The Daily Glance
Mark Young's At Trotsky's Funeral is full of work primarily in his ficcione strain. It's well-crafted, meandering, international, scholarly, and brilliantly fun. In the book, we stand in the Mexican sun at Trotsky's funeral, Octavio Paz peeking over our shoulders. We hear stories of Sun Tzu, of Che Guevara (carrying O'Hara's poems), of Mao, of Eileen Tabios (a persona!). He weaves fascinating tales the way that Jorge Luis Borges does in his fiction**, and also interestingly, Mark brings in contemporary international poets to even further blur the lines between the literary allusions and the real. Is he taking us into the "artifice of eternity" or into some new virtual poetic space?
One of the first things
Oppenheimer did as
director of Project Manhattan
was to invite Diego Rivera
north to Los Alamos to
paint a series of murals
showing the benefits
that nuclear energy
would give the peoples
of the world.
Mark Young has taken the magical of The Boom, blended it with the surreal, and thrown it into a Internet-age mix, and to me, and I say this as a publisher of two of his books, this is one of my favorite collections of his. Ultimately, I'd like to see it collected as part of a longer work that includes all of Mark's ficcione-oriented works.
Diego Rivera at the Rad Lab.
**I'm teaching his "The Garden of Forking Paths" tomorrow, and Mark's work seems like a poetic equivalent.
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