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Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

“Ives . . . is quickly developing into a poet of sentences on par with the poem-essays of Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall for their sharp blend of lyric, thought, and wit.”

—ROB McLENNAN, author of Household Items

“Think of the upkeep of the minotaur at the center of what can only be the labyrinthine mind of Lucy Ives. This particular creature feeds on its own enclosure. Who said time is eternity turned into a moving image? How does this work on the page? As soon as Ives allows things focus, she pulls back, revealing a small component of a larger construct, but never anything objective and irreducibly whole. Thus, effectively her subject and obsession is not the demarcation of time, but the inability of time to be properly or comparatively enacted. What if Stein and Paul Éluard were a single poet? What if Wittgenstein, Elaine Scarry, and Charles and Ray Eames collaborated on a novelization of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits? What if Robbe-Grillet and Hélène Cixous were to rewrite The Duino Elegies as an essay? Daedalus never built anything quite like this. Good luck getting out.”

—NOAH ELI GORDON, author of Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?

“Ives’s work is certain in its undoing of certainty; it has an unforgettable voice as it strips itself of voiced identity; it summons a deeply trusted narrator in a work which cunningly challenges that trust.”

—JORIE GRAHAM, author of Fast

image

ALSO BY LUCY IVES

My Thousand Novel

Anamnesis

Novel

Orange Roses

nineties

The Worldkillers

Human Events

The Hermit

Impossible Views of the World

Title Page

image

Rilke was a jerk.

JOHN BERRYMAN

Personae

PERSONAE

TROY LOUDERMILK First-year student in the Seminars for Writing; poet
HARRY REGO Loudermilk’s companion
CLARE ELWIL First-year student in the Seminars for Writing; fiction writer
LIZZIE HILLARY Daughter of poets; fifteen years old
DON HILLARY Instructor in the Seminars for Writing; poet
MARTA HILLARY Instructor in the Seminars for Writing; poet
ANTON BEANS Second-year poet

I: Early Days

I

EARLY DAYS

One. Control

One

Control

Troy Augustus Loudermilk has a silver 1999 Land Cruiser with tinted windows and sunroof. He claims he bought it with cash from an out-of-court settlement with the SUNY system. The civil suit stemmed from “repeated unwelcome sexual advances” allegedly made by a thirty-seven-year-old female assistant professor, an anthropologist, during office hours. Loudermilk was adept enough to preserve a number of these encounters on tape. Highlights include an afternoon of rhetorical queries—why Loudermilk “keep[s] coming back for more”; then, “what [he is] so afraid of”—followed quickly on by the professor’s playful mimicry of an exotic felid. She clambers gamely onto her desk and begins to “lap cream” out of a “saucer”/course pack. She yowls and purrs. Even in audio format, it’s pretty damaging stuff.