Donna Stonecipher, The Ruins of Nostalgia

 

THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 2

We had been to the secretservice museum, to the shredded-documents-being-pieced-back-together museum, tothe museum of the wealthy family’s Biedermeier house from 1830, to the museumof the worker family’s apartment from 1905, to the museum of the country thatno longer exists, to the museum of the history of the post office, to the museumof the history of clocks. We had seen the bracelets made of the beloved’s hair,the Kaiserpanorama, the pneumatic tubes, the hourglasses, the shreds, themicrophones hidden in the toupees, the ticking, the gilded mirrors reflecting ourfaces, the two rooms eight people lived in, the eight rooms two people livedin, the shreds, the trays of frangible butterflies carrying freight, thesilvery clepsydras, the ticking, the simulacra, the shreds, the vitrines, thevelvet ropes, the idealized portraits of the powerful, the ticking, the pink façades,the upward mobility, the shreds, the plunging fortunes, the downward spirals,the ticking, the ticking, the shreds, the shreds. We had been to the museum ofthe ruins of nostalgia.

I’mdeeply behind on the work of American-expat Berlin-based poet Donna Stonecipher[although we did hang out that one time in Berlin], having gone through her Transaction Histories (University of Iowa Press, 2018) [see my review of such here],but not yet seeing copies of her books such as The Reservoir (Universityof Georgia Press, 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance Press,2007), The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House Press, 2008), Model City (Shearsman, 2015) or Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017). At leastI’m able to get my hands on her latest, The Ruins of Nostalgia (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), an unfolding of sixty-four numberedself-contained prose poem blocks, each sharing a title. As the cover flap offers:“Sparked by the East German concept of Ostalgic (nostalgia for the East)and written while living through unsettling socio-economic change in bothBerlin, Stonecipher’s adopted home, and Seattle, her hometown, the poems mounta multifaceted reconsideration of nostalgia. Invented as a diagnosis by a Swissmedical student in 1688, over time nostalgia came to mean the notoriousbackward glance into golden pasts that never existed.” Stonecipher composes hersequence of prose poems as a weaving of lyric, essay and image, examining thevery act of remembering the past, focusing on periods and geographies in themidst of change, ranging from the intimate to the large scale. “It was beforethe city built traffic circles at every intersection to prevent accidents,” thepiece “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 21” begins, “like the one she’d heard one Sunday afternoonthat sounded like someone shoving her parents’ stereo to the floor, but she’drun downstairs to find the stereo intact, her brother in front of it as usual,practicing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the guitar, headphones on.” Her prose linesextend and connect to further lines and threads held together, end to seemingend. “Of course it was a little odd to be glad of the bombs that had enabledthe holes to remain holes,” she writes, as part of “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 7,” “tobe grateful for the failed bankrupt state that had enabled the holes to remainholes, so lying on the grass of an accidental playground, one just listened tothe ping-pong ball batted back and forth across the concrete table. And thoughtidly of one’s own surpluses and deficits.”

Thenotion of the repeated title is one I’m fascinated by, something utilized by astring of poets over the recent years, from Peter Burghardt, through his full-lengthdebut (no subject) (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2022) [see my review of such here] to the late Denver poet Noah Eli Gordon’s Is That the Sound of a PianoComing from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Johannes Göransson’s SUMMER (Grafton VT:Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. There is somethingcompelling about working this particular kind of thread, attempting to pushbeyond the obvious across those first few poems under a shared title, into anarray of what else might come. As well, Stonecipher’s line “the ruins of nostalgia”repeats at the end of poems akin to a mantra or chorus, running through thefoundations of the sequence like a kind of tether, stringing her essay-poemstogether in a singular line of thought. It almost reminds of how RichardBrautigan used language as an accumulative jumble into the final phrase of In Watermelon Sugar (1968), a novel that ended with the name of the book itself;or the nostalgia of Midnight in Paris (2011), a recollection that soughta recollection of a recollection, folding in and repeating, endlessly rushingbackwards. As with nostalgia, the phrase is repeated often enough throughoutthat it moves into pure sound and rhythm and away from meaning; to look too farand too deep into an imagined recollection, one glimpsed repeatedly anduncritically, is to lose the present moment. It is, by its very nature, to becomeruin. As “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 11” writes:

We were able to benostalgic both for certain cultural phenomena that had vanished, and for thetime before the cultural phenomena had appeared, as if every world we lived inhid another world behind it, like stage scenery of a city hiding stage sceneryof tiered meadows hiding stage scenery of ancient Illyria. For example it wasn’tanswering machines, or the lack of answering machines, or the sight of tinyanswering-machine tape cassettes that triggered our nostalgia, but therealization that our lives had transcended the brief life of the answeringmachine, had preceded and succeeded it, encompassed it, swallowed it whole,which meant we had to understand ourselves not as contained entities, but asplanes intersecting with other planes, planes of time, technology, culture, desire.One plane had waited by the phone for our best friend’s phone call beforeanswering machines, and then one plane had recorded outgoing messages on theanswering machine over and over, trying and trying to sound blithe. How many tinytape cassettes still stored pieces of our voices like pale-blue fragments ofPlexiglas shattered into attics and basements across any number of states? We stillowned a tape cassette with the voice of our first beloved on it, or a versionof it, and remembered the version of the girl who kept rewinding his messageover and over, under an analogue wedge of black sky and endlessly delayedstars. She was listening and listening for answers the answering machine couldnot provide. When we felt our material planes sliding to intersect withimmaterial planes, or vice versa, we bowed our heads and submitted to thepile-up of the ruins of nostalgia.