{"id":103893,"date":"2016-10-25T10:30:40","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T14:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103893"},"modified":"2016-10-24T17:29:28","modified_gmt":"2016-10-24T21:29:28","slug":"kenward-elmslie-orchid-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/25\/kenward-elmslie-orchid-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Kenward Elmslie and The Orchid Stories<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

From the cover of The Orchid Stories<\/i>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

\n

Upon that golden shore, kids
We\u2019ll lie on beds of orchids.
\u2014John Latouche, \u201cGoona Goona,\u201d\u00a0from the musical The Golden Apple<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The first chapters of Kenward Elmslie\u2019s novel <\/em>The Orchid Stories<\/a> first appeared in the Summer 1967 issue<\/a> of <\/em>The Paris Review. The novel has just been reissued by The Song Cave. <\/em><\/p>\n

Kenward Elmslie\u2019s perverse, scabrous, gorgeous poetry and prose have astonished his fans for over fifty years\u2014decades during which he remained the pride of small presses, the happy secret of cognoscenti\u2014but it is safe to say that the vast audience his work deserves doesn\u2019t know what<\/em> it\u2019s missing. He\u2019s the most extravagant, and extravagantly overlooked, poet in America.<\/p>\n

Elmslie is the nearly invisible fifth member of the quintet that includes Frank O\u2019Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. The generations of poets they inspired sing Elmslie\u2019s praises, but he is most brilliantly described by Ashbery, his comrade-in-arms. Elmslie\u2019s voice, writes Ashbery, is \u201cthat of some freaked-out Levi-Strauss, a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

When not invisible, Kenward Elmslie is misnamed. In his first big book of poems, Album<\/em>, there is a two-page collage by Joe Brainard, made from a sheaf of documents, including a citation for \u201cVagrancy by Loitering\u201d in New Orleans, issued to one Kennard Elmslie. The other scissored clippings include an announcement of a musical comedy, a \u201ctuner\u201d\u2014this must be from a showbiz paper, perhaps Variety<\/em>\u2014to be titled The Yellow Drum<\/em> with book and lyrics by Kenwood Emsley. Another clip reviews a piece written by Kenneth Elmslie: \u201cThe children in the audience approved mightily.\u201d Kenward Elmie is praised for an opera libretto based on Strindberg. Kenward Elm is praised next, followed by announcements of operas and poetry readings by Kenward Emslie, Kenwood Elmslie, Kenward Elmsee, Mr. Elnsie, and Edward Elmslie. Is it any wonder that the same book, Album<\/em>, contains a play, Furtive Edna<\/em>, in which the heroine sings a song called \u201cChange Your Name\u201d?<\/p>\n

Hidden identities, camouflage, and transposition are the essence of the work of Kenward G. Elmslie. The narrator of The Orchid Stories <\/em>remains nameless throughout, although in a love letter he uses the affectionate nickname \u201cGloop-silv.\u201d Is a nameless narrator unusual in a novel? No, not necessarily. But it\u2019s certainly unusual in a coming-of-age novel entirely about the narrator. Everything about this novel is bonkers, especially that it is called The Orchid Stories<\/em>. Stories?<\/p>\n

Eager to see what the manuscripts and drafts look like, I visited the Elmslie papers in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego. While there, I found two extraordinary things: the pages, many of them glued together by a mysterious fungus\u2014an accident in the lab?\u2014are versions and revisions of materials that are almost identical, except for a few words. Then, a specific example of Elmslie\u2019s process that I thought might help readers to understand his language, especially how language for him has always been a procedure involving some kind of breakdown, fissure, evolution, or reimagining.<\/p>\n

In the poem \u201cSin in the Hinterlands,\u201d from Tropicalism<\/em>, we find this stanza:<\/p>\n

\n

Lip-sync, a life of lip-sync,
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 it\u2019s like a life of lip-sync, lip-sync of tip of vat, hot vat.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A draft of this poem reveals that \u201ctip of vat, hot vat\u201d is a variant of \u201ctip of hat, top hat.\u201d These phonetic cousins might look identical when reading lips.<\/p>\n

Elmslie vigilantly mishears and misspells. In his world (not just postmodern, but postnuclear), language and the visionary imagination are fused, as are the deterioration of language and the inherent radioactivity of the landscape. This is the world of wonderful nouns\u2014things called into being by the magical act of naming, or misnaming, them\u2014and no sooner is a thing named than it begins to decay and mutate. Elmslie\u2019s obsessional, regressive fantasies pile imagination on top of imagination until the structure self-implodes and you have, as Gauguin said of the people in Gustave Moreau\u2019s paintings, \u201cpieces of jewels covered with jewels.\u201d Elmslie is a highly dedicated craftsman, and he appears to want decorated decoration in his work.<\/p>\n

His ornate density of language is signaled here by the orchid, the most extraordinary and complex of blooms. The Orchid Stories <\/em>coincided with the tenderfoot love between Elmslie and Brainard, who was painting orchids at the time. \u201cMy Buddenbrooks<\/em>,\u201d Elmslie has called this book, a coming-of age novel he read aloud to entertain Joe, just as Mann read his coming-of-age novel in sections to his family.<\/p>\n

In The Orchid Stories<\/em>, from what we can tell, the nameless narrator\u2019s childhood is filled with the trauma of parents dying, divorcing, and remarrying, alongside their strained attempts at rebonding with the child. Names change frequently. (Don\u2019t expect the usual cues for how to deal with gender or time, either.) Right away we meet Mattie, Edith (nicknamed \u201cLady Knickers\u201d), and Bubbers, their profiles \u201csketched\u201d by a painter on the front door of the Locust<\/em> (\u201clow-cost\u201d) estate. But before we can figure out who Bubbers is, Edith and Mattie both die, and Bubbers becomes Mummers. The narrator is sent to school, then boarding school (the Blue Institute) and then, following a breakdown, to observation by Dr. Schmidlapp, who once also observed the narrator\u2019s parents. They had \u201cbreeding\u201d problems\u2014the narrator\u2019s mishearing of \u201cbreathing\u201d problems; Schmidlapp is an upper respiratory specialist.<\/p>\n

The Orchid Stories <\/em>bubbles with head-spinning mixtures. Its combination of energy and boredom astounds. There are at least a dozen procedures, most of them irretrievable to this reader, that make this book an ongoing fantasia of representation. Its wildness keeps me going, even as I forget what had delighted me a page before; I go on, gleaning bits of Elmslie\u2019s masterful hyphenates, portmanteaus, fold-ins, cut-ups, feminine rhymes: even pun-cum-trick-feminine-internal-rhymes (he learned a lot from his first lover, the lyricist John Latouche). You can read this book repeatedly, as I have, and it\u2019ll be fresh each time, an eternal palate cleanser.<\/p>\n

Very few books in literature are as singular as The Orchid Stories<\/em>. Among them are Raymond Roussel\u2019s novels, Laura (Riding) Jackson\u2019s\u00a0Progress of Stories<\/em>, Giorgio de Chirico\u2019s Hebdomeros<\/em>, and John Ashbery\u2019s Flow Chart<\/em>. Elmslie belongs to that great countertradition to classic poetry and prose. He lets imagination spiral into contradictory zones, but he is casual about this, feeling that \u201cwe belong here, stirring, where it\u2019s beautiful to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

A longer version of this essay appears as the introduction to The Song Cave\u2019s reissue of <\/em>The Orchid Stories<\/a>, published earlier this month.<\/em><\/p>\n

Michael Silverblatt is the host of KCRW\u2019s <\/em>Bookworm. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Upon that golden shore, kidsWe\u2019ll lie on beds of orchids.\u2014John Latouche, \u201cGoona Goona,\u201d\u00a0from the musical The Golden Apple The first chapters of Kenward Elmslie\u2019s novel The Orchid Stories first appeared in the Summer 1967 issue of The Paris Review. The novel has just been reissued by The Song Cave. Kenward Elmslie\u2019s perverse, scabrous, gorgeous poetry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1083,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[17,22183,478,9859,11337,5234,25228,23255,7221,165,2047,16965,25230,25229,25231],"class_list":["post-103893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-books","tag-coming-of-age","tag-criticism","tag-frank-ohara","tag-james-schuyler","tag-john-ashbery","tag-kenneth-koch","tag-kenward-elmslie","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-poets","tag-raymond-roussel","tag-song-cave","tag-the-orchid-stories","tag-tropicalism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMichael Silverblatt on Kenward Elmslie\u2019s \u201cOrchid Stories\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Kenward Elmslie is the most extravagant, and extravagantly overlooked, poet in America.\" \/>\n<meta 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