“i like the feeling you get / from lies through omission / they make you feel / like a weird little / phantom”
One of the poems early in Kendra Grant Malone’s collection, Everything Is Quiet, talks about that moment after a good movie when we all have to accept the movie wasn’t real. When two people hang out in that moment, it’s excruciating, because they know “you have to / speak at some point / and you have to shatter / what you were just feeling / a moment before.” Much later in the collection, the speaker—let’s just say Malone because that’s what Malone says—talks about people who are “very beautiful” and other people who are “very drunk,” but ends talking about how she has no one to talk to “at this very / moment.” And it’s that isolation of Very-flavored moments that this book lives to talk about. Even though these spindly, skinny poems are gorged with excesses of violence (sexual and otherwise), excesses of ingestion and injection, their main concern is excessive solitude. Which gets no worse than when two people who want to be together are stuck living through those moments they don’t want to be together.
Why tell somebody you like to put hellfire and cat faces in your mouth? Coins and paperclips, left pinky fingers? Well, as a gesture of “wait,” maybe. When you tell somebody that most nights you spend with your cork collection, dumping and sorting and counting your corks, what you’re really telling them is that you’re not doing that right now. You don’t want to be anywhere, really, but you want them to stay, so you’re going to tell them about times when you don’t feel like you’re anywhere. Other times, you don’t want them to stay, and then you sit in the bathtub or sing at them through a door. Maybe you are haunted by your memory of randomly hating someone who ate McDonalds in front of you, by someone else’s lack of tattoos, and these memories are like the things we see before falling asleep, the things we can’t catch in time to rebuke, so they hang around some leaky attic above our hearts and drip at the most annoying pace. Sometimes we see a dead cat and we cloak a blanket around our own cat, but that doesn’t make our cat any less suspicious, because our cat comes with memories of her own.
In “Spick,” a sequence of short poems, Malone wonders if she is the only person who loves her brother, and she is not sure she can go on “being the only / the only / apparently the only / the only.” This skittish self-consciousness about the role of her own isolation is one of Malone’s most interesting aches. If she has to be somebody’s only legal guardian, why isn’t she allowed to be their coffee table? If she has to deal with everyone’s interpretations of her feelings, why can’t she enjoy wrecking herself as much as everyone else seems to?
This is confession that carries no implicit desire for forgiveness. Or approval. This is the opposite of head-in-the-lap confession—which Malone, in these poems, is always having to field and deal with. Maybe this is how confession looks when someone wants to be weaker than they are. In other words, these are the confessions of the head way above the lap you’re using, the thoughts of the person who’s giving you space to milk your sorrows. Another thing these poems are is a sort of plea to selfishness, but not how you think. More like how self-ish also means you only feel-ish that you have a self at all.
When Malone talks about chasing pigeons, she says “i chase things / that no one views / as precious / so that i am not looked upon / as a monster / (although i am)” And sure, pigeons are fun to chase, and it’s fun to make a noise that doesn’t mean anything, a noise whose only purpose is to make something else afraid of you, but this line is lovely and scary because Malone is talking more than pigeons. She’s talking about a tiny missing Irish man, whose murdered photo she chases through the paper for. Talking about a three-winged fly, a disabled brother. But she’s probably mostly talking about herself, and a world full of people who won’t dismember (or dis-remember) her even when she wants them to, even while the world gives us sensations and imagination at the same time.
Some of the poems seem to end humorously—like a poem that talks about wanting to rape and be raped but ends with the line “then maybe / we can do something / more acceptable / like play skeeball”—but these endings are not made of the humor designed to make a stranger laugh. Not the humor designed to make people melt into mutual recognition and comfort. Rather, the humor of shutting yourself off with another person, of building a sort of shock-based forcefield around two people so that no one else can get in. Eventually, of course, you realize you can’t get out, either. And you also have another force field around yourself, which you didn’t even make, and which you try to lie and fuck your way out of. You do bumps of coke and sing Belle and Sebastian while you whip somebody. But that shit is strong. And what’s worse, you kind of like the way you look in your forcefield, just like how you like the way you look in your three-hundred dollar fur coat. What’s worse: looking scared or knowing you look good?
When Malone says to one boy (everyone shivers down to such frank need in this collection that it seems fair to call them all boys and girls, even—maybe especially—the hulks at the kitchen table eating the bananas) that he smells like Christmas, all she means is that his deodorant smells like a candle her mother used to have. He’ll take it wrong, of course. What he doesn’t know yet is that not everything said between lovers is designed to make the love work better. Not everything said about love is said to help shut that love off from the rest of the world. Sometimes one person says something not because they want to have sex, but just because it feels good to be naked with somebody. Sometimes you have to push the head away from the lap, not because you don’t care, but because you have to pee. When someone tells you the “calmest, greatest” moment of their life was almost drowning to death, taking water in their lungs, there is an infinite moment after this telling. To say what they said is not a confession. Maybe it’s a reminder of mutual isolation—what is there to say? why not be quiet forever?—but also very much an open gesture, very much a way of challenging the listener’s own isolation. Do you want to hear about how I want to die? I don’t care. I’m going to tell you anyway. Because sometimes we can only know our own feelings when we talk about the times that we can’t feel anything.
Tags: kendra grant malone
FINALLY KGM gets her due.
Glow.
She is the god who compels me to make marriage work.
She has a vagina that is a book (look that up–I’m not going to surf for you)
Babies crawl backwards first, sometimes.
But not KGM.
Fishing pier!!!!
Buy
i really like kendra grant malone. she wrote a thing called “hill billy teeth” on her blog last year and it fucked me:
Hill Billy Teeth
We don’t know how it started that night. We were very drunk, but then, on the road, we were rarely not drunk. Earlier that day in some town in Wisconsin we bought little plastic “hill billy” teeth. The next bar we went to everyone there had teeth just like the ones we had bought. The dancing began much later in the night though. After we had grown very tired from traveling all day we found a frightening motel in the town we wanted to be in. We listened to the most romantic music we had while we fucked very tenderly on the squeaky old bed. After, I cried while Eric smoked in the doorway. When he came back to me he changed the music to something happy. I think I threw my ugliest panties at him, the ones I wear when I am on my period. I felt a little surprised when he put them on, but not too surprised because he had done that before. Little flashes of memories are all I have left of that night. I put my bra on him and it stretched flat over his skinny chest. He began to dance for me like a gay stripper, I think to make me laugh, because crying makes him angry and unhappy. One of his balls fell from my lime green cotton panties (with white polka dots and pink trim). He put in the more horrible looking teeth and I was so moved by his desperate display, his pathetic desire to make me laugh. I was still naked when I stood and put on his underwear and the other pair of hill billy teeth. Next we were listening to British dance music, but slow dancing, like a waltz. His face was very sincere when he stared at me then, with those stupid teeth protruding from his pretty feminine lips. I thought about slapping his face while we waltzed, but I laid my head on him instead.
i have often felt that feeling after a movie but never heard or read anyone describe it. that reason is reason enough for me to wanna read this lots.
i liked kendra’s book a lot. particularly “sylvia plath at sixteen” and “i never believed in god,” of the ones i hadn’t previously read.
“FINALLY KGM gets her due.” <--- the absolute truth.
Hi, I just kind of jumped into the middle of this post and read this:
“Another thing these poems are is a sort of plea to selfishness, but not how you think. More like how self-ish also means you only feel-ish that you have a self at all.”
It’s presumptuous, patronizing, and insulting to state something and then immediately tell your audience that their understanding of that statement is wrong. Don’t be a dick. Also, when you’re trying to explain a statement which may be confusing, try super hard not to use gibberish like “feel-ish”.
Just focus on being as succinct & coherent as possible.
As for Kendra, I’d love to bone her just so I can read about myself in one (or more, I’d like to think) of her works. Having said that, she is a good writer and has an unbelievable rack. I haven’t read this book, however.
You’re right. Now that I reflect on it, I see that my comment transcended mere literary criticism and stands as a provocative work of literature in itself, focusing on a uniquely personal exploration of the reader-writer relationship.
i liked this review a lot.
everything is quiet is probably the most honest, useful, accessible book of poetry that has ever been written
Equivocation is boning self-flattery’s unbelievable rack.
“As for Kendra, I’d love to bone her just so I can read about myself in one (or more, I’d like to think) of her works. Having said that, she is a good writer and has an unbelievable rack. I haven’t read this book, however.”
Cool, thanks for letting me know I don’t have to take you seriously at all! You almost had me there, kiddo.
‘Selflike’ is a subtle translation of “selfish”. Liking oneself, similar to oneself, liking what’s focused on oneself, and so on.
Egoist vs. egotist?
oh, hey y_, i dont feel hostile or anything (i thought it would be fun to quote cfa’s words at him); i just think the criticism is a little disingenuous/silly, maybe? it doesnt seem well put and constructive to me because cfa says he just ‘jumped’ into the post; i took this to mean he hadnt read the whole thing and so he isnt familiar with the context of those two sentences he quotes, but maybe i made a bad assumption. cfa talks about how the mike uses ‘you’ to aggressively address the reader, but he misses how mike previously uses ‘you’ earlier (im thinking of that second big paragaph) as a kind of playful thing? i dunno, i just didnt get that same sense from mike’s tone. anyhow, yeah, i didnt think it was helpful.
Settle down. I just thought you might be interested in writing as a craft and gave some advice where I saw room for improvement.
Another way to look at it is that I started a heated literary debate on a well-regarded literary blog.
Incoherence is boning incomprehension’s unbelievable rack.
that is another way to look at it
that is another way to look at it
Don’t be a dick.
Just having a literary discussion. Is it “too intense”?
Saying “I’d love to bone her…” and “… she… has an unbelievable rack” isn’t “Just having a literary discussion.”
That said, none of this is “too intense” by HTMLGIANT standards, in fact it’s pretty tame.
Owners of black cats are awesome.
Why are people, who are supposed to be mature adults, getting hostile and defensive over some constructive and well put criticism? You should thank this guy — all he’s doing is helping.
My disease: The HtmlGiant Effect
Symptoms: I do not want to read any book or author recommended here
Why: “the most honest, useful, accessible book of poetry that has ever been written”
or “FINALLY KGM gets her due”–Finally? She’s 25! Jeesh. Finally: Please see David Markson’s life–that’s FINALLY
Result: I probably miss out on a lot of good stuff (maybe KGM) because of all the nepotism and over-hype
Lie: Yeah, HtmlGinat hypes Markson and I love Markson. Okay.
You’re right, mimi. Now that I reflect on it, I see that my comment transcended mere literary criticism and stands as a provocative work of literature in itself, focusing on a uniquely personal exploration of the reader-writer relationship.
Yeah, and I can’t spell. OK!
i’m 26
“dude, she has a great rack.” “i’d like to bone her.” Are you Gilbert or Louis from the Nerds movies?
Well, have fun exploring yourself.
I don’t honestly believe you’re being anything other than a troll, especially because you say outright that you didn’t even read the whole review, which is sort of like going up to someone at the end of a story about their mother dying and saying “I don’t know who you’re talking about; she sounds like a bitch, tho.” But as a practice of good faith, I will try to talk about what you said.
When someone reads the word “selfishness,” there’s a pretty common definition that comes to mind, right? Which is something like “devoted to or caring only for oneself.” When I wrote those sentences you quoted, I was thinking of how the poems in this book often seem “selfish,” but they reminded me more of the way the word “selfish” has “self” and “ish” in it, “ish” being a standard idiomatic expression of indistinctness. To say “Jim is tall-ish” means Jim is tall, sure, but you have some reservation about calling him outright tall, something in the back of your mind, maybe the fact he always wears platform boots or something, and you want to incorporate this feeling of reservation/qualification into your language, so you say “ish.” This is all pretty basic stuff that language users stroll around doing all the time. Probably nobody needed an explanation of what “ish” means, but there we go.
So it’s interesting to me that “selfish” can lexically mean both “devoted to oneself” and “kind of like a self.” Because I was thinking about that, I used the word “feel-ish” to signal that relationship. I wasn’t patronizing anyone’s interpretation, I was playfully pointing out that “selfish” has one commonly accepted meaning with another sort of buried in the way the word is built. And it’s even sort of funny to think of hoarding one meaning for “selfish” because that’s sort of selfish. Which is all the sort of lame word humor that totally gets me off, which I fully admit is, in some real world way, lame indeed. But hey: craft, right?
You’re right: the feeling I’m talking about is a confusing feeling, an elusive feeling, and I wanted to build some sort of mimesis of that feeling into the writing. Even the feeling itself—the self-ish feeling—is only a feeling I “feel-ish.” Which I’m not saying to be confusing or deliberately muddle things, I am only trying to be the most honest I can and not compromise the expression into a place where it means something different. Which speaks to your advice: I made a deliberate choice not to be “succinct,” and I think we probably think of different things when we each think of “coherent,” but the difference is not for lack of thinking. So there isn’t really a “Just do this” involved. I made the choices I made, and they involved thinking about and already rejecting—before you showed up—what you suggested I do. So reading your advice, I felt like I’d made a sandwich with a bagel because I didn’t feel like eating bread, and you came along and said “You idiot, why didn’t you use bread, nobody eats bagel sandwiches, come on.” Can you see why I’d consider that advice easily rejected?
Finally, no, I don’t really have a lot of interest in taking your thoughts about craft seriously when you wrap them up with “As for Kendra, I’d love to bone her just so I can read about myself in one of her poems.” I mean, I don’t have anything against that feeling. You can want to bone whomever you want to bone for whatever reason you want to bone them. Cool, thanks for sharing. But I’m not going to take your serious bits very seriously if you tack that on and put it in that way. This is not like an emotional thing, like I am not “scornful” or “angry,” I just feel like “Oh! That’s the game. Okay.” Like if someone wants to know when the bus is coming and then they masturbate really loudly to a Polaroid of their aunt after they ask, I am not going to judge them. Who cares? Jack away. But I am not going to feel a lot of urgency in helping them with bus schedules because that’s obviously not what they care about at the moment.
I hope this clears things up. Again, to be completely honest, I already feel kind of bummed about how much time I’ve spent on this reply because I feel like you are going to fire off something snide in response, something that reflects a fundamentally impatient and myopic view toward mutual understanding, but sure: I hope I’m being an ass. And you really were just trying to talk about something that confused you.
Already older than Keats.
I’ve heard that dentists call hillbilly teeth ‘Mountain Dew mouth’.
love to bone, unbelievable rack, and literary discussion sound like the nodal points of a Malone story.
mimi’s point was that “bone”, “rack”, and “literary”, as used here, are not provocative.
Just considering the number of times all that has been quoted here, it does seem that people were provoked by it.
Thank you for taking that brief literary journey with me. The reader-writer relationship is something I value as both a reader and a writer.
i guess, since literature is, according to bataille, essentially infantile, you’re some kind of genius.
just kidding, you’re just filling the gap where nerds drool all over any post about a cute girl who also writes. congratulations.
Equivocation is boning self-flattery’s unbelievable rack.
I think my point remains as I originally stated 2 hours ago. (Fuck, 2 hours, jeez. I need to get off this computer!) but I’ll say it again:
Saying “I’d love to bone her…” and “… she… has an unbelievable rack” isn’t “Just having a literary discussion.”
For me the problematic word here is “Just”.
It’s literary discussion *and more*.
And I don’t mind the slight provocation. It’s not too intense for me.
‘Selflike’ is a subtle translation of “selfish”. Liking oneself, similar to oneself, liking what’s focused on oneself, and so on.
Egoist vs. egotist?
oh, hey y_, i dont feel hostile or anything (i thought it would be fun to quote cfa’s words at him); i just think the criticism is a little disingenuous/silly, maybe? it doesnt seem well put and constructive to me because cfa says he just ‘jumped’ into the post; i took this to mean he hadnt read the whole thing and so he isnt familiar with the context of those two sentences he quotes, but maybe i made a bad assumption. cfa talks about how mike uses ‘you’ to aggressively address the reader, but he misses how mike previously uses ‘you’ earlier (im thinking of that second big paragaph) as a kind of playful thing? i dunno, i just didnt get that same sense from mike’s tone. anyhow, yeah, i didnt think it was helpful.
Your mot juste remains: “tame”.
I think you started off on a tangent completely contraindicative to reality and I get the sense you’re not coming back in the course of this conversation.
Another way to look at it is that I started a heated literary debate on a well-regarded literary blog.
Incoherence is boning incomprehension’s unbelievable rack.
that is another way to look at it
Denise, I understand what you are saying. To me, this place feels like a gathering of people being very relaxed with each other, and so the gushing or overly exclamatory stuff fits the way it would fit if we were in a bar and someone said, “Dude, that book/movie/CD blew my mind.” I would not feel, in that situation, like the whatever actually blew anybody’s mind, but I’d take the enthusiasm as just that, a signal of enthusiasm among people comfortable enough to be excessively expressive with each other. Or the opposite: “That shit was awful, the worst movie ever,” etc. I mean, I’m not saying anything new: all this is symptomatic of internet culture at large and is why a lot of people get confused/angry about an ostensibly print-focused communication medium being so relaxed and verbal in atmosphere, but it’s new. I think people are still figuring out how to “talk” on the internet. There isn’t even a good verb for it.
All that said, I obviously wrote this discussion a little differently than I would for Jacket or ABR or whatever. I don’t really even think it’s a “review.” But I did consciously try to avoid a “hyping” tone and to simply narrate how I processed the poems: things I thought about, things I felt, a very scant bit about connections to certain literary lineages (so-called “confessional poetry,” etc.) Like, if I were writing about the book for a different venue, I’d talk about Anais Nin or something, but in the stuff I write for here I try to give myself the challenge of being artificially (we all think about other authors when we read stuff) anti-allusive. Like a mode of suffocating in whatever I’m writing about.
Yes, I do know Kendra (tho people have been writing reviews of work by people they know since Catullus), but I consciously tried to avoid discussing the book through the lens of our knowing each other. Even though I’m saying “Kendra” here, I gave myself the rule of only saying “Malone” in the piece, which is a totally superficial and paltry thing, but sort of trains things in the right direction. Because I agree with you: what does hanging out have to do with hanging on words? So I focused on the texts of the poems and what I’d read Kendra “say” in other places. Obviously I can’t speak for people who comment—good or bad—and commenting is a different genre/mode with its own conventions, etc. But if there is something in the piece itself that you find over-hyping or nepotistic, I would honestly like to know because that means I didn’t do a good job avoiding those things.
Yeah, extra T, egoist on the cross. It’s funny because the “i” (little i) in these poems is always wanting things/people to be quiet and go away, and it’s kind of a short hop to wanting yourself to go away and be quiet. I wonder what are other peoples’ favorite books about an overwhelming desire to quiet oneself?
Mike, if Denise threw your watch in the river, I’d swim out to get it for you.
Naah, you’re just acting like a Yugo.
I did in fact not read the whole post before commenting, however, I did read the portion about a head in a lap/above a lap as a psychological metaphor which confused me more than it explained anything. I don’t ascribe any particular emotion to the location of the head in relation to a lap. It’s too specifically personal a metaphor.
The writer is using “you” (which to the reader normally means “me”) as a substitute for “I”. I see this technique abused often and unnecessarily so. If he is writing about his experience of the book, he should use “I”. The only reason I can think of at the moment to use “you” is if the experience is a universal one (e.g. “You go through those doors and then you take a right.”) It denotes a common experience that the reader will have, identical to the writer’s. When you try to explain that common experience using words no one’s ever seen before like “feel-ish” and rely on the author’s personal metric of psychological state dependent on the head’s distance from the lap, you are contradicting the purpose of using the universal “you”.
Whether the “you” was literal “you” or a universal “I”, the statement “[this] is [that], but not how you think” is presumptuous and insulting to a reader who may not have the same reaction and may actually glean the correct meaning without having to be corrected. I do not mean the writer did this aggressively, just out of disregard. If he meant to express his own experience or feelings, he should just have used “I”, because there is no reason to use “you” and because he is otherwise only writing for the people that already think like him and unnecessarily limiting the communication of his thoughts to just that audience.
I wasn’t using “you” to mean “I.” I was using it to mean “close your eyes and imagine.” There’s no such thing as universal experience, but there is such a thing as empathy and projection. Again, I really do think you’re unnecessarily confusing yourself by not actually reading what you’re criticizing. I mean, I’ve read all the words in your comments. To me it feels like I made a seventeen course meal entirely out of differently flavored doughnuts, but you only ate the fourth doughnut and spit it out because you hate bacon doughnuts, and you don’t understand why I put bacon on a doughnut, and then you tell me I don’t know how to fry dough.
The head-in-the-lap thing is playful in how it’s written, and it means what it means, but because it’s confusing you I will try to say it in another way: say you’re putting your head in somebody’s lap—
(I mean, on the subject of “say you’re:” if you’ve never put your head in somebody’s lap, even in a figurative way, and when you try to imagine what it feels like to do this your mind comes up totally and aggressively blank, then I’m sorry for wasting your time but we should probably both give up this whole communication)
—and you are totally down, head in their lap, down in self-pity and worshipful gratitude of this person who’s let you put your head in their lap. This image is in the book, by the way. What I’m saying is the poems in the book make me think about how vocal that lap-sobber is about their feelings—especially in the context of poetry about feelings, especially thinking about the lap-sobber as a concept—but how we rarely hear from the person whose lap is being used. The person whose head is totally upright and looking somewhere else and probably thinking about something completely different even as they’re saying “Shh shh it’s okay.” All I’m saying is the poems made me consider the dynamics of that situation in an interesting way.
Okay. I do sincerely hope I’ve cleared up some of the head/lap confusion.
Thanks for noticing the subtle thematic allusion to the work of the author in review in my otherwise provocative and highly controversial comment. I feel like the different layers within my commentary creates an open-ended reader-writer relationship which serves to engage readers on their own terms.
You might be amazed to find out I only took 3 English classes in college.
hi lorian, i remember that piece too. thanks for posting it here.
This guy can’t take criticism. Thanks for provoking an interesting discussion here, chrysler5thavenue! You express yourself well and you’d be my ideal audience if I were to write a piece like this.
If you have an unbelievable rack, guess who’d love to bone you?
hey c5a, i appreciate this response. thank you for clarifying your original comment. i had reacted to it negatively b/c, i think, its tone, but now i understand this better. im sorry for calling you a dick.
i dont has time to respond more b/c im at work; maybe later.
ha, thanks david! i know how to swim, so maybe we can swim after it together.
She does look rather busty.
yeah
This book is a feat of minimalism. I think you mentioned literally everything that appears anywhere in it, and I immediately and precisely remembered every poem referenced after one read.
[…] Malone & Savoca Week (4): Our Cat Comes With Memories of Her …Malone & Savoca Week (4): Our Cat Comes With Memories of Her Own: A …. they want to have sex, but just because it feels good to be naked with somebody. […]