I use the word aesthetics advisedly in this context, indexing two of its primary meanings: first, the “possibility of articulating the material with the spiritual”; and second, the search for the beautiful.6 Alcalá’s poetry broaches the first of these through sensual imagery that insists on the spiritual as always an embodied realm of experience. The poet speaking to her lover in “National Affair” (Undoc 68) and about her lover in “Inflection.”7 The opening stanzas of “Rita Hayworth: Double Agent,” remembering the famous actress’s hairline electrolysis, an attempt to appear less obviously ethnic (LUW 15).8 The description in “Cante Grande” of songs “insisting” on the speaker’s skin.9 In these poems and others, spirituality—in the sense of ineffable subjective experience—is inextricable from broad social concerns: nationalism, racial discrimination, and (always for Alcalá) labor. Alcalá’s poetry activates the second meaning of aesthetics paradoxically through formal practices that run counter to traditional conceptions of beauty, preferring fragmentation over unity, parataxis over hypotaxis, and syntactic and semantic play over familiar idiomatic expression. Poems like “Property”—which unfolds in square blocks of prose across four separate pages—initially seem almost willfully opaque (LUW 67–70). Their considerable beauty depends on readerly engagement to manifest fully.
Indeterminacy is one important way of describing this aesthetics, but Alcalá’s relentless attention to class suggests a different term: alienation. Like aesthetics, alienation has both spiritual and material resonances, indexing lapsarianism alongside and through a Marxist conception of labor. As David Harvey explains, “The worker legally alienates the use of his or her labor power for a stated period of time to the capitalist in return for a wage. […] [T]he worker is estranged from his or her product as well as from other workers, from nature and all other aspects of social life during the time of the labor contract and beyond.”10 And yet, while alienation has played an important role in Marxist theory, it tends to take a backseat in literary analysis to other features of Marxism, such as ideology, class conflict, and commodity fetishism. Harvey argues that alienation might serve as the best grounds for a renewed socialist critique because of its spiritual resonances. Certainly Alcalá’s poetry represents alienation as a spiritual as well as material problem. “Today, students / are working out / class schedules,” observes the speaker of “Class”:
and I propose a course
objective of carrying
paint drums
across the length
of my office
until someone gives. (LUW 66)
The play on the word class that animates the poem—underscoring the distance between the university classroom and factory work—culminates in the double meaning of gives, the poem’s final word. The poem imagines students (or even the poet herself) giving in, giving up at the difficulty of physical labor, but it also holds out the possibility of the gift as the ultimate, empathetic response. We’ll do this labor until someone gives. One can almost hear Derrida reverberating here, both in his definition of the gift as “that which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange,” and his deconstruction of the gift as finally “the very figure of the impossible.”11 In the face of such impossibility, “Class” dwells in the urgency of a gift that might reconcile social estrangement.
“A Girl Leaves the Croft” showcases even more vividly how alienation operates not only as the thematic center of Alcalá’s poetry but also as its aesthetic mode. The poem begins by sketching a beatific pastoral scene:
Cottage work, the spinner at the door. A halo of sun, a tidy room behind her. “Maids at the wheel … / Sit blithe and happy.” Such chastity in the pre-electric. Or, in the moldy flax under the finger, causing Beauty’s allergic reaction. (Undoc 27)
This initial quatrain puts the cottage back into cottage work, playing on the Romantic fetish of rural simplicity. The quotation comes from Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” which describes nuns, hermits, students, weavers, and maids as “blithe and happy” within the severe constraints of their respective occupations. But the poem quickly gives the lie to this Romantic tableau, reminding us that cottage work is just that: work. The spinner at the door is not merely enjoying the sunshine; she is participating in an economic system in which she is increasingly alienated from her own labor. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, forces of industrialization were already putting intense pressure on cottage work, especially in textiles. Whereas formerly spinners, weavers, and other textile workers owned not only their tools but also the raw materials of production, more and more during this period they belonged to a system of production and distribution controlled by capitalists.12 Moreover, the poem reminds us that cottage work was most often female work, and that Romantic portrayals of that labor characterize women as merely docile. Picking up on the double valence of maids—which can signify both young women and virgins—the poem sarcastically celebrates the “chastity” of the “pre-electric” proto-Industrial Age, the pivot point where the poem’s ironic critique emerges clearly. All of this in five sentences lacking a single predicate. This is parataxis amplified, requiring readers not only to make connections among sentences, but to make sentences from the fragments it presents.
In “A Girl Leaves the Croft,” women are alienated not only from their labor, but also from their bodies. After the initial quatrain, the poem declares, “We’re all framed in this / who-dun-it” (Undoc 27), with the homophonic pun indicating how difficult it is to locate blame for structural inequities. Inequities in labor are inextricable from representational practices so pervasive they make resistance seem futile. Thus, “who-done-it” becomes “who-dun-it,” alluding to another sonnet, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130—“If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun”—which centers on romanticized representations of women. This pun is layered on the double meaning of “framed,” which is a metaphor both for deflecting culpability and for indicating boundaries or constraints. As the poem shifts in its second half to the Industrial era, the links between representation and material inequity are manifest in shocking images:
Later, a girl leaves the croft and is scalped
by an unboxed machine. […]
To keep conditions wretched men argue the loveliness
of the Calico workers. […]
[…] This is art in the age of ribbon
production. She stands so still
for the image:
A flash of pussy. The Industrial Age. (Undoc 27–28)
The poem asserts a continuity from the romanticization of cottage workers at the dawn of the nineteenth century to the fully horrific conditions of factory work at the dawn of the twentieth. The maid at the wheel, the girl within the croft (tenant farm), has become a collective of abused, disposable female textile workers. The idealization of the maid’s body has become the mass exploitation of pornography, with a sly nod to Benjamin. In either case, the girl’s body is not her own. But most importantly, the poem never allows us to forget that alienation begins and ends with language.
In Alcalá’s poetry this is especially true in relation to another recurring theme: migration. In “National Affair,” the speaker imagines an erotic encounter as a national allegory: “Your back / to Mexico, my back to what once was / Mexico, we envision each other / in place of someone else, in place / of place” (Undoc 68). The poem “Migration” revisits this conceit, describing two bodies “In sleep, two unlikely / countries bordering” (LUW 56). As in “National Affair,” the bodies in “Migration” hold out the possibility of crossing boundaries through sex. “Which direction / to take,” the poem asks, “forward or forfeit?” (LUW 57). It’s worth asking what the tenor and vehicle of these conceits are. Are these poems ultimately about love, using migration and national borders as metaphors? Or are they poems about borders and migration, using erotic encounters as metaphors? Another poem, “How Language Spanks Us,” begins with the astonishing observation that “
So far, a country that splits itself with laughter at the seams / seems impossible” (LUW 24). Here two idiomatic expressions combine—“split at the seams” and “split with laughter”—into a paronomasiac indictment of linguistic purity. Nations are self-serious affairs, and language is often the grounds upon which these imagined communities are built. Phenomena such as the “English-only” movement in the United States attest to the various ways that people use language to “spank,” or discipline, others. But the saucy enjambment of the homophones seams and seems undercuts the ideal of linguistic purity. Instrumental uses of language are doomed by the excess of signification within any given language.
As indicated by Alcalá’s poetics statement and the title of her third book, MyOTHER TONGUE (riffing on the term mother tongue), linguistic alienation continues to be a central concern of her work.13 This is surely one of the reasons that Alcalá has found a place among contemporary Latina/o poets. Although she is of Spanish, not Latin American descent, Alcalá has published work in two important anthologies of contemporary Latina/o poetry: The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007), and Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing (2014).14 In a prior era, when activists more strictly policed the boundaries of Chicana/o and Boricua authenticity, this would have been unthinkable. But the central concerns of Alcalá’s poetry are in perfect sympathy with the central concerns of most Latina/o poetry from the last thirty years. Alfred Arteaga writes that in Chicana/o poetry, “the border is a space where English and Spanish compete for presence and authority. […] In the broad interface between Anglo and Latin America, the operative tropes, the definitions, the histories and logics and legal codes, the semantics and epistemes are contested daily.”15 For this reason, Arteaga maintains that the multilingualism of Chicana/o poetry is categorically different from the quotation and literary allusion of such modernist poets as Eliot and Pound. Yet the border is not the only place where this linguistic contestation happens; Alcalá’s experience as the daughter of working-class Spanish immigrants has resulted in an aesthetics similar to the “poetic hybridization” Arteaga describes.16 This poetics has extended also to Alcalá’s commitment to poetic translation, including her ongoing work as Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña’s principal English translator.17
However, Alcalá is as interested in the estrangements of multilingualism as she is in the utopic potentiality of hybridization. She writes in “Poetics of Not-Mother Tongue,” “You may wonder if what I truly want is for English to be my mother tongue. If I deny my own mother, twice-over, by writing her in English, and thus love her, long for her, twice-over.” The ambivalence of this statement has its analogue in Alcalá’s poem “Heritage Speaker,” which begins by asking, “What good is it to erect / of absence / a word,” a question that pierces to the heart of family relationships:
When I teach my daughter
to speak
and build a woman
out of me
that is not her mother
but some propriety.18
The entire idea of being a “heritage speaker” is paradoxical; the term denotes a child with an attenuated relationship to her first language. Children of immigrants, for example, may grow up speaking the language of their parents, but in adulthood feel more comfortable speaking, reading, and writing in the dominant language of their society. But who is the heritage speaker of the poem? It would be easy to say that the poem describes Alcalá’s anxieties as a heritage speaker of Spanish, but in these lines, the speaker of the poem describes the paradox of the heritage speaker in relation to her daughter. She teaches her daughter to speak, “builds a woman” out of her, yet her daughter becomes something else, someone not her mother. The poem points out a tricky fact of heritage—we know who we are precisely by our difference from the very people who have shaped us. In another context, Mutlu Konuk Blasing has argued that “the alienation in poetic language” is a version of “the enabling condition of subjectivity in language.”19 Alcalá’s poetry combines a migrant’s sensitivity to this linguistic alienation with deep attention to class and labor. In this sense, she works at the intersection of class-conscious poets such as Mark Nowak and Juliana Spahr and migrant poets such as Juan Felipe Herrera and Myung Mi Kim.
“Heritage Speaker” in fact makes a direct connection between the alienation of language generally and the alienation of poetic language in particular, suggesting that the poet’s relationship to something like a poetic tradition is similar to a child’s relationship to her mother tongue. This is most explicit in allusions to Joe Brainard and Bernadette Mayer in the second half of the poem. The second of these is especially pointed, as Alcalá analogizes the situation of the heritage speaker to the situation of the poet:
Bernadette “turns to me
in the shower” and says
motherhood is now
fashionable among
the girl poets. If so, I want
my hat, a feather in it.
Mallarmé’s, in fact.20
The quotation comes from Mayer’s poem “First turn to me …,” which catalogues a series of erotic encounters between the poet and a lover, tallying the number of times each is brought to orgasm and concluding that “it’s only fair for a woman to come more / think of all the times they didn’t care.”21 Alcalá modifies the quotation for “Heritage Speaker”—in Mayer’s poem, the line is an invitation, “First turn to me after a shower …”—as if performing the instability of language that the poem dramatizes in the mother-daughter relationship.
The metapoetic gesture of “Heritage Speaker” reflects another of Alcalá’s ongoing concerns, as well as another, perhaps nonintuitive site of alienation. Metapoetics in Alcalá’s work is never in the service of reflecting on poetry as an autonomous or rarified discourse. It is not art for art’s sake. Rather, metapoetic references continually challenge the presumption that poetry is a kind of nonalienated labor, particular in the present constitution of the literary field. Raymond Williams writes, “The most interesting Marxist position, because of its emphasis on practice, is that which defines the pressing and limiting conditions within which, at any time, specific kinds of writing can be done.”22 Poems such as “Undocumentary,” “Job #6,” “A Girl Leaves the Croft,” and “Class” invite us to do just that in relation to poetry. Thus, in “Undocumentary,” the poet figures her alienation through the phrase “weak at the laptop,” a sly reference to the technicity of contemporary poetry writing. In “Job #6,” she compares being a poet to being a secretary tasked with taking dictation, lamenting, “There is no line of escape, / holidays are finite systems, the rest / a blur of supermarket cake / into rising rent” (Undoc 61). The pun on “line of escape”—both a line of flight and a poetic line—is pointed. Poetry provides no escape from the drudgery of quotidian labor or the demands of rent.
Considered from this angle, the final stanza of “Heritage Speaker” takes on added significance. Mothering as labor is a prominent theme of Mayer’s poetry, and inasmuch as Alcalá takes up the theme in her poetry, she could be seen as belonging to a similar poetic heritage or tradition. But the statement that “motherhood is now / fashionable among / the girl poets” is ambiguous at best. Now marks a shift from an earlier epoch in which labor was more strictly gendered, forcing a choice between motherhood and professional or creative endeavors. From a third-wave feminist perspective, the ability to choose both seems like an obvious good, but the word fashionable is dismissive, as if mothering were not a deeply considered choice, only a trend. Alternately, the implicit critique could be of a cultural milieu that gives the impression that there is no choice to be made. Poetry and mothering are, after all, both forms of service work. They feed into the logic of flexibility that underwrites neoliberalism. Flexibility suggests freedom, but labor is labor, and as so many contemporary service workers have discovered, the notion of flexibility more often than not results in unrestrained exploitation, as the boundaries between home, leisure, and work are first blurred and then erase
d. No wonder the poet at the end of “Heritage Speaker” yearns for Mallarmé’s feather, a reference presumably to the famous poem “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”), in which a “plume solitaire éperdue” (“solitary distraught feather”) symbolizes the purity of poetic endeavor (plume translates literally to feather but also signifies pen).23 Such artistic singularity seems far removed from the work of contemporary poets, particularly poets doubling their labor as mothers.
In Alcalá’s poetry, then, linguistic and social alienation are inextricable. Alcalá has spoken of writing poetry as answering “a call to deliver,” noting that as the child of immigrants, she has felt acutely the “responsibility and struggle to convert distinct linguistic currencies.” That struggle is ubiquitous in her work as both poet and translator, but it has also meant laying bare the “deficits” of language, in Alcalá’s words, “what one can say in one language and not the other, how supplementation, invention, and silence are at times necessary (and also a means of self-preservation).”24 It becomes the work of the poet at once to reproduce—so as to illuminate—and to attempt to reconcile these alienations. As a final example, consider “Voice Activation,” a prose poem. An epigraph by Ludwig Wittgenstein precedes the poem, warning, “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.” The poem then begins as follows:
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