Disaster Suite

by Rob Halpern

A paradox sets these disquieting and beautiful Disaster Suites into motion. They produce a music— missing in the count now counts as one — reaching for the disappearance of the very conditions that make it war, so-called natural catastrophe, a public sphere where there is no / Public. As in the songs of William Blake and the sci-fi novels of Octavia Butler, these Suites sing against their own beauty and their seemingly perpetual present — which is why they seem so strangely archaic and futuristic at once. In complex patterns of meter and rhyme, Disaster’s lyric “I” summons its own kind of “counting” (prosody) against the physics of finance or exchange. Yet the music which results can only be heard — the drowned and the bombed — in between and against the other tracks that Halpern intricately lays the singing of capital, the burble of mass media, the daily noise of bodies who work, shit, fuck, and love. This stunning book has almost single-handedly made me love contemporary lyric poetry again.
—Sianne Ngai

It’s hip to be deaf to the larger sounds of our time because the hip want a party, not THIS WORLD as it is! Fuck THAT! I want THIS poetry where the atonal crisis wails and sputters. Negotiate with yourself, it’s your life, in our world, at the line, and the next line of Halpern’s amazing book. Gross profits and grotesque guilty pleas align with the knife here. The stress of our injuries, you can feel your body ache while reading, now leave us to it Halpern, you’ve done your job better than anyone else could! I’m grateful for these poems.
—CA Conrad, author of Deviant Propulsion

That disaster could be arranged—in the musical sense—for a human voice would be a thing too dreadful to celebrate were it not a realization of what it means to be an instrument of history. In Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites, the lyric I is a disturbed, disturbing presence in a world we recognize as inadequate but ours, its song a reminder of our dreadful yet beautiful potential.
—Benjamin Friedlander

Genres: Poetry

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Poet, translator, and essayist Rob Halpern earned his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of the poetry collections Rumored Place (2004), which was nominated for the California Book Award; Disaster Suites (2009); Music for Porn (2012); Common Place (2015); and [————]Placeholder (2015). He co-wrote the book-length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (2011) with Taylor Brady. In his work, Halpern explores the intersections of lyric tradition, with its prizing of voice and individual subjectivity, and social crises, including the conditions of late capitalism and militarization. Reviewing Music for Porn, Lukas Moe described how the book worked within Halpern’s larger project: “In their concern with crisis these books are timely and yet already late, compressing the language, time, and sensorium of the very recent past into a variable distortion of the present. They make a series, by definition unfinished, that is just recursive enough to go on without fulfilling its premise or predicate. Halpern’s poems bracket and cite themselves, often by means of the flat ventriloquism of italicized paraphrase. Sentences especially are spliced and interpolated in Halpern’s prose and prose poems, reflecting a tendency in his work to modulate between the less and more theoretical.”

Halpern’s scholarly work reflects his interests in modernist writing, capitalism, and form. His critical work has appeared in collections such as Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004) and No Gender: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (2009), as well as in many journals, anthologies, reviews, and zines. He currently teaches at Eastern Michigan University and splits his time between Ypsilanti, Michigan, and San Francisco, California.

Reviews

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE IT!
I've created a (Soma)tic Reading Enhancement for it, which you can see at the ATTENTION SPAN 2009 List here: http://thirdfactory.wordpress.com/200...

THIS IS AN AMAZING YEAR FOR POETRY!
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

------------------

There have been some amazing books of poetry this year, and this one (for me) is a favorite! We're at a bootblack junction, here, together, and these suites feel the pain so well.


Now let's recount ourselves in terms of crisis dynamics
Depict the ends of state where history and the seas
Choose me since I see you there my dreamy fuck

Yr love for theory negates distinct periods involving
My words come out all wrong grossing much mulch
A lot of mulch not being elemental whereas history is

So many neo-liberal adjustments saying yes we can
Help condition yr profitability in exchange for the child
For whose realm of appearance I'm of the purest meat

And gas back then but now we're harder than gunboats

---wiring each sentence fails to link us to real force.



(BECAUSE GOODREADS IS SO FUCKING LAME, THE SPACES FOR THAT LAST LINE COULD NOT BE ADDED, BUT IMAGINE THE DASHES STARTING AT THE "N" OF "THEN") (THERE ARE ITALICIZED WORDS AS WELL THAT COULD NOT BE PROPERLY DISPLAYED FOR YOU). Meat, you feel like meat after a book like this, meat in the best sense, meat as in SOMETHING that has been pounded with a real sense of the world. After a bit a new breath comes in, hard.

Seek out the review by Thom Donovan at this link: http://poetryproject.org/publications... issue number 217, look at the PDF, it's an excellent review.

CAConrad
http://advancedELVIS.blogspot.com

[David Wolach · Rating 5 out of 5]

If, as in Halpern's (and Brady's) Snow Sensitive Skin, to hear is, in deliberate and painstaking (and painful) ways, to listen to what one's ear hears and does not hear, Disaster Suites is the broken music box of worlds of distances that feel our suppositions of the most intimate proximity to catastrophes that are, in fact, unFELT miles away. The distance between "I" and its supposed referents; the distance between disaster felt and disaster thought, then said; the distance between a lyric of simplistic lament or needy wonderment and the radio-dialer's war-ruptured provisioning of what, limply, the singer has just heard (or witnessed) from afar. Disaster Suites ruptures and eviscerates, then acknowledges its comparative inertness as typography on a page in a book in your hands. It does so unrelentingly, and this is the ugly and beautiful ways air shapes time. Hence, this is a music unearthed, then dismantled.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

No 'force of nature' did this.
Unauthorized report


Wetlands and marches slow.
But my poems, like phynance
---- this accumulation of waste ----

I mean this, you and "the cranes
Like ships," they're relentless
---- targeting flows, pipelines ----

Thru which the silence, too,
Has slowed, tho it's still refining
---- me, I'm down to prewar levels.

*

Pit-sand and river-sand ---- use these
And keep the town from going down
When sea-sand keeps coming breathe

In your being I forget my own material
As our needs meet the dust reeks ----
Roots and sand joins drives w/interest

*

They say organ failure's the limit now
But I can't say where it hurts so I am not
Tortured one forgets too easily the things

We feel inside the numbered words I am
A colored dossier singing, "There once was little
Steamboat," but I can't see any smoke

 - means the ship must be on fire.

*

Then his voice just petered-out becoming
Strands of pale blue smoke he was gaunt
As an old crane and just as wild as what

I'd be anything to wind you back around
Reacquaint ourselves with lost sensation
Invent a world to save us from the world

Just feel this ---- damaged roadside fridge

*

Over and above the market, I'm off trade
Now, without exchange means nothing
Like 'the dawn' has no commercial plot

Not belonging to itself, my value affirms
What goes unfounded and this won't count
As one subtracted fro prevailing orders

Of inclusion, a unit has no real unity
I mean artificially difference just can't be
Spreading in a tree is not a rock, a bird

Read the full text here: eclipsearchive.org

[Jamie Townsend · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a revelation, a multiversal lyric that sings clearly through its own fracture/fracturing without device or gimmick. Not -away from- but unflinchingly -out of- the state of things, DS is book about the real, the continuous, and raw, so culturally abstracted and conceptualized; the politics of product held close to the site of disaster. Oppen's "materials" are given a new time and place here, as particles reaching forward into an as of yet unnamed future.

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with Moten's, the other "best book of 2009" for me so far. More to say about this with a bit of distance, later -- right now it seems to have suffused all my reading of poetry and left not much room for critical engagement. Read this book!

[Jennifer Scappettone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devoured on a subway ride, to be returned to & again--with an afterword that specifies the desired ephemerality of its impulses--& thereby makes it a lasting, loved study in the lyric's sporadic power.

[Nanne Nauta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lekkere tekst, interessant nawoord van de auteur, eea goed van context voorzien door de tekstbezorgers.

[Henry]

I was given this book to help with a paper in a 300 level English class. This work added nothing for me. I found the prose empty and disappointing.