SoundMachine - Softcover

Zucker, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940696860 ISBN 13: 9781940696867

Publisher: Wave Books, 2019

Synopsis

Through heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, Rachel Zucker trains her relentless attention on marriage, motherhood, grief, the need to speak, depression, sex, and many other topics. Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay—and not limited by any of these categories—SoundMachine is a book written out of the persistent feeling that the human voice is both a meaningless sound and the only way we know we exist.

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Zucker is the author of many books, including SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019), The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014), and Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the co-author (with Arielle Greenberg) of the nonfiction title Home/birth: a poemic and co-editor (also with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Zucker currently teaches poetry at NYU. In 2016 she was a Bagley Wright Lecturer and wrote and delivered a series of talks on poetry, photography, confessionalism, motherhood, and the ethics of representing real people in art. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship in 2016, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center in 2018. Zucker lives in NYC with her husband and three sons.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

SEVEN BEDS SIX CITIES EIGHT WEEKS
Yesterday I began writing a poem in The Book of Nothing called “Facebook or the
End of Espionage.” The first line, “They already know all about you,” is all I
wrote. Then, nothing.

By “yesterday” I might mean last year. This is a characteristic problem with
reportage.

Many true things are difficult to write or offensive to others but The Book of
Nothing is not intended for a general audience so I can write anything but I
suspect the idea of a “general audience” might be offensive & fallacious.

For example, I got into trouble with a collaborative, collaged, lyric essay that I
wrote with AG. We hurt B’s feelings so we apologized & took out all references
to B. (B’s not even her real initial.) Even so, B said she was shocked & saddened
that we’d used her story as “creative fodder.”

I take The Book of Nothing with me when I leave the city. It isn’t heavy, is hardly
anything. Even so, everything is changed by its presence.

Once I told someone, Poetry is my way of making sense of my surroundings, of
paying attention.

I might have said that more than once or never. I can’t remember. And to
whom?

Fodder:
1) something fed to domestic animals; especially: coarse food for cattle, horses,
or sheep
2) inferior or readily available material used to supply a heavy demand

Whereas writing prose, I said, requires that I shut out the world. I could be
anywhere.

Supposedly, Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections blindfolded in his basement.
Or was that David Foster Wallace writing Girl with Curious Hair?

Jim Galvin said, Writing prose is just typing. He said it right after I’d told him
how much I liked his book The Meadow.

The Book of Nothing briefly adopts a pastoral soundtrack but cannot maintain it.

The Book of Nothing is not a poem. It is also not not a poem. It is nothing, after
all.

My friend Ilana has fluid in the tissue around her lungs & heart that cannot be
drained. Also a tumor in her brain & several metastases. But she is living. Not
nothing. Not for nothing. Nothing to sneeze at. Nothing is as nothing does.

I knew something was wrong but didn’t want to ask anyone for fear of seeming
like the stupid city girl. The cow’s belly was twitching & convulsing & her eyes
were closed, her neck at an odd angle. The other three cows in the pen
gathered around her as I approached & then scattered to the far edges when I
came closer. Finally I worked up the courage to ask the young woman sweeping
out another pen & she told me the cow had been treated earlier in the day &
just as she said that the cow keeled over & fell, with a thud, on her side.

Thud, I thought, “Thud” is the name of that sound.

The cow had been treated for pneumonia & was lying on her side in the mucky
pen. One thousand pounds down, I thought. Her breath was white vapor around
her snout. Labored breathing, someone said. The cow grew quiet, then
shuddered & relaxed.

Might not make it, said the camp director who’d been called over by a counselor.

That cow’s dead, I thought.

Might not make it till evening, he said.
The poet John Ashbery is nowhere in sight but as far as I know, living.

My friend has decided to decide by the end of June whether to get married or
break up. What if the fact that I have so many doubts means getting married is
the wrong choice? he asks. I try to explain the idea of a characteristic dilemma. I
say, How could you not have doubts?

I’ve been married for eleven years & thirteen days.

I am asked to write a blurb for a book by a poet I know slightly. I like the lines,
“this room / will always be the ghost of right now for as long as we carry it.” I
like the whole book, which has a spooky, sensual immediacy. But I hate writing
blurbs.

CNN online reports that a seven-year-old boy went swimming with his family at
a local pond. On the way home the boy seemed unusually tired & asked to lie
down. A few hours later the boy died, in his bed, from drowning. The story says
unusual fatigue or changes in behavior can be signs of water in the lungs.

I decide this story has no place in The Book of Nothing but it’s too late now.

I decide to write a series of prose poems about everything I can remember from

my childhood. Each poem will be a distilled snapshot of my past which disappears
as I watch. I cannot think of a single memory.

I write: Does one’s memory degrade more quickly and more completely if one
has children?

The director climbed into the pen & patted the cow’s belly & then kicked the
cow. Not gently, not hard, in the side. He covered the animal with a blue tarp
just as the Peapods & Seedlings entered the barn to pick up their backpacks.

Yesterday I saw a cow die, I say to my friend Erin on the phone.
I’m sure that will end up in a poem, Erin says.

I decide that this exchange is how I will begin the essay about teaching poetry
workshops that I’ve been asked to write, if I decide to write that essay. I might
decline the assignment in which case I should stop wasting time thinking about
how to support my argument that description is fundamental to good writing.

There are at least ten frogs in a small pond near the house we’re renting in
Brunswick, Maine. When I venture near the pond the frogs stop moving & stop
making sounds so it is difficult to count them. For seventeen days I’ve been trying
to describe the sound they make. It is nothing like “ribbit” or “croak” or any of
the other onomatopoeias we use for frog noises.

Finally, it comes to me: they sound like a wide rubber band snapping once—a
quick, low, single twang—a boing, reverb without consonants.

The Book of Nothing is like a postcard sent to no one, with a frog’s real sound.

The Book of Nothing sounds Buddhist but is not. At least it is not intended to be
Buddhist as such although Buddhism or some watered-down version of Buddhist
principles has seeped into art’s groundwater, so maybe it’s unavoidable.

They say memory is the spring that feeds good literature. Being memory
impaired I can’t say who “they” is or if, indeed, anyone actually said this. Let’s
hope it’s not true.

I give my son a notebook for his ninth birthday.
What do you think… what kinds of things should I…? he asks.
Nothing, I say, Unless you want to.
What’s in it? says my other son, pointing at the notebook.
Nothing, the birthday boy says, looking down.

I think about the difference between lemonade & citron pressé. I think about the
fact that I like scrambled eggs but not omelets, prefer peaches to nectarines but
only if they’re cut into slices. I think about the phrase “constituent elements.”

Paris exists but I do not go there.

“Yesterday I saw a cow die,” I write, beginning a microessay on teaching poetry.
In truth, I began the essay fourteen days after watching the cow die; since then,
no further progress. Further progress on the essay, I mean. I’m not talking about
the cow’s progress.

Yesterday I was informed that the conference panel proposal that includes me as
a participant has been accepted. The panel is about representing the self in
writing. Here’s what I have to say about that:
[ ]

Memory is a funny word. It applies both to the power of remembering & to what
is remembered. The word comes from the Latin memoria (a historical account),
from memor (mindful) & from the Old English mimor (well-known) & from the
Greek merm ra (care).

For this reason I often avoid greeting someone I know but whose name I might
not recall.

In Denver the air is thin & fragile. Even in the shade of trees I feel exposed to the
sun’s relentlessness. I am living, for eleven days, in my mother-in-law’s home.

Was there something you were planning to do today? my mother-in-law asks
after explaining she cannot watch the baby.

The Book of Nothing will not address the purpose of life.

The Book of Nothing would address the question “what is work,” if there were
time for such investigations.

I have nothing nice to say about Denver.

The poet likes the blurb I wrote. The microessay is still one sentence, but I
changed “yesterday” to “today” for a greater sense of immediacy.

What is work?

As instructed, I have registered my treatment for a reality-TV game show with
the Screen Writers Guild. It has been six weeks since the prospective agent
promised to call me the next day. I am also waiting for a response from a
parenting magazine about an essay I wrote about teaching poetry to young
children. Tomorrow we leave for Wisconsin.

On Ilana’s caringbridge.org site she describes her treatment & symptoms & state
of mind. In The Book of Nothing I write: “REALITY SHOW.”

Specifically I am trying to decide whether or not to return to the novel I began
writing four years ago & dropped after sixty pages & two years or whether to
work on my nonfiction memoir that three agents praised & rejected. Or to start
something new. Or not to write at all. Hence or instead, The Book of Nothing.

Wayne says this is a characteristic problem.

Arielle says I’m a whiner. She likes to hear my new poems over the phone but
finds my angst over what to do next exhausting.

I have no new poems, which exhausts me.

What is work?

Poetry is a way of connecting to the world, of noticing, of placing myself, I said to
someone while teaching or in an interview or else I read it somewhere in which
case: plagiarism.

My memory. This memory.

Perhaps eventually I will forget my own characteristic dilemmas at which point
memory loss will be the only characteristic dilemma left.

I read somewhere that fetal cells remain in the mother for twenty-seven years
after birth. Or seventeen. I can’t remember what conclusion or analogy I was
about to draw from this fact.

It’s true that my body has a quality of excess, unnecessariness, but is, at the same
time, useful, productive.

Feeling is part of the form, of proper form. Is that an argument? Or a desire?

You can’t eat a diseased animal so in this sense the cow is wasted. If the purpose

of the animal is to provide sustenance for other animals, which is not its
purpose.

Fodder.

I have nothing to say about “the speaker.” Instead I go swimming in the pool on
my husband’s grandmother’s property in Lakewood, Colorado, in my ill-fitting
swimsuit. Unshaven, untoned, slightly panicky in the goggled blue, the muffled
solitude of submergence. City girl with poor form & pale skin—spectacle for
none to witness.

What I like is the long, underwater glide as I push off from the wall.

What I like are the amoeba-shaped blue tiles along the bottom & sides of the
rectangular pool. The chipped tiles, the places where a tile is missing.

In the car my son reads to himself. Every once in a while, he spells out a word he
doesn’t recognize. I like how the possibilities of the first few letters narrow with
each subsequent letter until the word takes shape, definitively, & becomes
meaningful.

I go to a yoga class but the chanting & call-and-response prayer agitate me. After
chanting we sit in silence, breathing & then the teacher reads a long passage from
a book about the difference between experience & experiencing. Experience is
between life & experiencing. Experience is time-bound, on a continuum. The
mind is a product of experience. Thought is a product of the mind. The idea is to
rid oneself of thought, of memory, of mind, of all time-bound experience so as to
approach experiencing the here & now. It is hard to follow all this because I am
thinking of The Book of Nothing & how I will describe all this nonsense in The Book
of Nothing, which is a way of thinking about the future (now present) & therefore
a failed moment of experiencing.

Brunswick, Denver, Sturgeon Bay, Greenport.

Last night I dreamed my husband was carrying a blond child about three years
old. The child was crying. I took the child in my arms but could not comfort her.
Around five a.m. I heard someone say Mother, clearly & out loud. The sound
woke me. I looked at the clock & at my sleeping husband thinking I’d never heard
him talk in his sleep & how funny it was that he’d said Mother. Just as I was
dozing off, I heard the word “Mother” again. It was not my husband’s voice. I
heard whispering. I sat up in bed & put my ear to the wall that separated our
bedroom from the room our boys were sleeping in—all quiet. Neither of them
has ever called me “mother.”

I keep a dream notebook & often write down my dreams. By often I mean rarely.
By rarely I mean lately.

Only now, writing this down, do I make a connection between the child in the
dream & my friend Ilana, who is dying.

My mother forgets things. Small things like where she put her glasses or camera
& bigger things like my husband’s last name. But she denies this. I did not say
Gordon—you misheard me, she says. Or, You never told me that! When clearly
I did. On the other hand, she memorizes long stories that she tells to rapt
audiences.

I meant: forgot, denied, said, memorized. I meant, May her blessing be a memory.
I meant, May her memory be a blessing.

How memory is equated with caring. “Thanks for asking.”

I take the baby to our apartment to pick up our mail. The baby seems to have no
recollection of our apartment & makes no effort to see his room while I sit by
the front door sorting junk mail. Some people call this The Wonder Years.

What the baby remembers is me. And his father. And his brothers. This is an
important survival skill but annoying when I want to leave him in the care of
others.

When I write “the baby” it is like writing “yesterday” or, one day, “years ago.”

I still think of the pool in Lakewood as Emmett’s pool. He kept it hot & after his
heart-valve replacement surgery, walked back & forth along the short side of the
shallow end for hydrotherapy. I think about sitting with his coffin in the
basement of the funeral home & how I spent my allotted hour agonizing over
whether to open the coffin to see his body one last time.

Whether I opened the casket or not is recorded in The Book of Nothing. For
prosperity. I think I mean posterity.

In an email Ilana tells me that her childhood dog has come to be with her & has
been by her side all morning. This is not a dream. Neither the dog nor the email.

Good to remember: one can die from poisoned berries. See the movie Into the
Wild based on the book by Jon Krakauer based on the story of Christopher
McCandless whose name I had to look up when I typed this three months later.
The original text of The Book of Nothing says, “based on the life of _______.”

More & more I am drawn to the literal. Is this a fad? A developmental stage? A
characteristic dilemma?

On my favorite radio show there is a piece about a woman in her thirties who
asked, at a party: Are unicorns still endangered or have they finally become
extinct? The silence that followed was what clued her in.

Or perhaps I mean the surreal. It’s hard to tell.

By radio show I mean podcast.

Seven beds in six cities in eight weeks including the Newark airport hotel when
we missed our connecting flight.

Now here.

A lack of childcare changes The Book of Nothing. Lessens it. Increases its appeal.
The baby puts things in his mouth & cannot be trusted.

By “baby” I mean “when.” When there was/he was a baby.

It is five a.m. It is still 5 A.M.

Last night on the way home—[the baby swallows stories, words, all my language
with his promiscuous mouth]

—what was I saying?

This morning Ilana died.

Ilana died, this morning.

I write: “Ilana died.” I cross it out. I write it again.

Perhaps The Book of Nothing is a notebook not a book. One small note changing
everything.

On the ferry home my son says, I hate you. He’d battled his brother over the
crinkly paper around his cookie & lost. When he pulled away from me, I yanked
him close. Not safe, I said.

Evening. Half moon, hidden stars. The ocean again.

What will I wear to the funeral? I ask The Book of Nothing. Nothing, it says. Or, it
says nothing.

During the service, The Book of Nothing sits quietly in the passenger seat of the
rented Kia. Later, during the shiva, lies in the trunk with the clothes & diapers.

Three houses down from the one we’re renting two houses catch fire. We
watch. There is no one, thank god, inside. A neighbor hoses down everything
between her house & the ones on fire. We watch as the first house burns. We
watch as the house next to it goes up in flames. We watch as the volunteer
squads arrive from Greenport, Southold, Cutchogue, Orient, Riverhead. We
watch as a special ladder truck arrives & lowers a firefighter onto the roof. We
watch as the firefighter sits astride the gable & tries to cut through the roof with
a handheld chainsaw. The buildings burn.

The Book of Nothing is

The very bad smell as the vinyl siding collapses away from the wooden bones.

nothing if not ______.

When it is all over a firefighter puts a helmet on the baby, who is wearing only a
diaper, not even shoes, & who is not afraid of the fire or of anything because he
knows so little, almost nothing, & we take a photo.

The stars last night, after a clear day.

A week ago Ilana died.

Now I mean a month.

Later I will mean years. I cannot make sense of this.

The baby has words: “wawa” (water), “haa” (hat), “zeze” (zebra), “heh” (head),
“baw” (ball), “moe” (more), “nuh” (nurse), “tees” (trees), as well as names:
Mawma, Dada, Bruba, Bapah & many animal sounds.

“Baby” once meant today or yesterday. Now means years ago.

On one side of us is a house, then two burned houses. On the other side, just
across the street, a graveyard. The house is musty & filled with knickknacks &
junktoys, screens off their tracks, doors swelled past closing. Here, I sleep well.
The nights are cool. The stars.

Called out of yoga, I’m at the hospital waiting for A to have her cesarean. It’s too
quiet. Will I be able to hear the baby cry through the closed door of the OR? I
am A’s doula. I am supporting her by standing outside the closed door. This is
what I am permitted.

Ilana is still dead.

The city.

October is almost over & I have not written a novel or part of a novel or a
series of poems about memory. I have not written a microessay about teaching. I
have not written a microessay about the line but have promised to do so. I
wrote one new poem about waking up early with the baby but it’s a silly little
song-poem & its sweetness bothers me. I have not written an essay about Alice
Notley or the email to the agent outlining the “what happened” version of my
nonfiction book, which according to her is weak on plot. I spent a few weeks
making a nine-minute movie about the baby’s home birth & posted it to youtube.
It’s gotten 49,580 hits in the past four weeks, which makes it my most successful
publication.

New York is gray & bleak.

This morning I woke up & thought, Ilana, are you still dead?

I write: “Today David Foster Wallace hung himself.” That’s what day this was.
Later I will change this to “hanged” but doing so won’t change anything for David
Foster Wallace.

Once I attended a tribute reading for Elizabeth Bishop. Jorie Graham helped John
Ashbery onto the stage & John Ashbery cried when he read Bishop’s poem. Did I
dream that? No. But I can’t remember when or where it was & which poem of
Bishop’s Ashbery read. It was at least ten years ago. Ashbery seemed old then. I
remember thinking, as I looked at him, He’s next. But he wasn’t.

I gave my books of poetry to Ilana as gifts but doubt she read them. This has to
do with the problem of a general audience.

The summer disappears into photographs. Houses & hours on airplanes.

The City blocks out almost everything I am.

Meanwhile: Obama, the economy, famous & less famous suicides, the Library of
America publishes Ashbery’s collected poems on the day the baby I miscarried
would have been two years old & my living baby turns sixteen months & two
days. So what?

Like a fish I grow to fit my environment in this case apartment in which I sit at
my computer & listen to the MP3 of Cat Stevens singing “if you want to be me,
be me” from Ilana’s favorite song while I do not write anything for my panel
about the relationship between self & poet & do not work on my novel or
poems about memory or from memory. I do not write about Ilana who was my
doula teacher or John Ashbery who is a poet, one of whom is dead & one of
whom is alive, or about David Foster Wallace who is dead or about Alice Notley
who is alive & who was not my teacher but who said, There has to be a way to
talk about oneself without narcissism & said, That’s only one story: what you
remember.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1940696860
• ISBN 13: 9781940696867
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272