This book is unforgettable. It must be read.

 

Sandy McIntosh's Escape from the Fat Farm, 2025

 

There’s such a thing as a Sandy McIntosh memoir. He’s a wizard of the genre. Reading him, one is quickly led to the realization of memoir’s often polymorphous occasions. The range that this genre naturally provides is broad; its writer’s voice enjoys a unique stature and power. And, the thing is, it’s not so much that a reader’s sense of the real, the actual, indeed the historical, is being challenged.

McIntosh’s “memoirs” are essentially fictional; in other words they’re governed principally by their narrative power, which is a power only the memoirist possesses, or can possess if the writer is sufficiently skilled and imaginative--which is sensed in proportion to how much this writer feels like stretching out. It’s not quite the stretching out of the truth beyond all recognition, and it confirms that insight literary story-telling offers, whether the tale is completely factual or not.

The wise, skilled memoirist maintains a human connection while testing the boundaries of what makes the real possible, feasible. McIntosh knows full well that memoir’s polymorphous nature challenges some readers’ tacit assumptions about the nature of this form’s, or any literary form’s, purported historicizing, better to say factualizing. Anyway, the reader of memoir connects with the person, ultimately—in the way a fictionalist’s novel or short story establishes a world—something that’s possible in prose more so than a poet’s narrative, lyrical poem or not.

An aspiring memoirist will benefit from studying McIntosh’s quasi-nonfictional prose. In Escape from the Fat Farm, a fundamentally autobiographical book, the acolyte-protagonist comes upon the truth of the human predicament. The fake memoir (la belle histoire, or what I’ll call the marvelously nonfictional remembrance) beckons the reader, even if what seems clear enough is that McIntosh is more adept at writing the fakery than at assembling some lock-stepped facts (he need not also set out the alternatively actual).

His new book offers more than one way to fantasize. Then again, the concrete facts of the protagonist’s young life (some of the essays in this book feature a young McIntosh) are necessary for us to appreciate how this author—no longer a boy yet he must, still, find his way to manhood—is being guided by, let’s call them, more or less reliable life-narrators who are singularly fascinating.

In anecdotes, variously, a boy’s or man’s point of view is as much or more the storyteller than McIntosh himself. What the reader gets of Sandy the boy, adolescent, or man to be relished. We we watch as his character’s naivete melts away). The point of view of this protagonist is what may really matter, in the end. The reader does realize this, as the narrative unfolds.

In “A Curious Case: Dr. Irvin D. Yalom Treats Bartleby the Scrivener,” Yalom really exists—he’s an actual psychiatrist (you can read about him at his Wikipedia page). He’s treating Herman Melville,* who’s obviously fictional. “I had not wanted to treat Bartleby,” Yalom says, in confidence to us; “but a fan of these accounts of my therapeutic experiences with patients writes to urge me on.” The ensuing narrative functions as an ars poetica for how the trope of memoir governs the unfolding of the stories we read in this book (which is to say the book that’s been authored and is now, supposedly, being explained by McIntosh who’s now an adult writer). We take in the elaborate fantasy, witnessing how he actually works and how sees the world.

The “memory” of Melville is a hall of mirrors, the mirroring action serving as a permeable membrane that holds everything together within the narrative space. The context of all the memoirs in this book, including Yalom’s supposed remembrance, is to be taken as documentary, yet the fabrications, when there clearly are any, provide crucial insight into what the adolescence of one Sandy McIntosh was like. Inasmuch as Melville was long dead before Yalom relates his tale, and Yalom—we realize he’s a fiction—is still alive, we correctly assume that we know the spoof for what it is.

Yalom discloses to us someone’s expressed doubt concerning this psychiatrist’s use of literary techniques to shape, the therapist says, “the stories I tell in my books, thereby suggesting I am unfairly inflating the power of my curative insights.” If “literary techniques” are anathema to memoir, because they are suspect so far as facts are involved, then what can we imagine memoir to be? Obviously we find truths in memoirs, assuming we can trust their factuality, and yet the ways in which voice functions in memoir might undermine factual verity, casting the skeptic’s suspicions in doubt.

Psychiatrists are sometimes wonderful raconteurs, in their sessions with patients. When the “real” Bartleby pays Yalom a visit, looking “exactly as I’d imagined him,” Yalom tells us, the fictionalized Yalom invests a kind of plausibility in him. The therapist is quick to add that the visit has come as no surprise, “since,” he says, “I was, in fact, just then imagining him.” At this point the fictionalized imagining of a character who was once real but has since died, as put to us, is a lovely, literary, pleasure. The double entendre works seamlessly, and the purported Yalom’s remembrance is one of the unforgettable pieces in Escape from the Fat Farm.

The attentions McIntosh will pay to the more droll turns of fate in one’s life are rich in irony. Devastating understatement becomes his hole card. He does his best with the hand he’s dealt, managing his memories, and his readers who might balk at this larger-than life fable.

Sandy’s father and Fred Trump, Donald’s father, were real estate sharks on Long Island. Sandy met Donald at the beach club their families frequented. In real life, at age ten, Sandy was shipped off to the military school; the two boys spent six years together there.

We follow his drift, in this book. He tries to figure out what normal life is once he’s gotten clear of this military school that’s depicted as a jail for materially better off boys. McIntosh starts wandering Long Island and eventually falls in with an artistically rich conglomeration of writers and artists; they show him how to turn his pain into beauty. They’ve grown comfortable out on Eastern Long Island, in the Hamptons, which seems far enough away from New York City. McIntosh, the young man, follows his instincts. We’re left to ponder what, in life, may seem less obvious and what more powerful for having been secreted away.

That period in the Hamptons—the place itself, and as frequented by stunningly creative, also personally odd writers, poets and artists, who befriend the young fugitive—constitutes the point in time when memory might defy factual accounting for what gets missed in that. Memory can be, at once, funny and horrifying. The surprisingly hilarious turns of fate in this young man’s life are also, as Elaine Equi has observed, “a little scary.” Escape from the Fat Farm, transformative as it is, is as much or more imagined as transcriptive, and there’s something of great value in this, having to do with language and, by extension, insight into how a nascent writer emerges over time; his literary propensity renders the past as truth, a necessary truth.

He grew up in the heyday of Long Island’s Five Towns, located just over the Queens border. (Donald was chauffeured to that Nassau County beach club from the city each day.) Especially western Long Island had been transformed after the war—so many Gis, suddenly civilians again, changed forever. The GI Bill and other assistance enabled their flight from New York City to what, then, was something city kids called the country. It was a bucolic ideal.

McIntosh will discover himself amongst the likes of de Kooning, Bolotowsky; Ignatow, Schwerner, Hays, many others. When the young man succeeds in getting his first collection of poems published, the local bookstore displayed a copy in the window. Alas, Truman Capote made a fuss: the book was blocking view of In Cold Blood. But there was no malice on anyone’s part. All of these misfits were glad to trade the city for the immense ocean and sky of Suffolk County.

Aside from the supple textures and rhythms of his prose and verse, the aesthetic delight of the writing in McIntosh’s book fosters our contemplation of the people who, we increasingly come to appreciate, populate the young man’s maturation in a part of the Island he found exciting, one he’d not much known. A stark contrast to the Five Towns, the Hamptons were a key element of the Island’s singular weirdness (I think this had something to do with its proximity to the city).

David Ignatow’s deathbed conversation with the young man benefits from the elder’s loving, sardonic attention (although this may seem odd to anyone just coming to McIntosh’s work for the first time, it’s meant to elevate his life in our eyes):

Ignatow was dying, laid out in a rented hospital bed in the writing room of his house in The Springs, East Hampton. He turned to me and said, “I’m here to die.”

    I didn’t know what to say.

I changed the subject. “Remember,” I said, “how you paid so much attention to me when I was a kid—more attention than you paid your own children. Why?”

“You had the energy,” he said. “You were like an animal in a trap. I enjoyed myself, waiting for you to gnaw off your leg, make your escape.”

We rejoined the silence which all day had felt like something cloaked, about to unveil its secret.

“When we bought this house,” Ignatow resumed, “I said to myself: ‘Here I am. I’ve come to join the exiles.’”

He had grown up in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side. At first, out here in the country, the surrounding trees made him uneasy. “The branches,” he said. “They’re like prison bars.”

[. . . .]

Finally, when the room darkened, I asked if there was anything I could do for him, any final act between us.

He thought for a bit. “Yes,” he answered with his sly smile. “Trade places with me.”

McIntosh is very good at trading places. This capacity might be viewed as making it difficult to know what’s been fabricated and what’s truly remembered. Yet this is a concern of no consequence. The younger writer was drawn to questions of, beyond verbatim transcription, what makes for art; the now wizened Sandy has never lost faith in this way of telling. Robert Bly and Carlos Castenada were two figures he was especially drawn to, many years ago. Inherently interested in dreaming,  he has consciously “used [his] dreams as literal text for poems.” It would not be an overstatement to say that his memoirs first of all pay attention to what an occasion, any occasion, was, and to how it affected everyone involved.

Kenneth Koch, who summered in the Hamptons, provided a useful model of how to play gently with retrieved fact or simply with fiction. “The results,” McIntosh tells us, “which could come from such [an experiment] will certainly verge on the ‘poetic,’ and the marvelous, [and] these techniques [will] often produce [what] can be labeled confidently as real poetry. The raw material—the wishes, lies, and dreams—are, in the end, the stuff of poetry itself.”

So what might this say for the real yet ghostly people of his past—now, decades later, who have lodged in his memory? What might this question have to do with reconciling the lurid, yet palpable, other-worldly childhood McIntosh attests? How does one find the normal after, once a child, having experienced, as this child, a military regimen that incorporated hazing? What happens when play becomes formalized?

At the heart of his self-made genre there are the forays into anecdote or disquisition. McIntosh will err on the side of graceful expression but it’s clear that states of being is what’s truly important to him. Is there a way to get at it directly? I doubt it. The personality, as a construct in early psychoanalysis, was a natural borrowing from the nineteenth-century novel. (Freud, a powerful writer and devoted reader, often employed fiction in the service of explanation). The self, at the crest of Modernism, sets the individual apart from the masses. The idiosyncratic hero of modernity typifies industrial society’s alienation.

McIntosh, when still at the Academy, reads Catch-22 “six times straight through”—this was, in essence, taking place during a period of what, in effect, was his enforced incarceration. Thus his real-life fictions, in Escape from the Fat Farm, are droll, poignant, painfully funny satires. They find their groove in self-parody. His waggish, fracturus moments adumbrate primal scenes in which one or another “harmless impersonator” steps forth from a menagerie of unreliable narrators. “He feels the danger, diddling with history,” McIntosh says of Goethe, “but he has an honest end to achieve.” It’s the honesty of this book that gets to me. It appears as fiction sometimes, yet it’s true!

 ____________________________________

*Some of the following remarks are taken from my introduction to Escape from the Fat Farm. Others are inspired by what I wrote there. Still others are new reflections that have benefited by the time elapsed since the book went to press.

 

Xiaoqiu Qiu's Other Side of Ocean, 2025

 

The emigrant who leaves home, in seeking a new life, discovers what goes unnoticed by those who stay behind. Identity, in the pilgrim’s mind, will be an unending process of becoming one’s self; the pilgrim learns there’s no going back. A life requires surrender.

Xiaoqiu Qiu’s Other Side of Ocean explores this puzzle with delicacy, creating a poignant, quiet drama. Once the language of public discourse falls short, as it must (especially when a second language is in play) between people, there can be no satisfactory back and forth—between languages—yet something amazing can happen, something greater than the two languages, perhaps the two people as well.

Xiaoqiu Qiu’s marvelously knit collection of Mandarin-English poems—in which translation, as a phenomenon, becomes the subject of contemplation, ultimately its core concern—render a truth best contained in poetry. This is poetry that can only exist within the poet’s own, personal idiom—it’s the poetry of necessity.

Idiom—a subtle intellectual construct, an adroit mental maneuver—relies upon immanence.

Surrender, or at least capitulation to the second language, to the new culture (it may once have been unimagined, unimaginable), which is the ultimate embrace of the alien, underscores the life lived in this new culture and, of course, this new language. No other language, up to this moment in the sojourner’s life, has been able to think certain thoughts—has been able to think differently—and has been able to feel the gravity beneath this traveler’s feet. "To know another language is to possess another soul," Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, famously declared.

Even when people of the new land acknowledge the disjuncture within the immigrant’s reality, they may too easily have assumed the ebbing of what appears, to them, as that “former” life. Do immigrants come to relish the sense that their original life progressively goes unnoticed? Does the cloak of anonymity engender its own aura?

The poet lives apart from the entirety of such experiences in which languages, attendant upon cultural mores (or vice versa), respectively insist upon their unique responses to them. Likewise, there’s a delicious irony in considering what the careful reader, especially, hears and thinks.

Locating Qiu’s writing within such a social dynamic of this sort draws his reader to experience this societal framework that discloses the immigrant’s ingenuity. His reader steps back from it, to marvel at the sheer enchantment of his bilingual poems (in their incidental accuracy). The careful reader, like Qiu, intuits the dynamism of language.

Left to itself, language leads to idiomatic, sometimes truly unique, art. This is the poem as such. And, of all genres, Qiu would agree, it’s the poem that best enables this insight. The immigrant poet can reveal precisely what the limits of idiomatic discourse are, in general.

Conversely, such disclosure, as Qiu knows, fashions not a new language but, rather, a new idiom, one that holds insight into the social nature of human beings. And what thoughts, more to the point what utterances, sustain contemplation of a creative artifact that exists through—vividly so in the case of Qiu—the blending of Eastern and Western sensibilities, his invented idiom?

Might not such a poet have contemplated or just been aware, all the same, of a language’s limits, in experiencing this language, or better to say that each language creates experience? What might this mean for the poet whose new, American life unfolds within a linguistically very different context of mores and parlance, than what he knew of, experienced in his old, Chinese life? The differences, with respect to Qiu’s work, make clear, common, tacit assumptions that are embedded in an Indo-European language (versus, for example, the assumptions inherent in a Sino-Tibetan language such as Mandarin).

Qiu is that most adept poet for whom Auden’s famous, poignant, assertion that “poetry makes nothing happen” (in his paean to Yeats and the Irish Revolution) has little to no traction. Qiu makes something happen. He enjoys wrestling with idiom in his peculiar poet’s way, especially when he considers the prospect of writing in either/both Mandarin and English.

Here’s the first section of Other Side of Ocean, titled Sails (in the one language—it’s titled Hwra, whose Old Chinese ideogram stands for flower):

out of Target’s automatic doors

the sky is heartbreaking blue green boat thing

that a crushed coke can

tap dance

between the parking lot arrows pointing different angles

knows, this

is the edge of the world

waves of moon splashes

down its teeny tin ridges

drunk red decks

into each other

every light

of the night

tilts, I

can barely hold on

to this question,

cold wind in a desert

is from the sea:

two petals of calypso orchid

kiss tremblingly

at its lee

The underlying forces within bilingual writing hold sway on and off the page—as if there are two identities within a single personality. Qiu finds this complication fascinating. Fascination, the very word, is a door opening onto spectacle, wherein we spy the portrayal of the poem’s nature.

Qiu’s poems, in this book, make something happen. They’re bound up in an intellectual quest that’s both personal and spiritual. Contra Auden, the English reader is prompted to ask (e.g., in “The 3rd Graders Go to School”): “How far am I from the truth?” This question begins the poem.

There is truth in Qiu’s poetry; it’s to be hoped that his reader, bound to the literary, remains open to what constitutes the literal:  

All I have are two LED screens of opposite news

glaring like unsheathed blades,

and some broken words of a phone call

from a friend who still lives in Hong Kong.

I am two worlds away, and the

birds here sing so differently in the morn.

I can never get used to

a turquoise-colored dawn.

But every time I want to hold on

to something like a truth,

I think of them.

[. . . .]

They march from their average homes in Shenzhen,

and I imagine it is not a crucial difference

for any of them, that words don’t mean something.

The flags roaring in the wind

have an ideal to teach.

The smeared plaques on the ground

did an age wrong.

The giant strokes of characters

clinks and clanks on…

I imagine they walk on

and their feet know only

the next firm, solid ground.

[. . . .]

In my imagination, truth is not hard.

It does not ask you anything,

doesn’t ask you to swear fealty, or be its gunman,

nor does it blockade you

or hold a grudge against other truths.

In my imagination, truth

is not far from the third graders,

infallibly every morning,

go to school.

(“The 3rd Graders Go to School”)

Other Side of Ocean features an epigraph from Ernest Fenollosa (famously the author of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1919)—if you’re a fan of Modernist poetry you likely know who he was—the author of what became a foundational text in the evolution of Imagism). Fenollosa’s book was introduced by Ezra Pound whose essay, and the book proper, are now monuments to what became American poetry’s welcoming embrace of the unexpected—in a sense, a reinvention of poetry.

Pound, Fenollosa, the Imagist and Objectivist poets, other experimentalists—they all were not merely instrumental to high Modernist American poetry. They ushered in the postmodern world. Our avant-garde poetry is really, subtly, always going to be an effort to reinvent itself.

In some measure the American Modernist impulse was fueled by immigration to America, which in effect meant there was a broadening of the imagination. Qiu’s inclusion of a snippet from Fenollosa’s book presents us with our language now, and our poetry now:

A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. . . and the Chinese characters tend to represent them.

Qiu’s poems illuminate what can be called Fenollosa’s poetics. The poem becomes a “map of vectors, energy flows,” as Donald Revell says (in blurbing Other Side of Ocean), describing a Qiu poem as a “forcefield”—which supplies a “voice to such utterance.”

Does each language cultivate its own field of forces (in which a poet lives, in fashioning poems)? Words and spaces—are they unlike an ancient Chinese written character’s intrinsic tension in the ideogram—its tension between positive and negative space (not unlike a high Modernist painting)? What are the fields of words-and-spaces in each language?

Fenollosa, with Pound’s assistance, bestows upon Qiu his voice, his “utterance and abode” (as Revell expresses it). He finds expression in an English, an American language, which perhaps has become Chinese. “The poem holds no mirror up to nature,” Williams wrote. So much for mimesis. Rather, the poem “become[s] ‘nature’—continuing its marvels.”

Pound (not merely in The Cantos), H.D., Williams too—their poems, as true later of Qiu’s, “become ‘nature’” (to use Williams’ words, from “Spring and All”), “continuing its marvels.” They acknowledge the forcefield, which exists on its own.

Some poets may know better than to marshal their words, within an intention, to explain anything. Likewise, the sense of language per se as presence is most intense in Qiu’s collection. He makes wonderful use of the page as visual field, as counterpoint to out-loud utterance.

In appropriating Williams’ objectivist style, Qiu demonstrates how essential landscape is within the non-explanatory poem. Pound praises the “superiority of verbal poetry,” in discussing Fenollosa’s work “as an art” that 

rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate.

The West’s positivism places a responsibility upon the noun (thereby distinguishing English from Chinese). In Chinese, according to Fenollosa,

[a] true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.

 Qiu now lives in two cultures, in two languages, in two nations. He explains, in a note, how, in his poems, attention to landscape has sprung up from “that which gives us identity without dividing us. The genius loci [. . .] imbues us with ingenuity. After all, the earth is contiguous, and not the national borders’”: 

What makes the starless sky a

whose nightblack shadow barely

dead sea, makes us

blankets their torsos:

reflections:

     the magic   is   not           there there

     (the night is too contiguous to be there)

 

     when   I   closes,                      they opens

(I alone dark petals,    everywhere opens)

      (“Flower Duet from Walgreens at Midnight,” in the first section titled “Sails”)

 Revell grasps all this—hence his description of landscape as language (in his blurb of Qiu’s book): “a landscape, a primordial utterance and abode.” He’s exactly right in citing Qiu’s place within an essentialized notion of poetry (and all art) as “landscape”—which is the necessary condition for apprehending what both eludes and transcends language.

In Qiu’s poetry, there’s a place of dwelling. His existence on earth is “timeless.” Is there also a “sense of loss” in this? If “landscape [. . .] gives us identity without dividing us,” then how might we view it as his genius loci, a point within a set of locations? True poetry, for Qiu, is the essence of utterance—not the other way around (as the prosaic world insists upon).

"[Landscape gives us identity without dividing us”—a gift to the poet’s creative, artistic capacity, which “imbues us with ingenuity,” Qiu says.