Form, Form, Form: On Mike Corrao’s “Surface Studies”

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Despite Surface Studies’ first sentence—“I want to approach our topic with velocity,” I want to open by calling upon language poet P. Inman’s essay “Notes on slow writing.” “Language is not (shouldn’t be) immediately ‘convertible.’ Every unit of the written or spoken needs to be recuperated via its own particularity. The signal’s valence re-thickened,” he writes. Inman is writing about the materiality of language here: language as language, a new kind of signal where the written markings that make words carry as much weight as the meanings behind them. What a word means, especially in poetry, is more slippery than the concrete fact of its shape on a page— “The form of words rather than their formlessness”—and that presents, at its most simple, a new way of making literature and of reading it. All of the texts Mike Corrao engages with in Surface Studies—a collection of nine essay-reviews on experimental, small press books—are similarly material-forward. As Corrao explains at the outset of his project, these texts offer interesting physical arrangements, navigation, and reader interaction. They operate almost less as narratives than visual objects. For example, many contain images, typographic play, and paratext in the form of citation or accompanying digital presences. Of Ed Steck’s An Interface for a Fractal Landscape (Ugly Duckling, 2019), Corrao writes, “It is difficult to say what kind of book this is. It is not a novel or a poetry collection. It is something that exists in that ambiguous zone of text.” As Corrao outlines in Surface Studies’ short introduction, he selected the books he examines in this collection because each one prompted him to read topographically, as one would a map: “In less conventional works, the reader is often asked to search / investigate, map out the potentially chaotic or uncharted interiors of the work. Reading a book as a spelunker would a cave system.” Corrao’s unique critical style manifests a kind of spelunking that, to borrow Inman’s language, “recuperate[s] [texts] via [their] own particularit[ies].” 

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In genre, Surface Studies could be called short-form close readings or perhaps exploratory descriptions of books, much like Annulet’s “annulets” or essays found in the peer-reviewed journal, The Explicator. As in these essays, in Surface Studies, Corrao is writing neither academic articles nor market fluff. Though many—if not all—of these were first published as book reviews in journals such as Heavy Feather Review and Full Stop, they do not take the form of the traditional review. Rather, they allow for nimble, descriptive records of reading increasingly found in publications such as Annulet but also the Action Books Blog and Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, whose authors often incorporate paratext, personal narrative, and poetic language in essays that ostensibly serve as reviews. This experimental form of reviewing—“spelunking”—makes sense for Corrao who is himself an author of several creative works. He has written twelve books of fiction, poetry, and drama, some of which are collaborations, and all of which were published by small presses in the last five years. He runs his own small press, CLOAK, and works as a book designer for publishers such as Inside the Castle, 11:11, Fonograf Editions, and others. Importantly, Corrao is the author of innumerable essays, interviews, and book reviews, primarily on small press books and radical writing that would otherwise receive little to no critical attention. To say Mike Corrao is exceedingly everywhere in the world of small press books is not an exaggeration. His creative thinking in multiple realms—as writer, editor, designer—comes through in his analysis; he is an artist at the same time as he is a critic. This has given him an expansive view; one that has seen and imagined things never before seen and imagined, which allows his reading to open—for the texts to open in a way they might not open before the rest of us.

Each of the nine essays in Surface Studies focuses on one book published in the past five years by presses that describe their books as “trans-genre” (Tarpaulin Sky) and “unknowable” (Action Books); that invoke “involuted dimensions that only become apparent when you reach out to them” (Inside the Castle) and “renewed aestheticism” (Black Sun Lit); and “transcend boundaries” (Nightboat). Corrao notes in his introduction that he’s observed “an increasing number of radical works” that are concerned with textuality and “the page itself as medium.” The books Corrao selects for Surface Studies are difficult and messy. Some contain blood and guts as well as images, caps, and textual glitches. They each bend genre and expectation and put off easy wrangling. But Corrao is not interested in the easy wrangle. He’s interested in study. He aims to enter the texts and meet them on their terms, but these very texts’ terms are mutable, moving. For example, in “Towards a New Archi-text-ure,” Corrao explains the physical dimensions (in inches) of Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex (Action Books, 2020), including the way letters are laid out, down to the tiny gray dots that make up the type. Wuehle’s book is an engagement with Francesca Woodman’s photographs, and so the photographs, the artist Woodman, the poet Wuehle, the speaker, and the text itself reverberate in Corrao’s reading: “the book itself becomes a kind of environment / structure. Habit of the ghostly voice. Source of the poetic glitch. Death Industrial Complex is something that must be traversed—a passage to or from the underworld maybe.” Wuehle’s writing is a ghostly traversal, and so is the book object, and so is Corrao’s reading of it, and his writing here. This is his surface study. 

These texts invite interaction, as he notes, and Surface Studies is, at its most simple, a record of Corrao’s interactions. Three essays discuss texts that incorporate or work in response to / with film: Evan Isoline’s O! The Scarcity of Gore (SELFFUCK, 2019), Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), and Metahaven’s (a collaboration between Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) Digital Tarkovsky (Strelka Institute, 2018)—and the realm of the digital is also close at hand. Film and interactive, digital texts offer a multiplicity of surfaces for Corrao to deftly move over and through, clearly at home with this navigation. Importantly, the books’ various uses of other media are not, in Corrao’s view, “supplementary”: “They instead present these expansive microcosms. Alternative means of utterance.” That is, when an image appears in M. J. Gette’s Majority Reef (Inside the Castle, 2020), the image works as an utterance as much as a word does. Part of Corrao’s project, then, is to explain how he sees this operating. His fragmented, slashing style works well for this. 

In the essay on John Trefry’s Apparations of the Living (Inside the Castle, 2019), Corrao writes the imperative, “Approach the novel / interact with the text-object / treat it as if it really does exist.” He sees books as they are, but maybe more than that, he sees them as he sees them, as he’s thinking about text and book and object and narrative and the whole project as having the potential to be something else, something dynamic.

This manifests most concretely in Corrao’s critical style, which is highly fragmented and poetic. Some essays use sentences or fragments of them and some use slashes that break phrases, sentences, and paragraphs into little pieces of glass, as in the quotation above. They move the reader forward, describing the work at hand but also digging in and offering interpretations and attentive, generous close reading. For example, in his essay on Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat, 2020), he writes, “Each poem is a wall of reactive language, everything that has festered and fermented in the mouth. Bubbling until the tongue lifts and the words must come out. Flowing together as this free-form of colliding stanzas and imagery. Illuminated at the moment of half-formation. In transition.” Corrao’s explication of McSweeney is, in both form and content, “at the moment of half-formation. In transition” as the fragments and sentences accrue and refract. At the same time, Corrao admits, “Truthfully, I do not completely know how to talk about a book like this.” This confession was one of my favorite moments in Surface Studies because it acknowledges the difficulty of describing works like Toxicon and Arachne to others—essentially, the work of the critic—and the difficulty of approaching a work on specific and incomprehensible grief, one that the critic can only guess at as a student, as a person on the surface. 

Though the essays in this collection are certainly crafted through Corrao’s lens, he himself rarely enters the text. Rather, he’s the individual reader of the text, and that makes it his, but he’s not using autobiographical hooks or anecdotes to get us there. Neither is he doing the homework of reading every other book by these authors or digging through piles of references. In another essay, he writes about the connection between Trefry’s Apparitions of the Living and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Topology of a Phantom City, and near the end of the essay admits that he hasn’t (yet) read Robbe-Grillet. In fact, these essays include no references. They don’t cite page numbers or the books’ presses. There is no biographical information about the authors. If Corrao were writing this, he would not include parts of paragraph two in the essay you are reading right now. Surface Studies is about reading and writing, not encyclopedic knowledge, cultural context or the history of literature, awards, sales, or markets. 

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One of the presses Corrao frequently works with and examines in Surface Studies is Inside the Castle. On collaborating with Corrao as both an author and as a designer, founder and publisher John Trefry says, “I think [a] special thing about Mike is something we share, that being not educated as writers. It makes me feel rationalized and ratified to have that kind of kinship with someone whose work I greatly admire.” Corrao’s pushing back against the traditional review form (hook, biography / context, summary, example, evaluation, etc.) comes from the kinship he finds with other writers like himself, working alongside one another, and from different forms of training and exercise—it’s not a break from expectation but of never having met the expectation in the first place. And expectations for critical writing on experimental projects is tricky business: On the one hand, it’s useful to explicate something complex, to take a careful, slow, look at something and show someone else what’s happening. It’s another to honor the work by letting it remain enigmatic, even obtuse, and to still negotiate it through your reading. This last thing is what Corrao is doing: It’s not that he’s not capable of writing a review, it’s that he’s choosing not to—out of respect for the kind of work he’s interested in.

In a recent conversation with Trefry for Minor Literature[s], Corrao compares writing to buildings: “The structures of a lot of prose writing (and to a lesser extent poetry as well) felt very one-directional. You walk in a straight line, and when you’ve reached its end, then you’ve successfully experienced what the line has to offer.” However, buildings are more mutable than you think: different points of access, views, angles, and inhabitants: “This versatility of engagement is much more compelling to me.” Corrao’s criticism is operating in this way too: not in a straight line but offering a many-angled inhabitation. 

What Surface Studies does best is tell me that literary criticism has the potential to be different—“the signal’s valence re-thickened,” as Inman says—especially criticism of experimental texts. But this isn’t easy to do as a writer or to accept as an editor. My first encounter with Corrao’s work was in proofing a review for Denver Quarterly. How do I proof these slashes? These broken sentences? Corrao is committed to the fragment. Alicia Wright, former associate editor for Denver Quarterly and current editor of Annulet, has published a handful of Corrao’s essays. She says of editing his work: “There’s an assertion about the fragment and its value that asks an editor to interrogate one’s own relationship to and reliance on ‘standard’ forms of ‘clarity.’” She continues:

His interest foregrounds the fundamental strangeness or deviance of a text, but his criticism seeks to further naturalize the text only into its own nature, which seems to take residence at the seat of syntax itself. Editing this kind of work is truly like riding the bubbling, kicking waves of a dark ocean. Often I find as an editor I’m seeking to tilt his sentences toward more causal linkages, perhaps a more pedestrian sense by connecting them so that the reader might ride his critique’s implicit wave, while still wanting the overall reading experience to be very clearly still in Corrao’s weird waters.

Like working with a writer on a poem, the editor of critical work must inhabit the formal space of the critic’s expression. But these are two vastly different tasks. Corrao’s “errors” are nearly immune from editing. So, the editor’s task becomes something else, a working with, a study, not unlike what his criticism itself is doing. The editor too must be generous. Reading these readings is also a creative exercise. 

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Surface Studies’ opening sentence might call for velocity, but at the same time, it links back, in my mind, to Inman’s idea of “the slow” which he describes as “mining”—recall “spelunking”—one mines a text, goes inside it, leaves it, and comes back with a different understanding. This takes time. Two words Corrao likes are “duration” and “haptic.” I’m able to grasp a text in new transformations—topographically—in the instances I spend with it, in thinking and in holding it in my hands. 

To me, the role of the critic is ultimately one of generosity, and that’s the word I kept returning to as I returned to Surface Studies and Corrao’s range of projects. Corrao is able to write so well about difficult texts because he is wildly generous, because his eyes are all over some of this decade’s most interesting literature, and his hands are in it too. Surface Studies is generous and interesting, and it’s interesting because Corrao is interested. 

By generosity here I do not mean overly complimentary or even nice but giving in the form of giving one’s attention. Careful, critical attention is generous, especially when most publications that cover small presses do not pay reviewers for their reviews, and especially because critical attention to radical writing is lacking. Corrao is likely the most prolific reviewer of experimental, small press books. It is also worth noting that five of the nine essays in Surface Studies highlight women writers, a striking minority in experimental literature. This is generosity. 

As a reader, Corrao is a student, someone who studies the material and explains it to himself and to us in strange, short snippets. We should not underestimate the difficulty of critical brevity, especially when writing about experimental works, and Corrao’s writing is a prime example of this form. As much as I love short essays and—even better—short books, I do wish there were more studies because I could read these all day (good news: the introduction hints at a “larger project”). In fact, many of the essays open with the use of the pronouns “we” (“We are looking at a slim book,” “we focus on the relationship between film and prose”) and “you” or the imperative (“You have before you / a work in the expanded field of literature,” “Enter a zone of digital mutation”). As such, the essays invite their readers into the experience of reading as co-students, co-spelunkers. This, to me, is one of Surface Studies’ most exciting qualities: it is a critical intervention that is also an opening, a form / style / method for how to approach experimental writing critically.