The Cosmopolitan

by Noah Eli Gordon

The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher
Coffee House Press 2008
isbn: 978-56689-221-6 $16.00 us

One hundred and fifty years ago, the Baudelairean flâneur’s sidewalk botany birthed the prose poem’s first foray into capturing urban life. But things have changed. Just as the city, with economy, industry, culture, and all of its various erstwhile insularity propelled into a matrix of exchange, is no longer tethered to geography, so the prose poem of observation and allegory is no longer its form par excellence. Donna Stonecipher’s new collection, selected by John Yau as a recent winner of the National Poetry Series, comes as something of a corrective. She replaces the sauntering flâneur, content to peer in from the wings, with the cosmopolitan, one who takes to the stage, orchestrating interaction and reportage: “‘Ideally, I’d like to look like a Spaniard, fuck like a Serb, and make money hand over fist like an American,’ said the cosmopolitan sitting in Hong Kong drinking a caipirinha.”

Among the international cast of pronouns and personages populating these prose poems, one finds a theoretical architect, a Russian exile harboring “an indeterminate accent when speaking English, and an English accent when speaking indeterminately,” Austrian Anglophiles, hungover tourists, and any number of locals and foreigners, all of whom exchange nomenclature as quickly as the poems shift from city to city. Stonecipher, who has lived in Tehran, Paris, New York, and Prague, and now divides her time between Berlin and Athens, Georgia, brilliantly investigates the implicates of name and place: “The American man who was living in Tanzania was an expatriate, but the Tanzanian man who was living in North America was an immigrant.”

While everything here is rife with a metropolitan largess, from memorials to shopping malls and museums, airports to alleyways, there is always the presence of the simulacra we use to take the unfathomable down a few notches: viewfinders, snow globes, and architectural miniatures. This mastery of scale allows the poems to stand in complete reverence before famous works of art and still ask what empire and imperialism might have to do with our understanding of beauty.

Each of the book’s near two dozen poems carries the title “Inlay,” followed by the parenthetical inclusion of the author’s name, who, at some point within the poem’s sequence, lends a free-floating quotation. Stonecipher notes this as her attempt to manufacture a kind of inlaid furniture which might account for what she calls her “generation’s relationship to quotation and collage.” Although Thomas Mann, Zaha Hadid, Kafka, Sontag, Emerson, Benjamin, Elaine Scarry, and a dozen others haunt the periphery of these poems, their presence is a mere inexplicably opened door or the distant rattling of a few phantasmagorical chains. Far more enchanting is Stonecipher’s method of playing snippets of narrative against pulpy aphorisms, stirring the cityscapes and citizens of each poem into a constant, surprising flux.

© Noah Eli Gordon. All rights reserved.