Boyer, Notley, & Sloan
Alice Notley writes herself into Iowa City throughout her As Good As Anything poem with the limbic disappointment of a place equidistant between her east coast first love and the west coast subject of her writing. A place preoccupied with the craft of writing but consumed by a population of academic followers over practical doers. For Notley it’s somewhere which offers the kind of creative destination she craves in her work, and while she doesn’t expressly say it, we assume the subject of her ire here is the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her difficulty of place within it as a functioning educational system. An institution so consumed by poetry that through the actions of its transient population, has also begun to eat the surrounding city, but without the substance she requires to inspire her work. The rocks she needs upon which to build a writing practice. There’s neither the ‘real assholes’ she met in New York but which inspired her to develop a philosophy of sympathy and spiritual equality, nor the Californian landscape she struggles to write into. Everything here is surface. Visiting poets ‘treated like royalty’ and where everyone is stupidly writing their five hundredth poem. Notley’s Iowa Cty is a midwestern place between points of inspiration, but itself devoid of it, lost in the miasma of others consumed by the cacophony of their own voice.
If Notley’s Iowa City wallows in the disappointment of an aspiration unmet, then Anne Boyer’s two Kansas City essays take the disappointment of failed social infrastructure programs and the economic neglect of decades and boil it over into violence. Like the city itself, divided by a river, Boyer’s pieces organize themselves into the Kansas City of the Occupy movement and the civil unrest of recent years, in contrast to the Kansas City romanticized in the movies, songs and warm afternoons watching baseball. Both concern themselves with communal facades, and repeatedly ask themselves, just as their inhabitants do, which Kansas City we are talking about. The one we want. Or the one we’ve got. Just as Notley finds herself writing within a system she is increasingly uncomfortable inside, so Boyer does the same in finding herself caught between the protest and violence of a riot as much as the economic violence of non-investment and neglect. Boyer’s system is one of politicized disappointment, Notley’s one of academic and creative regret. Despite finding themselves in the middle of situations they’d rather be removed from, they are both still writing themselves deeper into both places.
But where Boyer’s Kansas City boils over with economic unrest at an unfair system, Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Los Angeles in A Clear Presence is one which burns with the unrest of racial tension. Sloan uses one of the most recognizable residential icons of any arrival into Los Angeles from the air, the ubiquitous swimming pool, to contrast the two Los Angeles she experiences. One is the privileged and wealthy white immigrant pool painted by David Hockney. The pool which depicts Los Angeles as a celluloid technicolor dream. Hockney’s pools are those of the orderly calm enjoyed by the rich, and the enormous splashes of color only afforded to those who can house them. The other is the disenfranchised and neglected pool of the black and hispanic communities. The pool Rodney King would ultimately die in. The pool which distorts faces under the water in the same way King’s face was distorted by institutionalized police brutality. Sloan invites these pools into conversation with each other as the city’s great unresolved dyad. Both concern themselves with the kinds of economic unrest described by Boyer, but Hockney’s pools use wealth to remove themselves from the violence and fire of the communal cesspools which ignite the Los Angeles riots. Similarly, Sloan’s Los Angeles is one of systems where the city we want is far from the city we have, and where Notley’s Iowa city is one of academic disappointment, Boyer’s Kansas City one of economic division, Sloan’s is one where the facade of creative aspiration has collapsed into racial violence.
Both Boyer and Sloan write of the emotional hierarchy of place. Of how cities in particular fetishize the brand promise of opportunity and economic aspiration in ways which draw populations towards them but ultimately consume them into a system which divides and disappoints. For Boyer it’s the Kansas City of which Fats Domino sings so fondly. The Kansas City of Royals baseball. The Kansas City of Robert Altman movies. But it’s also the Kansas City which erupts in violence towards the injustice of an economic system which leaves millions behind and rioters who scream about bombing the fed. Sloan’s Los Angeles is equally appealing through the lens of David Hockney’s splashes and the dream-like celebrity lens which blankets the city every awards season. But it’s also the racially-motivated crucible inside which police brutality also erupts into violence. Boyer and Sloan’s cities are ones which aspire to great heights but cannot escape their inherent economic and communal systemic flaws. Both paint thin facades which can never conceal the actual truth, only temporarily mask it. And in this sense, they both wrestle with what it is to be American. To hold onto the great promise of the nation while struggling to accept the discriminatory realities of its systemic operation.
