American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  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, from 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.25

  In performance, Alcalá often “reads” this poem by playing a digital file generated by text-to-speech software. Along with the epigraph, the performance cues us to think about the poem in relation to other modes of communication during this, the so-called information age. The poem promises the creation of a voice so “limpid” that bodies are not necessary. Even without the important social cues that come from physical bodies, the poem declares that we will not be confused, but it ironically undercuts this promise by highlighting the intense physicality of language. Into this matrix of technological alienation Alcalá inserts the social alienation that often results from migration and encounters between different cultures.

  Two modes of alienation thus potentially result from the circuits of global connectivity: technological alienation via digital media, and social alienation via labor migration. But these modes of alienation redound to the original alienation of the lyric subject from herself, as the issue of the poem’s clarity returns:

  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.26

  The poem inverts the usual relationship of object and subject: rather than the reader understanding the poem, the question is now how well the poem understands the poet. Very well, it seems. The poem claims to have achieved a clarity effective enough to counteract the various forms of alienation the poet experiences. Yet what does it mean to say that the poem understands the poet perfectly? It is apparent that the poet is speaking ironically here—that the poem’s “understanding” is no better than the understanding of a machine. Nevertheless, the poem invokes its own potential as a utopian space of nonalienation, or perhaps better said, the nonalienated expression of poetic labor. This ironized, constrained utopian promise emerges from a historically specific vision of alienation under neoliberalism. Wittgenstein, speaking in the second person, encourages his reader not to forget that a poem “is not used in the language-game of giving information.” The question in a reified world such as ours is, what value can a poem possibly have if it doesn’t convey information, that universal currency? To put it in more explicitly Marxist terms, how can the poem have any exchange value without the use value generated by its function as an information-delivery technology? These questions indicate how poetry itself becomes an axis of contradiction for Alcalá.

  For Latina poets, as for many other poets working from marginalized subject positions, poetry as labor is dominated by various experiences of contingency: contingent labor structures, contingent publishing opportunities, a contingent relationship to the intellectual class. Under these conditions, it should not be surprising that Alcalá has developed an aesthetics so distinct from the mainstream of US poetry. Again, aesthetics is a crucial term here, indexing an artistic practice that attempts to resolve the deep material and spiritual alienations that capital continues to generate. The problem in “Voice Activation,” after all, is not merely labor. It is the ineluctable fact of death, made worse by various aspects of contemporary society that conspire to make the death of a parent even more abject. Alienation in Alcalá’s poetry describes our vexed social and economic investments, but also always the multiple, inexpressible ways we are estranged from ourselves and each other. The poems’ indeterminacy seems at first to fully enact that estrangement, to reify it—that is, until we understand that only by passing through alienation may we encounter the possibility of reconciliation, its radical potential.

  NOTES

  1. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 32.

  2. Rosa Alcalá, Undocumentaries (Exeter: Shearsman, 2010), 50. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Undoc.

  3. Carmen Giménez Smith, “An Interview with Rosa Alcalá,” Letras Latinas (blog), November 3, 2011. Available online at letraslatinasblog.blogspot.com.

  4. Michael Dowdy, Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 9.

  5. On the unequal distribution of risk, see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992).

  6. William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 7.

  7. Rosa Alcalá, The Lust of Unsentimental Waters (Exeter: Shearsman, 2012), 17. Hereafter cited parenthetically as LUW.

  8. For more on Rita Hayworth, nee Margarita Cansino, see William Anthony Nericcio, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).

  9. Rosa Alcalá, “Cante Grande,” in The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, ed. Francisco Aragón (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 12.

  10. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 167–68.

  11. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 7.

  12. See Kenneth Morgan, The Birth of Industrial Britain: Social Change, 1750–1850, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013).

  13. Rosa Alcalá, MyOTHER TONGUE (New York: Futurepoem, 2017).

  14. Carmen Giménez Smith and John Chávez, eds., Angels of the Americlypse (Denver, CO: Counterpath, 2014).

  15. Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 70.

  16. Ibid., 69.

  17. See Cecilia Vicuña, Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, ed. and trans. Rosa Alcalá (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012).

  18. Rosa Alcalá, “Heritage Speaker,” Boston Review, April 22, 2015. Available online at bostonreview.net.

  19. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 5.

  20. Alcalá, “Heritage Speaker.”

  21. Bernadette Mayer, A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New York: New Directions, 1992), 121.

  22. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 204.

  23. For a digital facsimile of Mallarmé’s poem, see coupdedes.com. For an excellent English translation by Basil Cleveland, see www.ubu.com.

  24. Alcalá, “Aesthetic Statement,” Angels of the Americlypse, 17.

  25. Alcalá, MyOTHER TONGUE.

  26. Ibid.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Works by Rosa Alcalá

  BOOKS

  Undocumentaries. Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2010.

  The Lust of Unsentimental Waters. Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2012.

  MyOTHER TONGUE. New York: Futurepoem Books, 2017.

  CHAPBOOKS

  Some Maritime Disasters This Century. Brooklyn: Belladonna, 2003.

  Undocumentary. Dos Press, 2008.

  TRANSLATIONS BY ROSA A
LCALÁ

  Bestiary: Selected Poems, 1986–1997. By Lourdes Vazquez. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2004.

  Mauve Sea-Orchids. By Lila Zemborain. With Mónica de la Torre. Brooklyn: Belladonna, 2008.

  Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012.

  Cecilia Vicuña: New and Selected Poems. Ed. Rosa Alcalá. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, forthcoming.

  BRIAN BLANCHFIELD

  POEMS

  FROM Not Even Then

  One First Try and Then Another

  Careful, a night set on edge

  the European tradition of virtuoso

  and the raw desire to articulate.

  I pushed them both backward on the bed in the end

  and each played on, one first

  try and then another.

  Soft then on succession thought.

  The instrument all torso is loved where are held

  fitting the flown down housemartin with a reed

  or belying midway uncertainty

  in tandem the hands, and acts adolescent.

  A natural vaults a natural

  development, his farther back barn jacket

  American and strewn as if spare.

  Thought soft the crescendo all along

  saws, neither stroke inward or from the heart

  except it begins unbecoming

  building in roomy youth.

  We have our no, libido, go.

  Then all limbs arms and loudly I don’t want to

  play down the skillless touch.

  If the Blank Outcome in Dominoes Adds a Seventh Side to Dice

  A system builds around refusal of a system. Adrift

  in flagless sabotage, ahead the fleet prolepsis in arrears.

  I went with luck and I went without and to go is to give

  a leave. My dowry is narrow as a strait, as collapsed and

  goodness gushing a get up more sophisticated. One day, a tile

  in the driven sand, the next like nothing else. Not in thirteen

  new ways to play can the one that’s wild be reconciled.

  I send away for nothing. I let prepare the least and blackest bed

  occasion, its foot its head and windowswidth its length,

  and lay along a want of stars a piracy’s bit of balance,

  at sixes and sevens with facing’s nature, the cross with danger

  purity, and in the time it takes a stretch of beach to dry

  and on a day when all the mail from Normal’d come,

  in death’s detail, both in its clutches and in its throes,

  I make in love my ribs fit his.

  FROM A Several World

  According to Herodotus

  The Phoenicians were good at trenches. A channel

  with steep sides often broke, they saw, so

  they knew to widen out near the lip.

  If they were digging waterways, about twice as wide

  as volume demanded was optimal

  for coursing.

  With bridges, not so much. Built a couple crossing

  a strait, one made of flax, and the other,

  papyrus. That is history. A paper bridge

  didn’t hold, though, after a storm, doesn’t. That

  is engineering. The final chariot

  is the chariot befitting the king, carted right up

  to overlook what he had arranged

  to surpass. Wouldn’t. That’s policy.

  A people far from sovereign.

  Good at trenches, bad at bridges.

  On the job after the ransack and pillage

  of another people. Only in Arizona and only now

  is Phoenician a demonym. I mean, what I heard is

  there was no Phoenix home

  to Phoenicians destroying Greece

  for Persia. Only a story of a bird upstart

  where another bird burned. Demonym has its own

  Wikipedia page. The word is

  twenty-two years old. Imagine your own

  twenty-two year old [demonym here] here:

  curly hair, lashes, headphones if you like.

  Tell him, if you like, learning where he’s from,

  what he is. Now imagine

  learning where he’s from, being what you are,

  sending him back. That is

  statecraft.

  Edge of Water, Nimrod Falls, Montana

  Bareness in greater proportions, bare

  in the pairing, the slow man and his son;

  that estimation, too, the boy steps ahead of. Behind,

  upshore, a study of the swimming hole and his

  buttery way down the rocks, rippling dilemma

  who, it will be said, must learn to shave,

  whose aptitude on his own pertains. If uncircumcised, sorry

  and self-innocent, example. For feet, the wet white dumplings

  manage for now the body weight. Then, immersion, then

  a shallow paddle he picked up somewhere.

  No place is dangerous. The situation arrives

  as we do. Dad, when he wants someone

  to give attention; Butthole, he calls back to the bank

  to chide what he contrives is caution, when

  contrivance suffices; Baby. The man stands dry.

  The boy remarks the cooler water in the cove.

  There and back, imitation bats, cliff swallows

  hector the falls and the sulfur air and recur

  to the limestone, a thousand-chambered console.

  Pferd

  Marino Marini, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

  Gift Swiss, holding American, art Italian, tradition

  Boeotian. The diabetic buckles on the expo path,

  dislodges the fizzy headset and—would it be cavalier

  to add—misses in the Snapple retrieved for him

  the incidental part Marini plays in the tour of art

  a love poem once underwent, beloved incidental, he

  on whose behalf from all the world’s unconcern

  one circulating suitor contrived express concession.

  Anyway if there is a homologue in the Frick what

  can it mean in Charlotte, stooped at the centerpiece,

  in powered-down posterity, in a sugar low,

  North Carolina?

  Not rearing, and no rider, right

  or wrong, so by the four hooves bronzed

  into the tray base no honorific casualty’s

  inferred; but the stance braces, that is, informs

  an agony, an agony then the horse’s alone, as though

  to throw high and backward the head on the spine

  were despair that the slab will slide. Groundless

  the figurative foal in full maturity modern, that is,

  oblique. What else call it to be cavalier, material,

  about the pain of one you bring about to pain?

  The controlled spill of more manufacture beneath

  inheres in modernism but is, in area, the bed no

  more of a boy who climbs into the toy to celebrate

  his protracted trample, or to play at spartan sleep,

  a mean and final floor to test his cheek for bone.

  How often did he wake, the namesake child

  whose congeries at angel level benefactors

  rebuilt a home, and catch the study Ernst

  had made of WC Fields, rotund as a commode,

  twirling an umbrella made substantially of rain,

  and revolve the pony patrolling spooks.

  The hairless body so smooth the risen scoop

  of orifice is more singular, ocular, and since

  cleanly the spout and dress of tail has been, in

  the signature stub above, arrested,

  a medallion plumped, from there the line

  leads the unrestricted eye beneath the rump to

  the retractions of phallus in undercarriage

  custody.


  What is it supposed to mean, in Charlotte

  or he’ll faint and seize, the sweetest, densest

  thing you have and hurry, North Carolina? This

  would have been just after the war. How again did

  O’Hara do away with his Memorial Day 1950?

  The stone in uprisen turmoil is the sculptor’s

  work, but the patina on the flare of nostril

  is the touch of the patrons’ children who

  mounted the petered pony, locked

  foursquare on its outspread hocks against

  the flat pan of pewter as though it could escape

  him, who mounted him and rubbed his

  beestung or terror-fixed muzzle green. Did they

  say that in your audiotour. I said,

  Did they tell you that in your audio tour?

  Eclogue Onto an Idea

  Up ahead out here, and his affiliate, rival in the eyes,

  someone near, but not our crowd, someone whom

  you approach in a poem only

  to the extent of his vantage out, to the verb open out

  onto. To that extent, you fit into his

  looking suit, to the glove points, othering,

  a long parenthesis of lens, a self sort of, a caul kind of

  first feeling, to the doubled pocket

  mouth. Kissed him from inside:

     what’s yes in any es gibt,

       contributing thus

  the plus of a little sentience. Have you too felt extra fleetingly?

  The early given is he faces the same way we, as though

  we sent him to this promontory. To him assign