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American Poets in the 21st Century

Page 6

by Claudia Rankine


  24. Wang, Thinking Its Presence, 11; Noel, In Visible Movement, 178, n. 5; Reed, Freedom Time, 8. Martín Espada’s essay “Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination,” in Zapata’s Disciple (Boston: South End Press, 1999; originally 1994), is an earlier example of a poet of color articulating the intersections of aesthetics (what Espada calls “craft”) and cultural concerns (what he calls “commitment”). In other words, Espada attempted to conceptualize a “political” poetry that would be taken seriously as “Poetry.”

  25. Craig Santos Perez, Maintenant Series Reading, Poetry Parnassus, London, June 30, 2012. Available online at youtu.be/1hWIkM5E_OY.

  26. Johannes Göransson, “Borzutzky,” in Angels of the Americlypse, ed. Chávez and Giménez Smith.

  27. Lundy Martin, “The Rules of the Game,” 2–3.

  28. Alice Notley, Disobedience (New York: Penguin, 2001). This line of thought was influenced by the roundtable “Disobedient Poetics” at ASAP/7: Arts and the Public, the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) in 2015. Moderated by Evie Shockley, “Disobedient Poetics” included Julia Bloch, Amy De’Ath, Walt Hunter, Andrea Quaid, Lindsay Turner, and Catherine Wagner. For another salient dimension of this concept, see Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture and Society 26.7–8 (2009).

  29. Mark Nowak, “Documentary Poetics,” Harriet (blog), Poetry Foundation, April 17, 2010.

  30. Joseph Harrington, “Docupoetry and Archive Desire,” Jacket 2, October 27, 2011; Joseph Harrington, “The Politics of Docupoetry,” in The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement, ed. Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Susan Briante, “Defacing the Monument,” Jacket 2, April 21, 2014; Philip Metres, “From Reznikoff to Public Enemy,” Poetry Foundation, November 5, 2007; and David Ray Vance, “Radical Documentary Praxis [Redux],” in The New Poetics.

  31. It is also important to distinguish “creative nonpoetry” from Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing.” The former emphasizes the creative negation of poetry as a genre; the latter negates the creative agency of the writer. See Goldsmith’s poetics statement “Being Boring,” in The New Poetics.

  32. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; originally 1982); and Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987).

  33. Recent studies that address genre include Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Amy Robbins, American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014).

  34. Paul Lai, “Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.2 (2011).

  35. Documentary poetry differs from “poetry of witness,” but because their tools, techniques, imperatives, and relation both to the lyric and to historical “fact” overlap, they can be difficult to disentangle. See Sandra Beasley, “Flint and Tinder: Understanding the Difference between Poetry of Witness and Documentary Poetics,” Poetry Northwest, August 19, 2015; and Cathy Park Hong, “Against Witness,” Poetry, May 2015. Gray and Keniston rightly say that “engaged poetry tends to be characterized by suspicion and doubt about positions of witness, authority, and omniscience” (4).

  36. Brian Blanchfield, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (New York: Nightboat Books, 2016); Carmen Giménez Smith, Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

  37. In Garments Against Women (Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015), Anne Boyer addresses the reader: “I am writing to you in a long paragraph so that I will not be pornography” (14).

  38. Maria Damon, Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 168. For a sustained exploration of poets as fieldworkers and on-location ethnographers attuned to such processes, see Shaw’s Fieldworks.

  39. Wang, Thinking Its Presence, 20, 22.

  40. Humanimal can also be read as an example of what Cole Swenson calls “research-based poetry” in Noise That Stays Noise: Essays (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

  41. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). There are limits to the applicability of Glissant’s ideas here. The Francophone and Black Caribbean dimensions of the term “Poetics of Relation” resist portability, especially into US contexts. Even so, many of the poets and critics included here cite Glissant as a key influence.

  42. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 35. Glissant’s suggestion that a Poetics of Relation “forms the ethnography of its own subject matter” makes genre fluid in the ways Harrington identifies: “We see a poem by Brathwaite as the equivalent of a novel by Carpentier and an essay by Fanon. We go even farther in not distinguishing between genres when we deny that their divisions are necessary for us or when we create different divisions” (215).

  43. Lundy Martin, “The Rules of the Game,” 3.

  44. Roberto Tejada, Full Foreground (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 1.

  45. See also Douglas Kearney, Mess and Mess and (Las Cruces, NM: Noemi Press, 2015).

  46. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2; and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). The aesthetic, theoretical, and political glosses on failure cited here should not be conflated with the sort of failure of concern to Ben Lerner in The Hatred of Poetry (New York: FSG, 2016). Lerner is interested in what he perceives as an unbridgeable gap between the ideal of Poetry and “actual” poems, which, the argument goes, always fail to live up to their promise.

  47. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 2.

  48. Francisco Aragón, ed., The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007); and Angels of the Americlypse, ed. Chávez and Giménez Smith.

  49. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, ed., Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). See the previous note for Giménez Smith’s edited volume of Latino writing.

  50. Wang, Thinking Its Presence, 26–27.

  51. Born in London to Indian parents, Kapil underscores the porous borders of American poetry, thereby extending the work of Poetics Across North America, which included the Canadian poets Lisa Robertson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Erin Moure.

  52. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

  53. Fred Moten, Hughson’s Tavern (Providence, RI: Leon Works, 2008), 17.

  54. Rodrigo Toscano, “A Poetics of Ghosting: Aaron Beasley Interviews Rodrigo Toscano,” Boston Review, April 12, 2018.

  55. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 3.

  ROSA ALCALÁ

  POEMS

  FROM Undocumentaries

  Everybody’s Authenticity

  Among weeds, among variants of native

  crab grasses. One adapts to the kinds

  that curl or stand up straight, the bright green

  and speckled yellow. I would have to leave this poem

  and enter the world to render

  a better description. Plants don’t fly north

  or south, their migration is passive. But they

  assimilate rabidly, into hybrids. The dog

  is dismissive, indiscriminate, yet a colonizer,

  by way of the paw. What you must have looked like

  crouched curbside, at the edge of a shopping

  mall, looking for that elixir a Peruvian

  woman taught you to boil

  into a tea. It’s for the swollen legs, yo
u say,

  for the toes like mini chorizos, and it tastes

  okay, like nothing at all. Awaiting results,

  you call your sister in a town

  girdled by the Pyrenees, where crinoline

  can be heard rustling through the plaza. On your end,

  a blender is a welcome relief: I am sick

  of pounding things. It’s no way

  to live. You want tradition? Here’s the mortar & pestle.

  Believe me, the point’s just to pulverize.

  Job #6

  How to transcribe tragedy?

  (A secretary, a good secretary, asks.)

  Do I use a dictation machine?

  Look blankly at the boss

  and let fingers for a moment feel

  reproach? How can I plan my wedding

  as I cross out crutch words? When will I depill

  my jacket? When everyone is dead

  will the droopy bow of compliance

  get caught in the teeth

  of inquiry? There is no line of escape,

  holidays are finite systems, the rest

  a blur of supermarket cake

  into rising

  rent. The body charged

  with documentation has its own shorthand:

  now the turncoat gland, now the gut’s

  tactlessness. What’s the worry?

  The transcript never gets read

  for what it is: a stutter relieved

  of spare consonants,

  the art of rote aversion.

  Autobiography

  Factory is something not heard

  but written in degrees

  as breath. It never signs off,

  delivering you to you as a finished but minor

  product: something copied

  and stapled, slipped into your foot

  locker. You can’t value it. All you can do is replace it

  with an ethnic cuisine

  to riddle the ancients. It’s all you can do

  to keep from setting your face

  on fire. When the cat runs from one side

  of the house to another in an effort to find

  the childhood friend who died from eating

  old blinds, the page is left

  to NAFTA. Factory chases the cat

  out of the work though local manufacture

  is the aim. We should all be ashamed

  by the niceness of the working class: All, “Can

  I get you something?” Factory gives you

  ways to get ahead that are industrious, but

  uneven: Sleep with this history. Find yourself

  under that Volvo. The office for agents

  is the etymology of Factory, what we now call

  the conference. It reads properties

  for poetries. Factory is both fact

  and act, and mere letters away from face

  and story.

  FROM The Lust of Unsentimental Waters

  Rita Hayworth: Double Agent

  In the follicles sits a dangerously coiled

  and coarse nature, from which the genus

  springs. So the body’s genius

  zapped with a year’s worth

  of electrolysis. She becomes

  a G.I.’s dream by moving the border

  that frames the face, by deflowering the name

  and firing the island extra

  who made the dance number

  a risk. Still, after ions have cooled,

  they invent helpless swine

  to be rendered (“Good evening, Mr. Farrell,

  you’re looking very beautiful.”)

  at the spit. Or place her

  at the ticket booth of a Chinese theatre,

  speaking perfect Mandarin. So

  much of her choreographed

  or dubbed, winking at you

  through a ruffled excess. But what’s more natural

  to a bilingual girl from Brooklyn

  than to mouth her country’s script? Or insinuate

  herself into its defenses?

  She throws her head back, and on a long

  black glove slowly tugs: “Mame did a dance

  called the kichee-coo. That’s the thing

  that slew McGrew.” And though

  it’s Gilda we want to bed, we catch a glimpse

  of something familiar from behind a curtain

  of hair. It’s Margarita Cansino as the song

  ends and the striptease continues. We volunteer

  to lend a hand when she confesses, “I’m not

  very good at zippers.”

  Patria

  for my father, José Alcalá García

  The salute

  of this poem

  rides open

  to a shotgun—

  I carry grief

  blatant

  as propaganda.

  My father’s name

  lifts

  the hammer

  bucket

  brick

  to eye

  level

  & makes everyone

  a bit uneasy

  for what’s

  to come:

  a parched code

  a cracked

  body

  ’s final test.

  It’s a Dallas

  of suspicion

  a ramshackle

  conspiracy

  of origins

  that hides

  a mother

  so central

  to the narrative

  and fuses

  time & again

  melancholy to elegy

  to bring the madre

  patria back

  to civil war.

  This ditty

  like Annabelle Lee

  holds the beat

  every foreigner

  can tap his foot to.

  But whose feet

  will be put to

  the fire

  for a democratic state?

  When lost

  in the sway

  of our sorrow?

  the flag

  of our own names?

  FROM MyOTHER TONGUE

  Paramour

  English is dirty. Polyamorous. English

  wants me. English rides with girls

  and with boys. English keeps an open

  tab and never sleeps

  alone. English is a smooth talker

  who makes me say please. It’s a bit of role-playing

  and I like a good tease. We have a safe word

  I keep forgetting. English likes

  pet names. English

  has a little secret, a past,

  another family. English is going to leave them

  for me. I’ve made English a set

  of keys. English brings me flowers

  stolen from a grave.

  English texts me, slips in

  as emojis, attaches selfies

  NSFW. English has rules

  but accepts dates last minute. English makes

  booty-calls. English makes me want it.

  When I was younger, my parents said

  keep that English out of our

  house. If you leave with that miserable,

  don’t come back. I said god-willing

  in the language of the Inquisition. I climbed out

  my window, but always got

  caught. English had a hooptie

  that was the joint. Now my mother goes gaga

  over our cute babies. Together

  English and I wrote my father’s

  obituary. How many times

  have I said it’s over, and English just laughs

  and says, c’mon, señorita, let’s go for

  Chinese. We always end up

  in a fancy hotel where we give

  fake names, and as I lay my head

  to hear my lover breathe,

  I dream of Sam Patch plunging

  into water: a poem

  English gave m
e

  that had been given

  to another.

  Voice Activation

  Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.

  LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Zettel, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe

  This poem, on the other hand, is activated by the sound of my voice, and, luckily, I am a native speaker. Luckily, I have no accent and you can understand perfectly what I am saying to you via this poem. I have been working on this limpid voice, through which you can read each word as if rounded in my mouth, as if my tongue were pushing into my teeth, my lips meeting and jaws flexing, so that even if from birth you’ve been taught to read faces before words and words as faces, you’ll feel not at all confused with what I say on the page. But maybe you’ll see my name and feel a twinge of confusion. Have no doubt, my poem is innocent and transparent. So when I say, I think I’ll make myself a sandwich, the poem does not say, I drink an isle of bad trips. Or if I say, my mother is dying, where is her phone. The poem does not say, try other it spying, spare us ur-foam. One way to ensure the poem and its reader no misunderstanding is to never modulate. I’m done with emotion, I’m done, especially, with that certain weakness called exiting one’s intention. What I mean is Spanish. What a mess that is, fishing for good old American bread, and ending up with a boatload of uncles and their boxes of salt cod, a round of aunts poking for fat in your middle. So you see, Wittgenstein, even the sandwich isn’t always made to my specifications; it’s the poem that does what I demand. Everything else requires a series of steps. I call the nurse’s station and explain to the nurse—her accent thick as thieves—that I’d like to speak to my mother. She calls out to my mother: “it’s your daughter” (really, she says this in Spanish, but for the sake of voice activation and this poem, you understand I can’t go there), and she hands the phone to my mother and my mother, who is not the poem, has trouble understanding me. So I write this poem, which understands me perfectly, and never needs the nurse’s station, and never worries about unintelligible accents or speaking loudly enough or the trouble with dying, which can be understood as a loss of language. If so, the immigrant, my mother, has been misunderstood for so long; this death is from her last interpreter.

 

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