Stephanie Young opens by shaking her hands at her sides to denote both nervousness and excitement. She has never read at the project, and she is “profoundly overstimulated” by New York; not at all the suburbia that Oakland “has finally become”. She is somehow both conversational/accessible and profoundly authoritative: a feat for a reader, I think. She never falters, but seems to attack reading as though it were a physical task (well, I suppose it is) to be completed.
Her reading centers around a long poem - “My Life in France” - which she frames as “calling out” to its origination with friends Dana and Ally, and for a reading at Kinessa Gallery in Oakland. The poem had come out of an assignment to write either “location” or “correspondence”: this prompted a conversation in which the three friends came to the conclusion that the two are inseparable. Their friendship is a kind of a location made through correspondence. Or, in Young's own words: "A face is not a location. A poem is making a location possible".
The poem artfully mixes the mundane (“I am hurt by facebook”) and the startling, rushing
onwards in a kind of litany of locational complaint. There is an anger and a tenderness suffusing the work; as it skewers or re-routes narrative tropes in favor of an ever shifting present location, a present presently re-made, vivid enough to invoke both the past and the absent. “Looking for a resolution,” she writes “no / not this time / not a story / not a scene / not a forest for the trees / not even on their behalf.” This “even” demarcates the space outside of the poem as a space in which the story, the scene, and the resolution will be demanded (or at the very least ardently desired). The poem's strength lies in it's wish to fulfill these needs “on their behalf,” coupled with its refusal to do so as expected.
An entire section follows the life of Julia Child, writing the Art of French Cooking with her
dear friend and co-conspirator “Simka”. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that this was the story that the poem was following, at present. (Alright: I am not particularly familiar with the life of Julia Child). Is it Stephanie Young's “Life in France” or Julia Child's that we are hearing? The poem is flush with life stories, falsities, revealing asides; a kind of maddening gossip and chatter which, in Stacey Szymaszek's words makes “biography as a process rather than a product” happen.
Young had opened her poem with a quote from Bachalard: “we are unable to live duration that
has been destroyed”. “But it is not,” is the retort of Young's first line. “My Life in France” is a poem that “calls out” to the other locations where it was multiply born. In so naming, it creates a series of lines, a number of durations, drawing continuity implausibly from disjunction.
