Works on Paper

by Eliot Weinberger

During the past several years, Eliot Weinberger's inventive prose has earned him a reputation as a candid social observer and penetrating essayist. Works on Paper is the first collection of his writings, twenty-one pieces that juxtapose the world as it is and the world as it is imagined-by artists, poets, historical figures, and ordinary people.
“Inventions of Asia”, the first section, deals primarily with how the West reinvents the East (and how the East invents itself): images of India circa 1492 (where Columbus thought he was going); Christian missionaries in sixteenth-century China; Bombay prostitutes as seen by a New York photojournalist; Tibetan theocracy transplanted to the Rockies; a Confucian bureaucrat’s address to crocodiles; the shifting iconography of the “tiger”; looking for an answer to an ancient Chinese poem of questions; how the children of Mao have reinvented Imagism; Kampuchea under Pol Pot.
“Extensions of Poetry” explores the ways in which the world affects the imaginations of individual poets (George Oppen, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Octavio Paz, Clayton Eshleman) and indeed entire movements, leading at times to unexpected incarnations and transformations. Weinberger ponders such strange conjunctions as Whittaker Chambers and Objectivism, anti-Semitism among American Modernists, bourgeois poets –present-day wards of the academy and the state– confronting the issues of peace, American foreign policy, and The Bomb.
An essayist and translator, Eliot Weinberger, founded and edited the literary magazine Montemora (1975-82). His published books include translations of the work of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Homero Aridjis.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry, Criticism, India, Literary Criticism

176 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1986

About the author

Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages.
Weinberger first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet Octavio Paz. His many translations of the work of Paz include the Collected Poems 1957-1987, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among Weinberger's other translations are Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Reviews

[Garima · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Inventions of Asia to Extensions of Poetry, every page of this book is alive with the captivating imagery of an enigmatic East and obscure breathing of sublime poems. But that is just a pretty fraction of the whole picture. Within the same pages; death, ignorance, wild speculations, wise reflections and direful facts have done their efficient job too. Eventually, it’s the combined effort of all these factors that renders these resultant works incredibly effective.

In the beginning, there is a dream. Columbus is yet to visit a mythic country where land is always green and roses grow everywhere. A country where there are neither liars nor tailors. The place is India and the dream sequence is of India. The Dream Of India. A sense of collective nostalgia occurs while reading this unusual essay. There are voices belonging to different centuries, hearsay travelling through faraway pasts, and customs observed in present times – India according to the rest of the universe; a delicious blend of truth, whims and outlandish hopes. Journey continues. On the way, one gets a glimpse of Christian missionaries’ minds which could have been a role model for Borges, the controversial teaching methods of Chögyam Trungpa and the tumultuous encounter of Falkland Road through the lens of a photojournalist where Weinberger talks about the peculiar Indian Stare.



In India, it is the subject, not the photographer, who sees more intensely.

And finally one arrives to meet Blake’s Tyger. It’s an astonishing and powerful piece of writing where Eliot takes us through the revolutionary alleys of Tipu Sultan’s Mysore to the untamed safari of British Raj. An alarming and masterful case slowly builds around the extinction of several breeds of the unfortunate mighty beast as the result of a cold-blooded revenge and the vain superiority of the so-called mankind.



It’s hard to leave that ground but journey continues further to face the questions raised by Chinese poetry in Qu Yuan’s Tian Wen: A Chinese Book of Origins where Man has rhetorically asked heaven about several things by breaking rules of poetry writing. According to Weinberger, it’s the Epic Poem that China never had.

Emerge by the boiling canyon.
Arrive at the vale of night.

From light until dark
Is a pass of how many miles?

While one is still relishing in the unknown wonders of beautiful verses, the word Kampuchea suddenly appears with all its poisonous fangs and a savaged history. Like Weinberger, I can’t say anything except this:

To think about Kampuchea one must imagine, not acts of murder, nor death itself, but a life of death. And it is here where my mind blanks out. Absolute terror, like bliss, is a world from which human speech cannot return.

A deep, terrified silence follows after reading about that fateful Kingdom which also establishes Weinberger’s highly critical and relevant voice that remains consistent throughout the new section about the American Poetry scene in relation to world Politics. I read that part by keeping myself less emotionally involved but more intrigued since it was akin to reading the critique regarding a director whose films one haven’t watched. Yet it gave me a fresh perspective about the likes of Ezra Pound, Williams Carlos Williams, Octavio Paz, Kenneth Rexroth and Langston Hughes and how their works affected the society around them and vice-versa.

Throughout the 20 short but well researched essays contained in this book, Weinberger doesn’t stop at one central topic but interweaves his criticism with rare facts pertaining to different areas and present them with his unconventional approach to essay writing. His prose is simple but in that simplicity one can find a voice which always seems to say all the right things. These Works on Paper are accomplished enough to take you around a fascinating world in 175 pages.

[Maddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wrote out a whole long review for this and then deleted it by accident. Probably for the best. To say far less: Weinberger’s somewhat miraculous prose & the geography of his literary essays & also his exceptional love for poetry moved me and reaffirmed my own belief in life and the written word. Could be a big one for me.

“A question is the only complete grammatical structure that cannot exist by itself—it must always take us somewhere else, to another sentence or to an unspoken (unspeakable) unknown. It is the piece of ordinary speech closest to a line of poetry. Questions, like poems, like sacred formulae, are articulations of desire. The sacred formula: a concentration of power in order to possess what one does not have, become what one is not. The question: to reach the answer, or the unanswerable. Poetry: to find out, or, in Octavio Paz’s phrase, ‘to find the way out.’”

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine collection of essays on various literary and social topics.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBqs4...

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

his books make go find more books. my favorite piece in this collection "is titled The Dream of India [c. 1492:], and it consists of descriptions of India, many only a single line in length, a few slightly longer. Only at the end of the piece is it revealed that 'all of the imagery and some of the language are derived from works written in the five hundred years prior to 1492' -- a surprisingly effective device and one that, due to its air of authenticity, lends the piece considerable resonance."--the complete review

[Henry Begler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sat down to reread one essay and ended up reading almost the whole thing again in one sitting. One of his best collections. I will forever be grateful to EW for showing me all these incredible worlds out there in books. When he writes about poetry and history it’s stranger and more fascinating than fiction could be. Knowing things rocks.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weinberger's first collection of essays and reviews - 1980-1986. You can tell that he is still somewhat new at this - although by the end of the period covered here he is 40, and already had a number of translations of Paz' work published.
His usual subjects - especially Japanese and Chinese culture and writing. More than his usual number of contemporary poetry reviews - Objectivists, Pound/ians, and poets published by New Directions. While he complains about the new post-war poets, he does not name names, or really give specifics as to why he finds them lacking.
Already politically active, one of the longer pieces is on Kampuchea, and another on the poetry of the VN War (too bad he chose as his major example a poem, and poet, long since forgotten).
The best, initially, is the last essay, "The Modernists in the Basement & the Stars Above". It starts out about the anti-Semitism of not only Pound, but also W C Williams and Cummings. And ends with a bit of a rant calling for the tossing of our Modernist idols to the side, into the trash heap, and starting a new movement in poetry. Sadly the poets he names as potential examples of this are all pretty much forgotten today.
He has always been against writers being attached to universities, and it does appear that during his long career (he is still about, in his 70's) he has never held a faculty positon at an academic institution. And yet been able to make a living as a writer and critic!
Always a pleasure to read, and even these older pieces hold their own nearly 40 years later. Unfortunately some of his political insights hold as true today as they did back then.

[Robbie Maakestad · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of Weinberger's first collection of essays displays his classic style and experimentation. The second half consists of essays on various American poets. My favorite essay from this collection was "Kampuchea" about the unknowability and horror of the Pol Pot regime.

[Riley]

More impressive on the re-read, actually.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Dream of India changed my life.

[karl · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5