Life & Style
Marie Buck
Patrick Lovelace Editions, 2009
Review by Diana Hamilton

If the gossip rag Life & Style Weekly differs from its sister magazine In Touch Weekly in its goal of helping readers incorporate the details of the celebrity gossip they read in their own lives, it makes sense that I can see myself in Marie Buck’s Life & Style (out from PatrickLovelaceEditions): the jacket, designed by Dirk Rowntree, is (literally) reflective, so your image appears within reach of the outstretched rubber arms that let you know you’re inside the scientist’s glovebox. The front cover implies that the reader is untouchable, if embraced, and it wraps around across a text-less spine to a back cover whose bottom third is the same reflective coating, with white text excerpting the book in a form of self-blurb. The left shoulder of a man in denim fills the right corner with a sunset in the background; could be from an advertisement.

The same text that ends the book on that cover restarts on the first page with the title “Girls Came to America,” a sentence-length story that gives the book its context: girls here are, as usual, the subject, and their examination takes place within a highly American reconfiguration of what has and is being said about them. And, what they say about themselves; the paragraph/poem continues: “He asked them if they were lesbians and they replied that they were like ravens. They believed virginity was when they hadn’t skied.” The girls are able to self-describe in unison; they are a group whose individuals don’t seem so discrete.

The second poem’s title, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” — in which Yeats’ last line “I hear it [water lapping] again in the heart’s core” becomes “I hear again the basis of travel, late to physics.” — hints further at the vehicle the girls took to get to America. As Buck writes later in the book, “pretext is where I [she] cut his purse”; the pre- of this text is multiple, in that the titles and structure of much of the work comes from famous poetry, while the text that translates or builds those structures appears to be largely taken from the internet. But it is, most importantly, stolen. The early appearance of this title also points out immediately that the sources here are not hidden; obfuscation is not one of this book’s tricks. A shorter chapbook version of Life & Style was put out by Beard of Bees in 2007, and began with a preface that made the book’s intent clear:

One of my aims in writing these poems was to situate a gendered, lyrical subjectivity within the language of MySpace, a site that intrigues me in that its form dictates so overtly as to nearly narrate the continual collapse of all forms of identity into identities of commodification & commodity consumption. The content of most of the poems is collaged from MySpace, and the forms come from a variety of authors: Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas Wyatt, William Butler Yeats, the Gawain poet, and Charles Baudelaire. I found text to collage by putting phrases from the source poems into the MySpace search function and snagging language from the profiles that popped up.

In accordance with this, the next poem is appropriated not from literary history but from a quiz widely circulated around MySpace itself, renamed as “I am ___ % Happy” (I scored 72%), which invites the reader to check off any statement that applies. Among the more interesting criteria for happiness are “Your room is big enough for you” and “You collect something normal.” Owning the book already fulfills the latter for me (if its still normal to collect books), while the former pairs with the more expected “You have your own room” to get at a feminist problem best phrased by Virginia Woolf, which gets the book ready to think about space and form, and about what kind of space or what kind of room the girls in question need. In an interview with Kareem Estefan on his radio show Ceptuetics (all of which are now archived at Pennsound) Buck talked about the appeal of MySpace’s sincerity. That’s often the appeal of Life & Style as well: the continual collapse of gendered subjectivity that she would write happens with a necessary level of respect for the sincerity of its sources. So much so that the criteria for happiness laid out by the MySpace poll reappear as evidence in later poems: “I feel sorry for girls who don’t have a good/ growing up. I had a room.” Having had a room is certainly a better position than becoming one, as Lindsay Lohan laments on the next page: “A sad life/As a room/Instead of a person.” The original poems on which these are built, along with the individualized profiles of the website from which text is being mined, become empty containers in which some sort of subjectivity can be formed. Not without interference, of course — some of the original poem can get left behind in the new text, and spam and advertisements find their way into people’s profiles — but “filling-in” is the process here, in an effort to build a profile of Girls in America. In a text that shares a name with a celebrity magazine, the possibility of the inverse, of becoming a vessel into which others can project themselves, has to be confronted.

The poem “Gravitate to Me” demonstrates Life & Style’s straddling of the possibility of building subjectivity through others or becoming the structure in which others’ subjects are built. The second line, “Cut short the confession. I observe Katie and Tom,” insists on the speaker’s position among other celebrity-watchers, but as the poem continues, it appears that the person observing here is a celebrity herself, Suri, Tomkat’s daughter — the title of the poem is now either an invitation or reproach to those that observe her. Throughout the book, we’re reminded that all this visibility can be something sinister: “You can take all my pictures down but you can’t make me disappear.”

The most frequent poet echoed in this text is Emily Dickinson, with many numbers titling poems in this book corresponding to the numbers assigned to the chronological assembly of Dickinson’s work. Across these poems, the transformations that occur include Dickinson’s conversation between May and July becoming a new conversation between Nip/Tick and emo kids (from “386”), and the last line of Dickinson’s 34 (The Rose ordained) is omitted in Buck’s version and replaced by an ASCII image of a rose that precedes the other lines. The restrained, clever, sometimes depressing lines of what often reads like one woman’s experience becomes a location for the explication of an experience different enough to be contemporary, but similar enough to look like translation.

1533

On that specific Pillow
Our projects flit away —
The Night’s tremendous Morrow
And whether sleep will stay
Or usher us — a stranger —
To situations new
The effort to comprise it
Is all the soul can do.

1533

Women rights people pillow Fight
I templated my 23rd Think Pad —
At night Cash’s tremendous Music
& whether the guy will text you
& tell you ‘I wish you were here’ —
a stranger — still working at the Big K
I have my license now — effort to comprise it
Listening for you is all my soul can do.

Dickinson is not the only poet subjected to this treatment, as Buck explained in the preface quoted above; other notable translations include the first line of Ernest Downson’s “VITAE SUMMA BREVIS SPEM NOS VETET INCOHARE LONGAM” — “Our path emerges for a while, then closes” — becoming “Our mutual sharing of Kegels instructor left me recovering.” In borrowing the text from MySpace, Buck creates translations/mutations that at first seem altogether contemporary, but which are also bogged down by history — not only of the canonical texts she subverts, but occasionally by the fact that MySpace itself is already somewhat out of fashion. It is still a popular site, but it’s not the ubiquitous nexus for online social encounters that it once was, and its replacement, Facebook, wouldn’t create the same text as Life & Style: MySpace has always been messier, more easily infiltrated by spam, more poorly designed, more trolled by people looking for sex, etc. The fashion of websites like MySpace is marked by moments of intense “mutual sharing,” following by periods of recovery — an emergent path subsequently closing — as described above. The book ends with Dickinson’s “But History and I” becoming “History gets tag-teamed,” in a text where “we are English Freaks, pissed off by Stupidity,” where what’s “Around us, every Day—” is not necessarily witchcraft, the subject of Dickinson’s 1583, but systems (whether MySpace, Facebook, language, magazines, or women themselves) that work hard at describing and positioning women. The history of that process is taken on here by Buck’s restructuring of some of the more contemporary examples into these poems, which stake out a place for girls to occupy:

And it’s girls girls girls who shave their pussies. And it’s girls girls girls who are cute and busty. And it’s girls girls girls who get drunk and strip . . . And it’s girls girls girls who are next door . . .  And it’s girls girls girls who answer in tears of my lost heritage. And it’s girls girls girls who live and prosper.

Life & Style offers very strange, even uncomfortable language as poetry, but reassures you that poetry is happening with titles like “Vowels” or “The Beheading Game.” It begins with girls’ uncertainty (“They believed they were vegetarians who were never going to see unicorns”) and ends up with girls who “plan to handfast as soon” as they can. It that sense, it is a growing-up text, but the place (decidely American) where all the girls in this book grow up (whether we’re talking about the “girls girls girls” above or Linsday Lohan, Paris Hilton, or Emily Dickinson) is not always conducive to that process. Marie Buck helps the girls who become subjects here navigate the terrain, reorganizing text in a way that does not render women’s experience any clearer, but does provide a way out of the typical modes of observation or description in which people attempting to talk about girls girls girls get caught.

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