Ravisher or Abductor Beneath the Stars:

on Paul Cunningham’s Fall Garment • Schism Press, 2022 • review by Christopher Higgs

I am sitting in a room, as Alvin Lucier said, different from the one you are in now. I am observing Fall Garment as a PDF on a computer monitor in my home office in the San Fernando Valley while listening to Delphine Dora & Jackie McDowell’s experimental ambient avant-folk album The Dream of Change (2021). I’ve just eaten a piece of sourdough toast with almond butter and chugged a hot cup of earl grey tea, sweetened with raw agave. The overhead light is off; a dull lamp illuminates a small spot on my desk but little more. The time is 8:29 PM. My son is taking his nighttime tub and my wife is somewhere doing something and our cat is asleep under our son’s bed. I have a bit of a headache, but I’ve taken a painkiller so I should feel the pain decrease soon.

As a critic, I believe it’s important to establish my embodiment—to affirm that I am a living person writing this text rather than a disembodied voice pontificating outside of time and space. At forty-four years old, I now read texts differently than I did at twenty-four. Education and experience have impacted that change, but so has my body. I’m still a straight white guy who sometimes paints his fingernails and enjoys drag shows, but what it means to inhabit that identity has changed over time, too. A recent visit to the cardiologist revealed an irregularity in my heartbeat to go along with the gastrointestinal issues I’ve battled for years. I need to lose weight. My therapist reminds me weekly to keep up my journal of cognitive distortions and potential solutions. I bring all of this to bear on my engagement with Cunningham’s text, and I believe these facts about my situation contribute to my response in substantial ways. Aside from the macro-identity issues, the minor details, the details of this particular moment, also significantly impact my experience. Had I not eaten the toast, for example, I might find myself hungry, which would change my reaction to the material. If I had not drunk the tea, I might be thirsty or slow-witted less the caffeine. And undoubtedly the music I’m listening to creates a particular ambiance. If I was listening instead to Slayer’s Reign in Blood or Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR then my reaction to the material would be different. If I were engaging with this text in its physical form, I would certainly respond differently. If it were morning rather than evening, if I were hot rather than cold, if I were high rather than sober. All bodily circumstances contribute to my experience and therefore contribute to my response.

Under the conditions I’ve described, the first thing that comes to mind as I begin my engagement with Fall Garment is an entrancing echo of Gertrude Stein’s “A Long Dress” from her magical book Tender Buttons. Although Cunningham makes no direct reference to it, my mind instantly conjures the line, “What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist.” As always, Stein poses questions without the requisite question marks. This seemingly small thing: the absence of “proper” punctuation, always reminds me of her everlasting punk-ness. Cunningham, too, feels like a punk poet. Not because he alters punctuation but because he’s someone who forges his own path despite the existence of a clean and accessible sidewalk. The ethos of grime, of gnarliness, of heterodoxy, of knowing what’s expected and not caring, of writing for the self and not an audience. The ethos of Emerson’s nonconformist. This, for me, marks a valuable contribution to literature: irreducible singularity, the confluence of creative influence and unique arrangement that recognizes the past but refuses the anxiety of influence in order to forge a fresh version of the present through individual experience with an eye toward subjective defamiliarization. It’s the complete opposite of what that asshole T.S. Eliot wrote, “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Bah Humbug! To me, personality matters most. Personality names the focal point of irreducibility. In other words, as Stein would say, personality makes the difference.

And so I think it’s important that personality frames Fall Garment. Not for nothing, it begins with an “I.” The phrase “i grew up” repeats itself in the two opening stanzas. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking and teaching and reading and writing about narrative, I see narrative everywhere. When a speaker speaks their “I,” for better or worse, I begin to form in my mind a character existing in a space, a character with wants and needs, a character with problems and troubles, a character I can imagine existing in a world created by the author. Not this world, mind you. I hold neither Platonic nor Aristotelian delusions regarding mimesis; I simply mean an imaginary world and an imaginary character. Poetry, however, routinely stumps me in these regards, because unlike in fiction the speaker in poetry often feels, to me, akin to the author, as if the text finds close kinship with nonfiction. And yet, I know this assumption most likely equates to a fallacy. The speaker in Fall Garment could or could not be “Paul Cunningham.” And even if the speaker “were” the author, what difference would it make? Why even think about that issue in the first place? To make matters more complicated, one moment an “I” speaks and then in the next moment some omniscient voice speaks, so the identity of the speaker continually dissolves into a cacophony of different tones and volumes and speeds. (Here I am reminded of films by Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Finch: a kind of chaotic destabilization of the unified subject.) Each of us, and here I believe Deleuze and Guattari, are multiple. So even if the speaker “were” the author, what version of Paul Cunningham would the narrative voice instantiate? Most likely an imaginary version, not a documentary version. Not an indexical version. (Can such a version even be said to exist?) And is the version of the speaker in poem number one the same as the version of the speaker in poem two? What about amongst the three sections—Cunningham calls them “books”— “Factory Appetite,” “Sic Ark,” and “Fall Garment”? Maybe the speaker switches every book. Maybe every page. Maybe every line. Or maybe the speaker constitutes a unity—perhaps the one who utters the language serves as the position of unity for the entire collection, as disparate or multi-vocal as that voice may seem.

Maybe the reason I got so hung up on this point is because I sensed from the very opening lines a desire for the character’s visibility. A desire in the text to manifest a life into the living world, to speak existence into being, to identify a subjectivity experiencing the world, created from the imaginative state of the author’s magical conjuring. At any rate, Fall Garment attends to language carefully while it centers an “I,” centers a character, centers a physical body in physical space, even if that body and that space is imaginary.

But wait.

On page 22, Cunningham writes:

broken-nosed, I once walked at night,

leaving behind a blood-trail, my shirt

somewhere down Harmony Road

41°03'10.6"N 80°02'09.9"W

So I Googled those coordinates. Turns out, they represent a spot in Northwestern Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of a town called Slippery Rock. When I switched the map to “layers” I found that the area is massively green, surrounded on all sides with forests and golf courses and camping grounds. It seems rural. Closer to Youngstown, Ohio, to its west, than to Pittsburgh to its south. So by providing those exact coordinates, Cunningham allows me to locate the speaker in space—not that exact space, not the space as it exists in the present version of reality we all share and presume as our own, but in a past version, an alternate past version, an imaginary version. And I notice that in this moment, Cunningham uses past tense. But the text doesn’t stick to that tense consistently. In fact, it seems to convulse between past and present creating torque that extends throughout and serves as a way to move the reader through the reading experience in fits and starts, as if the speaker has grabbed the reader and is shaking them through the text. The speaker, whoever they are, sometimes speaks in the present about the present and also in the present about the past, but at times also seems to speak from the past about the past, and in certain moments from the past about the present or perhaps a future not yet created. This time-shifting makes the world Cunningham creates unstable. As the reader, I’m sitting here at my computer, my eyes sore from gazing at the screen, my stomach grumbling from the caffeine this late in the evening, my headache growling, and I feel as though I am unable to find firm footing in Cunningham’s world. (Is this really any different from the “real” world I inhabit?) For some readers this destabilization may sound objectionable, but I find the slipperiness absolutely absorbing.

Indeed, Fall Garment delivers for me the type of experience I prize above all others. To explain, I should probably confess that as a reader, I want most to indulge in mysteries, to feel perplexed, confused, overwhelmed, bewildered. As a reader, I have no desire to understand anything, to relate to anything, nor to “get” what an author is “trying to say.” Instead, I want to experience estrangement. I want to encounter something unusual, unfamiliar, shocking or befuddling, something I had not thought of or considered before. I want to participate in the construction of a life, my life, as it encounters the object of the text and assimilates that experience into my own. Often I think about my body as a text and my writing as an extension of my body. Likewise, I consider every text I encounter an extension of a writer’s body. So when I “read” a text, I am really bringing my body into contact with another body. In this case, I am bringing my physical body into contact with the digital extension of Cunningham’s body. And the reason I feel compelled to compose these thoughts on the text is because of the way that body has affected me. In short, I want to spend time with texts that make my life more expansive—expand my own embodiment—and this text succeeds at that task.

In each of the three “books” in Fall Garment, Cunningham foregrounds a different set of concerns. In the first, “Factory Appetite,” the speaker’s physical presence in the world seems most significant, especially contrasted against the harshness of their particular lived experience.

it’s amazing how a field can bend

an already drifting body…

the best doctors say stuff doctors say

and the list goes on and on

uneven ataxia

gynecomastia

a bruised boy runs away from home…

‘39% of rapes are committed

by an acquaintance’

I used to roll

my eyes

now, when I see

bluebells, I see

red…

The connection between the speaker and the concept of constructing clothing stands out as a particularly potent analog.

As Cunningham puts it, “the needle’s / annihilation of // the very fabric / of being” directs our attention to a play on both the act of making clothes and the punishment of a physical body used or conceived of as an object. The speaker’s identity, like a garment, arises from the assemblage of multiple individual experiences, many of which seem to turn toward darkness. Here, blood and pain and couture all get chewed up and swallowed by experience so that the creation of a garment and the creation of a person seem eerily similar. I begin to think about the clothes I’m wearing and what they say about me, about their construction and about how they work to construct me. It’s nighttime and I’m in my pajamas. Since the pandemic, I spend a lot of time in pajamas. The softness and comfort of these garments work to soothe my generalized anxiety. I’m not sure Cunningham’s speaker ever feels the sensation of softness or comfort. As that thought hits me, a good deal of sadness bears down.

In the second book, “Sic Ark,” Cunningham flips the focus outward, toward American culture in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic, and the sickness of Reaganomics. Here, I felt a strange sensation of nostalgia about my childhood, growing up in the 80s. Reading Cunningham’s version of that era, I am reminded of so much fear and anger and sadness expressed by the adults, but as a child I knew so little about world events. I was happily playing Atari and riding my bike without a helmet and getting into fistfights with other kids over baseball cards. Now, in retrospect, the horrors of America in the 80s seems mind boggling. But this disconnect between my lived experience as a child and my views now, thirty plus years later, demonstrate another interesting concept arising from Fall Garment: the reader’s position vis-à-vis that historical moment.  I’m sure it may hit differently for younger readers who never experienced the 80s firsthand. To those readers it may seem like ancient history from a textbook not unlike the fall of the Roman empire. Alternately, I’m sure it hits differently for those who are older than me, who experienced the 80s as adults and therefore had to grapple with those events from an adult perspective.

Another interesting aspect of the second book is the way it seems to carry the ghost of the first book, but it also seems to exist in a different world, as if “Factory Appetite” is one scrap of fabric and “Sic Ark” is another, both belonging to the same speaker/garment At the opening of “Sic Ark,” the “I” of the first book returns momentarily:

as if everyone wanted

the size of business

of money

to lie “I” to industry

the rose is no longer true

molecular “I” with

commercial affiliations

Then the “I” more or less evaporates, and the world itself moves into the foreground; history steps in, concepts of morality step in, sickness and fear and anxiety step in, the horror of American culture steps in. 

In the final section, the titular “Fall Garment,” (the longest of the three main sections and itself broken into four parts) begins, “I have a beach in mind.” Instantly I feel the return of the personality from the first section, that “I” who shared their childhood in the open section. If the personal takes center stage in the first section and the historical takes center stage in the second, this final section sews those two aspects together brilliantly to create a combined textual garment.

In the first section, the speaker encounters a world filled with pop culture (Blade Runner, The Carpenters, Sprite®, Lana Del Ray), and then in the second section, the speaker encounters religion and mythology (Satan, Adam & Eve, Ovid), which carries over through the third section as well. In the final section, the darkness comes to the forefront as drugs and porn and corpses take center stage.

Only one line exists on the penultimate page, a repetition of the final line of the page that precedes it:

“I belong to this box.”

Alone on the page, that phrase gave me a very long pause. I blinked and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had blinked. This text gripped my eyes and wouldn’t let go. My headache defied the painkillers and throbbed across my forehead and temples. My glasses needed cleaning. The smudges from earlier in the day seem more pronounced as I squint at that five-word-phrase. “I belong to this box.” Not “I belong in this box,” but “I belong to this box,” as if the speaker has made vows to the shape. I read and reread it. I consider the boxes I belong to. The boxes I check on application forms. The boxes I check at the doctor’s office. The boxes I check on my census forms. I begin to think I belong to a lot of boxes myself. How exactly does one think outside the box when one always belongs to a box of some kind? I went back a page and read the lead up to it and then read it again. I stopped before reading the final page. I considered seriously that this section of the book begins with the speaker’s imaginary beach and ends with the speaker belonging to a box. All the memories, the science, the religion, the sexuality, the technology in between seemed both useless and profound, both noteworthy and totally forgettable. And then I read the final page slowly:

a queer tucked in by flowers

was it ashes or was it glitter

fingers of an era,

flagged for farewell

satin-lined obscenity,

tulips crackling into ashes

was it ashes or was it glitter

at the end of nations?

Whatever “I” am, whoever “I” am, sitting in this room, which is different from the room you are in now, feels a deep sense of sadness, sorrow, ache. Between the first line of the book, which established Cunningham’s “I” and this last line of the book that draws our focus to “the end of nations,” Fall Garment forges a singular path across Cunningham’s specific version of the American landscape, both real and imaginary. On this voyage, Cunningham’s “I” bent my “I” toward the relationship between the construction of our selves and our clothing. My headache persists, the painkillers have not done what they promised to do. Not yet anyway. And oddly that feels apropos. I can’t escape this moment with this text in this situation. I can hear my wife finish the story she’s been reading to our son. I know it’s time for me to go into his room, tell him I love him, and say goodnight. My back hurts from sitting in this chair. I want to cry because of Cunningham’s world, because of those last lines, because of the invocation of ashes and glitter, the idea of beauty and horror, of all those things we use to present ourselves to the world, the boxes we belong to, the garments behind which we cower, and the inevitable fall of everything around us. As I close the PDF and get up to say goodnight to our son, I stop and take a moment to breathe. I wasn’t expecting to feel and think about such heavy topics on this night. What began as a tantalizing echo of Gertrude Stein’s playful linguistic antics soon transformed into a throbbing existential ache. I am left contemplating the very real notion that one day, there will be no more “I.”

Christopher Higgs has published three books, two chapbooks, and many shorter works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and criticism. He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches narrative theory and technique at CSUN, and curates Beaucoup: a twice-monthly trove of marvelous artworks.