American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  […] This is art in the age of ribbon

  production. She stands so still

  for the image:

  A flash of pussy. The Industrial Age.

  For Alcalá, gendered labor, particularly in the factories of Paterson, New Jersey, where her immigrant parents worked, comprises the specific historical condition from which investigations of the possibilities and limits of poetic language emerge.

  Brian Blanchfield’s writing is also concerned with the relationships among class, belonging, and language, through a queer lens. He begins his poetics statement, excerpted from his essay “On Abstraction, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source,” by expressing his distrust of poets’ discussions of “the materiality of language.” Instead, he locates numina in Dickinson’s poetry and in the objects, locations, and words of daily life. These numina contain the enigmatic traces of a metaphysics wherein psychic, linguistic, spiritual, sexual, and communal energies gather. In his essay “In the Dark with Brian Blanchfield,” Chris Nealon examines “the difficulty of beginnings” in Blanchfield’s syntactically complex and densely allusive poetry. Nealon shows how the development of a gay male lineage—via Whitman, Crane, O’Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery—in Blanchfield’s poetry has produced an aesthetic that is elusive and multilayered, even as it is inviting: “a deliberately difficult Whitmanianism.” Echoing Cutler on Alcalá, Nealon argues that in Blanchfield’s poetry, “spatial and grammatical derangement is not meant as an alienation effect in the traditional avant-gardist way,” but is used as a means “to startle us into recognizing our closeness” to the poem. Nealon concludes that Blanchfield “disorients in order to attract,” a quality seen in the poems included here from his collections Not Even Then and A Several World.

  In addition to sharing a publisher (Nightboat Books), Daniel Borzutzky shares Blanchfield’s preference for poetic series and his distrust of poets’ recourse to distancing phrases such as “the materiality of language” to explain their writing. That’s where their similarities end. While Blanchfield’s complex, decorous syntax conceals its sources and doubles back on its narrative turns, Borzutzky’s grotesque fables bare all. His narratives disorient and repel in order to jolt readers into recognizing imperialist and state-sponsored violence, from Chile to Chicago. At first glance, Borzutzky’s poetry is the most dystopian of this volume’s poets. And yet he is also determined to articulate a durable ethics that can be embodied in an aesthetics. In “Pardon Me Mr. Borzutzky / If,” Kristin Dykstra places Borzutzky’s search for an ethical language in a Chilean lineage that foregrounds the poet’s transnational, diasporic, and inter-genre forms. Her title alludes to a short poem by the Chilean antipoet Nicanor Parra, which itself alludes to the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. Borzutzky’s poetics statement likewise builds momentum toward continuums of language, borders, translation, genre, and identity, where an ethics emerges in the shifting relations between self and other, north and south, English and Spanish. Dykstra’s essay focuses on the ways in which Borzutzky’s sentences accumulate into “a chant-like escalation of feeling through repetition and variation, often describing some blend of imagined and real atrocities.” In Borzutzky’s long, looping sentences, the dystopic vein can also be airy, full of breath and luminous, as in “Let Light Shine Out of Darkness.” Here the unpunctuated opening sentences—“I live in a body that does not have enough light in it // For years, I did not know that I needed to have more light”—build pages later into a body that is paradoxically and powerfully “dissolved into its own resistance,” prepared to confront the forces of violence his poems chart relentlessly.

  In her poetics statement, Carmen Giménez Smith cites Borzutzky as part of the living lineage of uncompromising agitation in which her work participates. Literary and political, this confrontational tradition nonetheless makes space for irony, humor, and “raucous play.” For Giménez Smith, this form of play, diablura, combines an “irascibility” sourced in third-wave feminism, Latinidad, and twists on (and twisted revisions of) the North American avant-garde, trenchant media stereotypes of fiery Latina “excess,” and the resourceful immigrant’s American Dream alike. Giménez Smith’s statement also foregrounds the way in which a socially engaged poet serves in many roles—as mentor, advocate, publisher, and editor—of which writing is but one part. Joyelle McSweeney’s essay “‘The Call for Reversal is Native’: The Paradox of the Mother Tongue in the Work of Carmen Giménez Smith” places Giménez Smith’s writing in a lyric tradition, with several differences. Among these are the ways in which her sequences and list poems, such as the defining “gender fables” and “Parts of an Autobiography,” respectively, in Milk & Filth, stretch the limits of lyric inspiration and originality. While Giménez Smith joins Alcalá in exploring how mothers and mother tongues define subjectivity and art, she has been more direct in her attempts both to condense the lyric—as in the propulsive energy, tensile steeliness, and startling lucidity of the “Be Recorder” sequence excerpted here—and to expand it to its breaking point—as in her memoir of lyric prose Bring Down the Little Birds.

  Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has also published in a variety of genres and forms, from her memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer to Blood Run, a “free verse play.” Like Giménez Smith, moreover, Hedge Coke embraces the multiple roles of “literary citizenship,” serving as an advocate for and editor of other poets. Hedge Coke’s edited volume Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, for instance, collects the work of Indigenous poets from across the Americas.49 Beginning with the collection Dog Road Woman, Hedge Coke has plumbed the conjunctions between working-class and Indigenous lifeways, dramatized in the autobiographical poem “The Change” included here. Alongside Perez, she is the poet in this volume who is most directly invested in combining art and activism, in her case on behalf of Indigenous communities and environmental causes. Chadwick Allen’s “Resurrecting the Serpent, Reactivating Good Earth: Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run” decodes the book’s intricate mathematical forms, forms that figuratively reproduce and decolonize an Indigenous earthworks, Blood Run, on what is now the border of Iowa and South Dakota:

  [The] structural complex Hedge Coke builds for and between her Snake Mound and Stone Snake Effigy personas, intricately designed to juxtapose “animal” and “geometric” forms, exemplifies her larger project: to build a contemporary poetics between an activist witnessing of destruction and the explication of an older form of Indigenous writing, an expressive Indigenous technology based in Indigenous science.

  Allen’s exacting intellectual labor reveals Hedge Coke’s own labor in modeling the large-scale geometric earthworks of the Blood Run site and the monumental scientific and physical labor of Indigenous workers and thinkers that has been subsequently erased by conquest, colonization, and the ongoing systematic repression of native histories and presence in the United States. Although Allen does not make this argument, Blood Run is site-specific conceptual poetry of the highest order.

  Like Giménez Smith, Cathy Park Hong has reshaped the lyric, and like Hedge Coke, her persona, voice, and narrative poems build monumental structures. However, she is more explicitly interested in the languages of globalization than is either of these poets, and her use of frontier tropes and speculative forms (the American West, the Vegas- and Dubai-esque “Desert,” the Chinese Boomtown, and the “World Cloud”) differentiate her mother figures and tongues from Giménez Smith’s and Alcalá’s. In “Building Inheritance: Cathy Park Hong’s Social Engagement in the Speculative Age,” Danielle Pafunda contends that Hong’s poetic “boomtowns” “disenchant us of any pre-Google romanticism.” In this light, consider this passage in Engine Empire, which dramatizes the migration from the countryside to “Boomtown Shangdu.” Hong’s inventive global pidgin distills thorny truths about the gendered and linguistic valences of capitalist globalization:

  Ma has passed the village gathered and wailed w’ trumpet lungs,

  while I daydreamed of leaving these parched shriven hil
ls,

  traveling far into the mirror cast of Shangdu’s

  chandeliering lights,

  Then that melon-bellied landlord, a genius

  for making tithes, skulked by and tithed me, tithed the grievers,

  who quickly scrambled to escape the tithe,

  tithed our ma for the burial.

  Even the dead don’t escape the tithe.

  In Thinking Its Presence, Wang argues that the exclusion of Asian Americans “from the category of ‘native speaker’ of English […] surfaces as much in the formal structures as in the thematic content of Asian American poetry.”50 Like the passage just quoted, Hong’s poetics statement dramatizes this process. It displaces the centrality of whiteness and of standard English by reveling in the prolific use of “bad Engrish.” Pafunda examines how Hong’s three collections mash-up numerous “bad” Englishes by developing, with rapaciousness, a vast range of aesthetic tools (slang, dialects, accents, pidgins, K-Pop, and hip-hop, as her poem “Notorious,” included here, shows) and literary modes (lyric, parodic, speculative, ethnographic, frontier). Pafunda ultimately shows Hong creating an innovative poetics that, like Giménez Smith’s and Moten’s, charts its own vanguard path, disavowing the raced and gendered gatekeeping of the avant-garde.

  Christine Hume’s poetry initially reveals fewer clues to its modes of social engagement. At the outset of “Utter Wilderness: The Poetry of Chris tine Hume,” Molly Bendall notes that Hume’s work is difficult to place, due in part to her focused exploration of “wildernesses,” both physical (Alaska, in her collection Alaskaphrenia) and metaphysical. Hume’s sound experiments, along with her associative and interrogative poems, instantiate her abiding interest in the methods of scientific inquiry, in cognition, and in preverbal perception. Her poetics statement “Hum” underscores the centrality of voice—not in the lyric, expressive sense, but rather in the aural properties of sounding, hearing, and processing—to her poetics. She writes, “My attempts to reproduce the shadow voice are all hostages of paradox: unfathomable source, surplus effect.” Hume’s auditory practices, lullabies, primordial humming, and hypnotic effects all dramatize the paradoxes attending the limits of human cognition, the origins of the self, and the porous boundaries between self and other. Joining the thread taken up by Alcalá, Giménez Smith, and Hong, Hume’s soundings offer further insights into the maternal body and “mother tongue.” Bendall posits that Hume’s poetry can be read through the lens of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, which asks “what language does rather than what it means.” In this sense, Hume’s performances, which “replicate the doubling of voices or a ‘duet’ […] by superimposing other voices or sounds over her own voice,” highlight and magnify the active social dimensions of even the most seemingly private, embodied experiences.

  Bhanu Kapil is also interested in sound effects, preverbal experiences, and cognitive disjunctions, but in the ways that they characterize the violence endured by immigrants, women, and people of color.51 In her poetics statement, Kapil explains, “The parts of immigrant life that are harder to write about—sexual trauma, physical violence, gender violence towards women—take up a different block of narrative time.” She goes on to show how her writing creates a syntax to “match” this disjointed “narrative time”:

  I wanted to match—roughly pinned to the sentence: the contractile-extensive tissues—throes, convulsions, peristalsis—of the body: in these moments—which are not moments: a syntax. But also: in the same place—the paragraph, you could say: the rough, overlapping and acoustic arcs of the violence to come.

  With Borzutzky, Kapil shares a content (violence, disgust, abjection) and a form: the sentence and the paragraph, which build into disorienting narratives. Like Hong, she reinvents speculative modes, in Kapil’s case via the figure of the monster. As Eunsong Kim argues in “Perpetual Writing, Institutional Rupture, and the Performance of No: The Poetics of Bhanu Kapil,” Kapil’s five books overthrow generic conventions. Kapil’s meditations on the immigrant as an inassimilable figure that “blackens,” and thus radicalizes, literature, Kim asserts, can be understood via the critic Lisa Lowe’s “immigrant acts,” which reject the immigrant’s “vertical” relationship to the state.52 The novel—the assimilationist immigrant form par excellence—represents at once the idealized imperial dream of literary production, the condition of failure for black and immigrant bodies, and a polite form of institutionalized violence. As the excerpts from Kapil’s five unclassifiable books show, her “failed” novels resemble field notes (à la Maria Damon), offering glimpses of what may come after Literature.

  Mauricio Kilwein Guevara also addresses elements of immigrant life “that are harder to write about.” His poetics statement begins in the vein of the immigrant narrative, but quickly veers into the more unusual (and entangled) territory of coal barons and publishing titans, cancer and sputum, Gertrude Stein and John Berryman. These moves are instructive for reading his poems, which resist closure, wholeness, and clarity: in other words, the tropes of assimilation. Instead, Kilwein Guevara’s poems are frequently opaque, surreal, fragmented, disorienting, and evacuated, exploring what he calls “the epistemology of loss.” In “Mauricio Kilwein Guevara’s Scavenger Infrapoetics,” I argue that his “infrapoetics” is an aesthetic variation on a politics “from below.” That is, the poems sift through cultural detritus for the discarded and disavowed, composing a scavenger poetics from waste and compost, and through masks of anonymity and dissimulation. These features explain, in part, his poetry’s uncategorizable store of allusions, radiating outward from his native Colombia and his childhood home of Pittsburgh. They coalesce in Kilwein Guevara’s theory of the poem, poema, as a “combustible” and “miniaturist” form. Paradoxically, he writes, “the tinier the space, the greater the poem’s expansive energy. If you want to write about violence, is there a more fragile cosmos than the testicles of a small child?” Across his prose poems, disjunctive lyrics, and associative and performance pieces, poema is paradoxically constituted via what it excludes.

  “Combustible” aptly describes Fred Moten’s poetry. From the congregation of proper names in B Jenkins to the “shaped prose” of Little Edges, Moten writes poems with propulsive melodies, intricate rhythmic syntax, and sinuous enjambments. Take the poem “Metoike,” from Hughson’s Tavern, in which Moten creates a portrait of “one of them impossible domestics,” an enslaved woman whose labor finds an “impossible” rhythm between revolutionary strategy and selfless love:

  Her hand blew up inside blew up

  the house inside where she work

  to blow it up and somehow love

  them while she be cleaning up

  and scheming. Sewing seeds from

  reading laying out with reeds her

  hand blew up inside. In her air

  she have a migrant curve her hand

  blew up inside. She harass the

  sheets she fold by singing

  hellhounds in the crease. This

  was her air and hand.53

  Like this volume’s selections, “Metoike” animates via the abundant resources of black speech and black music the inquiries in Moten’s poetics statement. With a nod to Charles Olson’s projective verse (by way of Amiri Baraka), Moten asks how a black poet can juggle contradictory impulses and imperatives, all in order to create a poem that is “committed to as much going on as possible.” As Brent Hayes Edwards argues in “Sounding the Open Secret: The Poetics of Fred Moten,” Moten’s writing participates in the tradition of black radical poetics that is attuned to a dizzying array of sonic forms. It is in precisely this sense, Edwards shows, that Moten’s poetry and criticism converge: “It is a poetry that refuses to relinquish the impulse to theory even in the throes of its music.” Both create space for a black “undercommons” (of which “impossible domestics” are part) to enact fugitive soundings and departures, where, as in Borzutzky, “ethics and aesthetics are in parallel play” (“it’s not that I want to say”). While Mote
n’s fugitive poetics shares some characteristics with Kilwein Guevara’s infrapoetics, his poetics statement asks a question at the heart of many of this volume’s poets: “Can we protect the block in breaking it?” Moving between tearing down oppressive institutions and building liberatory structures, Moten’s poems are contrapuntal, rowdy, and joyous. His focus on “a black maternal ecology,” alluded to in his poetics statement and in the title of his collection B Jenkins (his mother’s name), moreover, puts Moten’s writing in dynamic conversation with this volume’s women poets.

  Craig Santos Perez shares with Moten Olson’s influence and the impetus toward an emancipatory poetics. Just as Moten’s radical energies emerge from and invigorate a black undercommons, Perez’s innovative poetic forms delineate their source—the island of Guam (Guahün), an “unincorporated territory” (read: colony) of the United States. Perez’s four books comprise an ongoing series dispatched “from” the colonial palimpsest of Guam, which has been conquered and colonized by Spain, Japan, and the United States. His book series draws on Chamorro language, mythology, history, and culture, along with avant-garde poetics and cultural theory. This volume’s selection, “from aerial roots,” is drawn from his second book, from unincorporated territory [saina], where the sections are interspersed among other series. “from aerial roots” exemplifies the typography of Perez’s poetry. In his poetics statement, Perez describes his work as “book is lands” and “song-maps.” These poetic “archipelagos” create a powerful documentary poetry that juxtaposes appropriated source texts, including tourist literature and military documents (Nowak’s third-person practice), with autobiographical writing (Nowak’s first-person auto-ethnographic practice). In “Tidal Poetics: The Poetry of Craig Santos Perez,” J. Michael Martinez explores how the anthropological concept of “preterrain” that is advanced in from unincorporated territory [saina] constructs “a solidity without ground.” Martinez argues that Perez’s “tidal poetics” produces a unique decolonial epistemology and ontology with manifold consequences for our understandings of history, philosophy, and poetry.