Week Three: Couplets
JUNE 21, 2023 • CAMP TOB WEEK THREE
Couplets
with Activity Leader Moti Lieberman
Hello everyone! We’re halfway through our first month of Camp ToB 2023, and having completed our discussion of Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss (catch up here and here), this week we continue our June reading vibe of “every story is an unconventional love story” with the first half—through book two—of Couplets by Maggie Millner.
Now let’s welcome Activity Leader Moti Lieberman (aka capfox in the Commentariat), who will guide us through Couplets over the next two weeks.
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A woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are private, not real. One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life. She falls into a consuming affair—into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom.
This has been excerpted from the publisher’s summary and edited for length.
Hi, Moti! We’re so glad to have you at camp. Please introduce yourself, and take it away!
Hello! I live in Montreal, and among other things am the co-owner of the Argo Bookshop, the oldest independent English-language bookstore in the our fair city. I've been following the ToB for what seems to me like a very long time, since Lightning Rods was in the tourney in 2012 (I'm a long-term Helen DeWitt fan). I read fairly broadly, with a weight towards speculative fiction, Japanese works, and queer stories.
So for Couplets, here are a few questions to get us going. Since the book is short, I’ve purposefully only read through the end of book two so far
How much did the poetry work to craft the story? In reading about the book, I saw that a lot of the discussion around couplets as traditional love poetry. I don’t know that that association is as strong for me, and so I don’t know that it created the mood it did for other people. And did it bother you that a lot of the couplets didn’t really rhyme or have the same meter for the first and second halves? Did it come to you that maybe that’s a bit about the messiness of love?
The formatting of the couplet sections vs the hybrid haibun/couplet sections intrigued me. I liked the playing with second person and who was being spoken to. And probably the punchiest bit so far to me was in the haibun 1.6, where the narrator is pulled along a series of questions. But is it strange to have that be in one of the prosier bits of the story?
Haibun 1.8 gets into how people are reading differently now than perhaps they once did. Is this way of writing the story a way to get us to approach reading it differently?
The relationships overall here interest me. Maybe I’m just not enough of a poetry reader; I confess outside of material for store events, I don’t read much of it. But the romance, particularly the tie to the initial boyfriend, feels pretty weak. And the characters don’t feel that fleshed out, to feel the punch of them splitting up, or the pull of the relationship together. But that’s the nature of the project, perhaps. I do appreciate the unapologetic queerness of it a lot; the presentation of desire and connection and longing did work for me, even if I didn’t feel the depth of it I wanted. Did you feel the relationships and the queerness came to life for you?
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