Marfan

by Peter Reading

Grief, decline and exile have been Peter Reading's persistent themes through twenty books written over thirty years. After staring into death's Medusa face in his recent work, the scourge of Britain's sham uncaring society sentences himself to a year's exile deep in the empty heart of Texas in Marfan. This richly observed, unsparingly caustic book-length poem presents an unflattering but grimly affectionate portrait of the hick town of Marfa (pop. 2,474).
Here be cowpokes and Bible bashers, crazies in Chevies, trigger-happy Border Patrolmen and gabby old-timers in Ray's Bar, all intent on bending Reading's ear. And he takes it all in, just as the slaughtered Indians and despised 'Spiks' have done, but this suspicious stranger answers back. In blackly ironic, highly sophisticated poetry created in their own language, out of their own drawling mouths, Reading's rednecks damn themselves in this latter-day divine comedy set in an arid all-American wasteland.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Peter Reading (27 July 1946 – 17 November 2011) was an English poet and the author of 26 collections of poetry. He is known for his choice of ugly subject matter, and use of classical metres. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry describes his verse as "strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical". Interviewed by Robert Potts, he described his work as a combination of "painstaking care" and "misanthropy".

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Reading was an English poet of grim, acerbic humor and a dismal outlook approaching and sometimes touching misanthropy. For most of his career, his harsh lens had been set on British society, but a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation allowed him to spend the year 1998–1999 in Marfa, Texas writing poetry. The subject he choose was the small “hick town” around him, its architecture and its people, with his detailed study taking place in its bars and town library and along its railroad tracks. The volume is nicely complemented by photographs by Jay Shuttleworth of some of the places Reading describes.

This book is written as one single poem fleuve where only vertical space on the page signals that we have moved from one set of connected stanzas to another. It often circles back to motifs or subjects discussed people, like a mentally ill Marfa man believing he was pursued by the CIA, or the politics of Mexican immigration and the porous border. Reading was a master of adapting newspaper reporting or the speech of lower-class people to traditional meters, an effect that best comes across when the poems are read out loud.

Many of the elements I knew from reading Reading’s earlier collection Stet are present here, such as how a few dry, descriptive lines lead up to a bitter zinger at the end:

El Paisano Hotel, corner of Highland,
completed 1930, designed by Trost
& Trost, El Paso, in grand quasi-Spanish
Baroque style, built around a central courtyard
with fountain, ornate, long ago fucked-up.

Also fun is his swerving between high and low styles. You can’t get more to extremes than veering from local talk written in dialect to lofty language like the following (about sculptor Donald Judd’s artworks in Marfa):

Manifestly possessed of major talent,
what ingenious kuntswerke would he have, perforce,
produced if big-money backers had been absent
to finance these billion-dollar, minimalist,
factory finish, self-indulgent art games?

Reading clearly has a low opinion of the place he wound up (through the total accident of a literary award) and its people. Often that seems deserved, as he documents the appalling history of this part of Texas and the racism that often persists. Still, he is at his best when the tone is acerbic but not outright mean-spirited, and I felt some lines about people he never even met to cross that fine line:

$10 in advance! The Marfa Lights
Festival (held on Labor Day Weekend)!
This year we feature the great Dana Lee
the one and only Shelly Lares – enjoy!
[Also a bunch of other total shites
like ‘Randy’ Bob Pulido (‘Texas Cowboy’)…

[zunggg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading's late-period masterpiece, a frazzled, ballsy, multivocal immersion in a small town in Texas.