Flux Factory Factor

"Three Poems" by Hannah Sullivan and why I read more poetry than prose.

Hannah Sullivan, author of Three Poems.

Three Poems, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Hannah Sullivan thought she might write a novel about being a sharp-elbowed young woman in New York—raising an arm for cabs, kissing a girl, getting a Brazilian wax job before saying ”I love you” to the wrong bastard she will remember for the rest of her life. She mentions this in a YouTube clip filmed after receiving the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2018, adding she changed her mind because she didn’t think she had anything original to bring to the novel form.

Instead, she turned the material into the verse chunks of her exhilarating debut collection, Three Poems. Sullivan, a Brit and now 46, has one of those back-jacket bios—Harvard PhD, teaching jobs at Stanford and Oxford, awards and short lists up the wazoo—that could set you against her. Forget it. She’s earned those prizes with her buzzing mind and technical brilliance. Her book asks us to think about the different freedoms of different genres.

Sullivan composes poetry in small bursts, and she’s dispensed with the nag of a narrative arc that arrives somewhere that’s been aimed at in the launch. Her voice is breathless, moment-to-moment consciousness. She could have done the same thing in a novel, and then it would have been called “a novel-in-prose-poems.”

What kind of sausages can you make from life’s ordinary fillings? The first poem, “You, Very Young in New York,” looks back at the time you prove how young you are by notching your belt with forlorn experience you take to be adult. The second poem, “Repeat Until Time,” meditates on repetition from the perspective of noticing it for the first time. The third poem, “Sandpit After Rain,” jumps between the death of the poet’s father and the birth of her first son. The power of Sullivan’s writing is in its no-limits subject matter and riotous experiments with language. She’s not engaged with stuff because it happened to her—or to anyone. She’s engaged with what language can generate in the reader, and stuff that happened is what she hangs language on.

In interviews, she’s mentioned Joan Didion’s memoir “Goodbye to All That” and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City as prompts for “You, Very Young in New York.” Her use of the second person pronoun—an inclusive you—can feel cozy one moment and presumptuous the next. When male writers use the pronoun you, they assume their readers are male. When a female writer uses you, she subversively implicates the male reader in female experience, and it’s thrilling, especially in the hands of a writer like Sullivan, who likes to push the reader’s face into bodily moments.

“You, Very Young in New York” is a walker on Broadway, capturing sudden intimacy that’s also anonymous. Capturing a time of life when you take vitamins without wondering what will happen if you stop. (Nothing.) Writers sit in Starbucks “Picking like pigeons at the tail of the morning croissant.” A vibrator with low batteries “rotates leisurely in your palm.” You short the market. You feel your tongue dry up as Ritalin kicks in. Whatever else the poem is about, at heart it’s about a doomed affair that sharpens your movie-scene recall.

Preparing for the potential fuck that awaits, Sullivan’s narrator says, you “take two Advil and lie/On a table in Chelsea holding yourself open, ‘stretch it’ she says,/Irritably sometimes, and ‘stretch’ as lavender wax wells/Voluptuously in hidden places, and ‘turn’ as you kneel on all fours/So she can clean you up behind and, still parting you open, her fingers/Spend one moment too long tissuing off the dead wax with almond oil and/’All done she pats ….” Finally, when the bastard shows up on a rooftop, “he says, ‘you’ve lost weight, you look great’ which is true/(He dumped you) you think of elderberry and magnolia, quietly pulling/At the silver-starred skirt, pulling it over the ripple of your thighs./But when he says one more, for old time’s sake, you say why not/And sit rigidly in a cab, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge beside him.”

Oh, brother.

Almost any experience can stir philosophical associations for Sullivan as well as historic ones. That’s what she’s after. In the second poem, contemplating a still photo from the 1961 movie The Black Cat, she notices an older woman “Squeezing her cat like a tantrum,” knowing “that 1960 was the future and JFK is in office” while a blond kid “in a tapestry waistcoat … is waiting for the sixties to start, for the violence to be real./He looks like David Bowie on the cover of Young Americans,/Uranium-bright hair, a softly permed disco halo.” The second poem is set in San Francisco, where Sullivan lived while teaching at Stanford, and the third poem is set in England, her home and where she now lives, but the book feels like one long Alice in Wonderland dream of expansions and contractions.

Sometimes her fever of images is show-offy and doesn’t add anything to the moment. We don’t need to know, for example, that the look of lights going out in a high-rise across the way reminds the narrator of a Mondrian painting. Other people don’t seem real to her, even her dying father. Being a good writer does not make you a good person, and hats off to that.

In the practice of writing, you don’t care about anything but your effect on the reader. Sullivan bets she can keep you reading by describing the “gristle” she pokes back into her father’s neck rather than by measuring the meaning of his leaving her life. Sometimes, though, you have to pretend to be more human than you are, in case the reader finds you too cold, too clinical, too fancy with your techniques. You have to stop with the writer-y writing in order to trick the reader into thinking you are an actual human being with emotions—even though you can’t have emotions when you’re writing, and even though you may not have them when you’re not writing.

She manages this often and perhaps most brilliantly in the third poem, first dwelling on the limbo plight of a saltwater eel in a suburban restaurant:

It wants to be rid of the tank, the shriek of lobsters,
The monotonous view of leatherette banquettes, The off-duty industry folk, greedily appraising, ‘Let’s do it half sashimi-style, half dry-fried-spicy’, And also not to be rid of the tank, to remain forever Chosen and not yet chosen, neither living nor dead, Eddying between two walls of bubbling glass. Learn something about indifference.

A few pages later, in a jump-cut to the Caesarian birth of her first child—a pregnancy that has forever banished the poet from limbo—she sympathizes with her unborn baby’s reluctance to leave his tank:

Under a tangle of capillaries,
A baby is dreaming of his old home.
The Sunday morning swimming pool
Of far-off children.

Then yellow glows in the curtains And his mouth snapdragons open

. . . .

This is the world:
The street-cleaning machine
The slow lob of rubbish

What can narrative offer if it lacks plot? It prints the shape of a mind looking at the world, and from that a pattern forms—which might be another word for personality. In all three poems, Sullivan masterfully follows the best recipe for narrative: start in the middle, fail to arrive, remember to love things, make the reader hot, make the reader laugh. She knows there are no good endings. All endings are bad. That’s why it’s difficult to end a story. You have to stop before the end, the way you don’t die in your own dreams. The standard ideas about endings, Sullivan doesn’t buy. Arrival, no. Death, no. Marriage, no. A baby, no. Love gained, no. Knowledge acquired, no. You have to find the next tank.

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I love writing pieces of appreciation for the work of other writers and artists, partly because I think we show who we are most subtly by honing in precisely on what we love. In that sense, criticism is the sneakiest form of memoir you can write.

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Yesterday, for a friend, I posed in pictures wearing a bra.

I colored my hair, smushed a sample of skin serum over my face, and stood on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror. Too much midriff. I used to wear Spandex halter tops designed by Azzedine Alaia. I remember when that was no longer a good idea because my skin was no longer made of Spandex.

One day, maybe twenty years ago, my friend Alan and I were in the gym talking about how we would manage as we aged. This man had grown muscular and flexible by doing yoga. He was very proud of the changes in his body, and I couldn’t understand why he continued to eat massive amounts of rice and beans. He said, “You will adjust. That’s what you do. You will find a way.” I was surprised by this view of me. It seemed so positive, even though I knew he was talking about himself.

My hair turned out good, and my mood brightened. When I say “my hair turned out good,” I mean the color was dark, and the mop was thick and curly, although obviously not shaped by a professional. I like to think it’s become my look: hopeful woman, smiling obliviously into bathroom mirror.

I raised myself a bit, standing on some towels, and Richard snapped me with bare arms. Not good. I put on one of his shirts and opened it enough so you could see the bra and my shoulders. This made a better composition, we agreed.

Then I sent some shots to our friend

Daisy Alioto

. The underwear company Chantelle is sponsoring BLANK, her new venture about books in her media platform DIRT. She’s asked writers to pose in the underwear. I don’t look as good as I did even a year ago. Do those serums for growing eyebrows work? Why had I agree to send her a picture of me in a bra? I hoped I could pull it off, and it’s a really comfy bra.

Here’s the ad:

https://blank.beehiiv.com/p/the-polo-bar-d4a9

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Richard recuperating during a low sugar hiking in Cornwall.

Richard isn’t a fan of being looked at. I post pictures of him because I like the look of him. I have a picture of him naked, stretched out on the bed. He looks like an otter sunning beside a stream. He doesn’t know he’s beautiful, which makes him more beautiful. This is true of all animals and all human beings.

He’s not a fan of being looked at, but he is a fan of being read, and his new stack, Every Twenty Minutes, is original and brilliant—literary tales of life with the chronic illness type-1 diabetes. Please read his latest post here: richardtoon1.substack.com/p/additions-and-subtractions

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