The Book of Frank comes hot out of 2009 at an alarming proximity to all things Victorian poetry. This claim sounds dull, but the evidence of this book’s Victorian inheritance just sits there at all edges! Speaking of edges, this book is on the cutting edge. CA Conrad’s poetics are a breath of fresh air in a stale world of academic graduate-poets. The poem’s Victorian inheritance leads me to believe The Book of Frank truly does have staying power. With this, I pay homage to a dusty world, and to Conrad’s fearlessness.
Most obviously, considering its genre-bending form, The Book of Frank is in chorus with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel Aurora Leigh. Aurora Leigh is written in blank verse, a form of iambic pentameter that is arguably close to the natural rhythm of English. The Book of Frank by CA Conrad is the blankest verse novel of them all. There are only three chapters in this sparse 148-page poem. The line breaks don’t necessarily capture a rhythm or tradition, but rather make the mind hungry for a plot, which The Book of Frank offers up. The poem tells the story of Frank’s childhood and his coming into being. Aurora Leigh is similar in plot. Sidenote: she has a cousin-suitor named Romney.
Aurora Leigh is tied up in its self-awareness as a verse drama. It is difficult to separate the author, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from her main character. At one point Aurora Leigh crowns herself a poet on her 20th birthday, performing a ritual with ivy. At the end of ONE in The Book of Frank, Frank asks a “pile of bones,” “would you sign/my book Mr. Poe?” Frank answers, “why certainly.” Both Aurora and Frank initiate themselves as poets through natural objects, bordering enlightenment and delusion.
The Book of Frank digs around in the same cultural dirt that preoccupied our friends in the 19th century. For example, it inherits anxieties about objectification.
GB Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott depicts a woman fated to watch the world through a mirror-image of it. She sits in front of her loom and looks in a mirror as she weaves. She doesn’t look out the window; she watches its reflection in the mirror. She is cursed by her sex, doing woman’s work. In The Book of Frank, Frank “tries to ignore/the girl living inside his mattress/she never shouts/or makes demands”. In the book’s afterward, Eileen Myles calls this an expression of “outrageous feminism,” and it is, in the same way Tennyson practiced outrageous feminism by historicizing The Lady of Shalott.
“The Lady of Shalott” (1888)
The Book of Frank captures anxieties about visual art, another Victorian inheritance. In ONE Frank “forces his head/through canvas/ ‘FRAME ME’ he shouts ‘FRAME ME!” What kind of ekphrasis is this? All the components are there: a frame, a canvas, and a poet. In An Artist’s Studio by Christina G. Rosetti is concerned with obsessive objectification for art’s sake, making it perverse, creepy. Frank literally forces himself into the canvas, perhaps revealing Rosetti’s initial impulse: “FRAME ME!”
The comparisons between Victorian poetics and CA Conrad’s The Book of Frank are many. It is illuminating that the current climate and that of the 19th century share similar features. This suggests that much has been left unresolved since the globe’s first violent wave of industrialization. But The Book of Frank is just so damn good. It’s like reading the movie Where The Wild Things Are. It’s like watching a dream about your childhood. Stop reading Thought Catalog and start reading The Book of Frank.
Sally Reisch is a contributing editor for The Rutgers Review.