilogy’s first installment), is cited at length. As one might imagine, the poems are also concerned with the issues of simultaneity that their forms evoke. For instance, his poem “Elegy for the Worm”: Vermiculate who ate itself—(no) beginning middle end—and saddled with the passing earth rained out devoured Our soul’s content This sense of simultaneity has something in common with Pound, but its strong emotional appeal does not. CorlessSmith ’s poems shift between eras, modes, and styles to produce a strongly lyrical, almost Romantic voice—but whose voice? He writes, in an untitled poem: The powers of the soul may be said to be a medium between substance and accident The question of self is at the heart of his work, and the poems of English Fragments are presented as songs filtered through the multiplicity of modern life. Corless-Smith seems less concerned with romantic appeals per se than how they might be conceived, in a world twenty years after DeLillo imagined Mao saying, “The future belongs to crowds.” That Corless-Smith should privilege multiplicity over the traditionally Romantic notion of authenticity, or sincerity, gives one pause. Individuality—the authentic self—has been a sacred virtue in our country since its beginning. Puritans made an art of selfinterrogation ; the American strain of Romanticism gave us truisms such as Emerson’s “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself ”; and, really, how much has changed in the Age of Oprah? Authenticity—to be of “undisputed origin,” from the Greek authentikos, meaning “original, genuine, principal”—suggests a unity of being, and of specific location. An individual’s authenticity implies a presence in proximity close enough to permit verification, and one grounded in a singular, pure source. 175 Book Notes However, that neat philosophical chestnut seems too pat a solution for a world that requires us to not only have principles, but to act on them: to not only live, but to participate. If we have a sincere (meaningful) experience, our mind differentiates it from other sensations and experiences; it’s no coincidence that many creation myths around the world begin with differentiation. But to put something into words—to give it a name—means that we lose its unnameable quality in...