There has always been a hypnotic, meditative quality to Donna Stonecypher’s writing. Her previous book, The Cosmopolitan, was inspired by Joseph Cornell’s boxes; its delicate self-contained prose poems held small moments up to the light and turned them so that their angles and lights gleamed and twinkled.
Model City is divided into 72 numbered sections, one to a page. Each section is further divided into four ‘stanzas’, each of roughly the same length of two and a half to three lines, and divided from each other by centred bullet points. Each section begins with the phrase ‘It was like…’, but as part of the cover blurb notes, we never really know that the ‘It’ refers to! The ‘It was like…’ is often followed by the gerund ‘-ing’ e.g., ‘It was like studying…’, ‘…looking at…’, ‘…imagining…’, ‘…wondering…’ etc. The effect of these gerunds is to float action into the stanzas, as if quietly launching something onto the stream of consciousness. Occasionally, the effect is rather twee as in ‘It was like imagining strawberry and raspberry jam circulating neutrally among the theoretical inhabitants of the model city, jam for breakfast in the gardens of the well-to-do and at the epileptic farm.’ ‘Model City [23].
But mostly, Stonecipher’s meditations on life in the city are precise, deft and moving. And alongside the floating grammar, Stonecipher’s imagination floats through the city and its inhabitants with precision and real care. And not just the humans, in Model City [4], she imagines meeting a fox in the city, ‘- a real fox, not a taxidermied fox, not a fox logo, nor a foxy person that one might want to sleep with.’ Then later, ‘It was like watching the real, soft, cinnamon-colored fox, the only object moving in the landscape, moving silkily along the overgrown median, darting glances over at the people standing on the sidewalk, staring.’ Not only is there the precision of the colour, but that colour is held in focus within the landscape, then there’s the nice sense of the silky movement of the animal in the ‘overgrown median’. ‘Median’ is the American English for ‘central reservation’, and one has to think that here, the American language has got it right – for this poem, anyway – as the shorter word fits with the location of the animal. There’s also a neat play on the more mathematical sense of the median, as the animal is both clearly out of place, arousing the stares of the humans, but is, somehow, in the middle both physically but, somehow, in its sense of life and intensity.
Stonecipher has been reading her Walter Benjamin and both the Arcades Project and also Benjamin’s sense of ‘porous housing’ are referenced in the book. ‘Porous housing’ was, for Benjamin, where it is possible to look, from the street, into the courtyards, arcades and stairwells of, for example, a Mediterranean city, such as Naples. In Stonecipher’s version, ‘It was like walking down a street walked down many times before in your own neighbourhood, and coming to a stop before a wide-open door that is usually never open.’ Later, ‘It was like walking through each glimpsed courtyard and glimpsing more courtyards, and walking through more and more glimpsed courtyards until you abruptly reach the last courtyard.’ ‘Model City [9].
These quotations give a sample of Stonecipher’s method in this book. She layers perception and reflection between the four stanzas of each section. And, as above, where this does not come off, there is a self-consciousness to the surrealism which is unfortunate and distracting. Elsewhere, she explores the imagined social mores of model cities, through the visions of not only Socialist utopianisms, and Le Corbusier, but also places such as Letchworth, the first British Garden City. Stonecipher has presented a profound meditation on the nature of the contemporary city, pondering not only how citizens might live and relate in such cities, but also how imagination itself evolves in these creations.
Ian Pople