The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Collected Works, Volume Two: 1976-1986 by Paul Metcalf
Robert Buckeye

Paul Metcalf. Collected Works, Volume Two: 1976-1986. Coffee House, 1997. 600 pp. $35.00.

At the beginning of I-57, his account of driving the length of Interstate 57 during his fifty-seventh year, Paul Metcalf writes, “I have never stopped writing this, and it has not yet begun.” If this comment notes a commonplace truth about writing—that the writer never accomplishes what he intends, so that, in effect, his efforts to do so mean he is always beginning or, in some way, yet to begin—it also emphasizes Metcalf’s rejection of finish; work determined by boundaries of one kind or another—definition, closure, convention. Such order is always arbitrary and, for Metcalf, artificial, fatal to the creative impulse. From the beginning, he has sought to escape containment of one kind or another and to seek in the writing process, fluidity. (“America is a verb, Europe a noun,” Metcalf says.) His method is to cluster texts of one kind or another together: historical, scientific, autobiographical, literary, correspondence, fragments, found language. In some books, he has not written a word of his own. Both is about John Wilkes Booth and Edgar Allan Poe—both acts as the currency of metamorphosis in the book, and is also all, any, each, every. Waters of Potowmack is history as histology, geography as physiology, poetry as archaeology. In it, Metcalf finds what we have lost, listens to what we have tuned out. “My effort,” Metcalf writes, “has been to collapse time to create a plane on which events of all periods may occur at once to create tensions that one finds in the static arts.” He is as original a writer as we have, part of a native American aesthetic that includes, among others, Melville (his great grandfather), Thoreau, William Carlos Williams, Olson. It is important to have his work, virtually all of it published in small presses, more readily available. [Robert Buckeye]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Collected Works, Volume Two: 1976-1986 by Paul Metcalf Robert Buckeye Paul Metcalf. Collected Works, Volume Two: 1976-1986. Coffee House, 1997. 600 pp. $35.00. At the beginning of I-57, his account of driving the length of Interstate 57 during his fifty-seventh year, Paul Metcalf writes, “I have never stopped writing this, and it has not yet begun.” If this comment notes a commonplace truth about writing—that the writer never accomplishes what he intends, so that, in effect, his efforts to do so mean he is always beginning or, in some way, yet to begin—it also emphasizes Metcalf’s rejection of finish; work determined by boundaries of one kind or another—definition, closure, convention. Such order is always arbitrary and, for Metcalf, artificial, fatal to the creative impulse. From the beginning, he has sought to escape containment of one kind or another and to seek in the writing process, fluidity. (“America is a verb, Europe a noun,” Metcalf says.) His method is to cluster texts of one kind or another together: historical, scientific, autobiographical, literary, correspondence, fragments, found language. In some books, he has not written a word of his own. Both is about John Wilkes Booth and Edgar Allan Poe—both acts as the currency of metamorphosis in the book, and is also all, any, each, every. Waters of Potowmack is history as histology, geography as physiology, poetry as archaeology. In it, Metcalf finds what we have lost, listens to what we have tuned out. “My effort,” Metcalf writes, “has been to collapse time to create a plane on which events of all periods may occur at once to create tensions that one finds in the static arts.” He is as original a writer as we have, part of a native American aesthetic that includes, among others, Melville (his great grandfather), Thoreau, William Carlos Williams, Olson. It is important to have his work, virtually all of it published in small presses, more readily available. [Robert Buckeye]

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