The Middle Room by Jennifer Moxley

The Middle Room by Jennifer Moxley (Subpress 2007)

A photo of The Middle Room by Jennifer Moxley. The title of the book is in reddish brown, and the author’s name and the name of the publisher, Subpress, are in black. The background is pale yellow. You can also see the hand holding the book, with the thumb pressed against the cover above the publisher’s name.

 Since the initial phase of my apprenticeship to poetry, I’ve found it very useful to read poets’ memoirs and journals[1]. In them is a wealth of information not often given (or not given explicitly) in their poetry on questions like how to live a poet’s life? It can be helpful to have information about how others have lived it, both for scope: what is the limit of what’s possible? and for succor: I’m not the only one to have been immature or to have suffered misfortune. If the poetry is a map of geological features in their facticity: here are the islands of an archipelago given in their respective sizes and distances from each other, these para-poetic writings function like translucent overlays, indicating—if I continue my map conceit—meteorological information, or the movements of flora and fauna.

Writers and their writings exist in relation to each other, and these relations can’t wholly be explained by aesthetics. Who went to school together, who dated, who are bosom companions, and who are sworn enemies is such important understand to truly get the ‘lay of the land’ and it is this very information that beginning or, in the current parlance, emerging (like cicadas from a long slumber) poets most lack. And it can be damned hard to get just by lingering after readings at the periphery of conversations in which your elders are blithely first-naming people. (It feels important to state that younger poets are engaged simultaneously in seeking out this information and producing with their actions, even if the former feels more urgent.)

In the early aughts, when I was making the rounds of Austin bookstores’ poetry sections, Gen Xers (born ~1965-1980) were the younger poets, making their bids for notoriety, distinction, and/or literary acclaim. Since I was born in 1984, Gen Xers were my young cool teachers and their ilk. So, it thrilled me when I came across (I think it was in Book People) Swoon by Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan (Granary Books 2001), a poetic archive of an epistolary love story, which Rodney Koeneke described thusly:

If Heloise and Abelard had email, and Japan was a sort of nunnery, and Abelard didn't get castrated, it'd probably end a lot like this book, the best fin to the 20th siècle a poetically-inclined transnational romantic could wish for.

I haven’t revisited it since, but it came to mind while I’ve been reading Jennifer Moxley’s The Middle Room, which I picked up from Myopic Books on a recent trip to Chicago. Moxley has been in the air for me because she wrote the introduction to Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Brian Kim Stefans. This find was serendipitous, because I recently returned to an autobiographical narrative whose 130ish pages have been collecting dust since last year, and I’ve been wishing for guidance; a model for how to write the story of my coming of age and my coming into poetry.

Moxley, born in 1964, fits the generational bill, and The Middle Room, being a memoir of her life from childhood through 1990 (the author’s 26th year), shows the development of the poet in all its messiness. Moxley generously pulls back the curtain on her younger self in the process of figuring out how to be a person in relation: to her family, her friends, her lovers, and herself. She and Steven Evans proceed erratically but (in retrospect) surely towards each other, and I admit that romantic and prurient interest were not insignificant factors in my rapid progress through this long (633 pages) but quite readable tome.

It is also very much an artist’s memoir. To single out, for instance, the course of Moxley’s love affairs as somehow the primary focus of the book would be to do it a disservice—and not only because other modes of relating, such as familial affection, friendship, and pedagogy share pride of place with love in her narrative. Moxley also gives us geographic influence (has any other writer so effectively swathed San Diego with the mystique of other, more notorious, capitols of literature like Paris and New York?), and cultural ones. Punk is here, and what I would call hipsters, with their fastidious subcultural attention to sartorial and behavioral practices. Moxley’s disquisition on the typewriter, at the end of that machine’s heyday, rivals Nietzsche’s at its beginning.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of The Middle Room is its style. Moxley writes in long sentences with decadently layered clauses. Here’s the first paragraph of Chapter X: The Escape:

A crisis can throw a template of significance over the most ordinary things. It can turn an inanimate object—an oval portrait of a distant relative hanging in a much-trafficked hallway, for example—into a menacing portent. The sepia-tone eyes suddenly follow you with their accusatory glance, professing: if only you had paused to study my visage—with its cumbersome square chin bearing undeniable witness to your genetic history—if only you had bothered to take the time to understand my grim and stalwart face, an important warning about the terrible and random workings of the Fates. But it seems I had never deigned to pause.

Photo of a green 64 Chevrolet Corvair Monza parked in front of a small shed and a building with aluminum siding. Description Date 25 May 2012, 12:18 Source 64 Chevrolet Corvair Monza Author Greg Gjerdingen from Willmar, USA

Is this the influence of a francophone discursive style? I want to call her clauses, and the sentences and paragraphs they build into, Proustian or Henry Jamesian. In certain matters, over the course of the narrative, Moxley admits to a nostalgic streak. Her Corvair’s radio only picks up AM stations, leading to an affection for big band jazz, and her fashion choices look to the past for inspiration. Is it nostalgia, then, that motivates her prose style?

I would be lying if I said there weren’t moments where I felt like there was something twee or affected about the prose in The Middle Room, but it is unlikely that a writer would be willing, even if she were able, to maintain a style at such length that is unnatural to her. And naturalness is itself changeable: what we affect can become natural to us through extended use. And as a former Texan who spent several years California, I feel on guard against the ambient sentiment that Southern Californians ought to write like Raymond Chandler, or Texans like Larry McMurtry. This is San Diego style, or one important species of it.

And it’s a style I’ve really settled into, swiftly and pleasurably moving through four hundred pages in four days. Moxley is a voice in my ear and her stylistic accomplishments, along with her diligent and honest memory work, make her a pleasurable companion. Moxley again:

Frustrating though memory work can be, reconstructing motives or timelines is nothing when compared to the indescribable sorrow that accompanies luminous moments of true clarity. There is no desire more painful than the desire to re-immerse yourself in the sensuous logic of a lost moment; no one sensation can adequately reproduce its complex ambience, and no amount of hard work or planning can help you arrive there.

I’m going to really miss the person I met in The Middle Room. In a paragraph on her affection for cheap mass market editions and marginalia, Moxley writes, “Falling in love with a book can be a very lonely pursuit, along which I have always found the invisible companionship of previous readers to be a great comfort.” I plan to extend my reading experience by shuffling some of Moxley’s poetry and translations into my ‘to read’ stack, but if you have read and loved this book, won’t you drop me a line?

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[1] Diane di Prima’s Recollections of my Life as a Woman, Joanne Kyger’s Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Joe LeSueur's Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, Richard Perceval’s lurid biographies of Robert Graves and Laura Riding, John Keats by Walter Jackson Bate