American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

It was at this moment that I saw light in my body not sun over the sand but a drip of soft blue on a piece of skin that had fallen off my body and dissolved into its own resistance

  The Performance of Becoming Human

  On the side of the highway a thousand refugees step off a school bus and into a sun that can only be described as “blazing.”

  The rabbi points to the line the refugees step over and says: “that’s where the country begins.”

  This reminds me of Uncle Antonio. He would have died had his tortured body not been traded to another country for minerals.

  Made that up.

  This is a story about diplomatic protections.

  The refugees were processed through Austria or Germany or maybe Switzerland.

  Somehow they were discovered in some shit village in some shit country by European soldiers and taken to an embassy where they were promptly bathed, injected with vaccines, interrogated, etc.

  Their bodies were traded by country A in exchange for some valuable natural resource needed by country B.

  There was only one gag, says the rabbi, as he tucks his children into bed. So the soldiers took turns passing the filthy thing back and forth between the mouths of the two prisoners. The mother and son licked each other’s slobber off the dirty rag that had been in who knows how many other mouths.

  You love to write about this, don’t you?

  I am paid by the word for my transcriptions. Just one more question about the gag.

  He wants to know what color the gag was, what it was made of, how many mouths had licked it. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?

  They used their belts to bind them by the waist to the small cage they were trapped in.

  Everything reminds me of a story about an ape captured on a boat by a group of European soldiers who showed him how to become human by teaching him how to spit and belch.

  Everything is always about the performance of becoming human.

  Observing a newly processed refugee, the rabbi says: “I have seen those blue jeans before.”

  At times like this, he thinks: I can say just about anything right now.

  This is, after all, a bedtime story for the end of the world:

  I am moving beneath the ground and not sleeping and trying to cross the border from one sick part of the world to another.

  But where is the light and why does it not come in through your bloody fingers?

  You hold your bloody fingers before my eyes and there is light in them but I cannot see it.

  You say: there are countries in my bloody fingers. I am interested in the borders.

  Or: I am interested in the gas chambers in your collapsible little fingers.

  You put them to my face and I see your hands open and in them I see a thick wall and a sky and an ocean and ten years pass and it is still nighttime and I am falling and there are bodies on the ground in your bloody hands.

  Think about the problem really hard then let it go and when you least expect it a great solution will appear in your mind.

  The broken bodies stand by the river and wait for the radiation to trickle out of the houses and into their skin.

  They stand under billboards and sniff paint and they know the eyes that watch them own their bodies.

  A more generous interpretation might be that their bodies are shared between the earth, the state and the bank.

  The sentences are collapsing one by one and the bodies are collapsing in your bloody hands and you stitch me up and pray I will sleep and you tell me of the shattered bus stops where the refugees are waiting for the buses to take them to the mall where they are holding us now and there is a man outside our bodies making comments about perspective and scale and light and there is light once more in your bloody fingers.

  All I see is the sea and my mother and father falling into it.

  Again? That’s like the most boring image ever.

  The water is frozen and we are sleeping on the rocks and watching the cows on the cliff and you tell me they might fall and break open and that sheep and humans and countries will fall out of them and that this will be the start of the bedtime story you will tell me on this our very last night on earth.

  Come closer, you say, with your eyes.

  Move your bloody face next to mine and rub me with it. We are dying from so many stories. We are not complete in the mind from so many stories of burning houses, missing children, slaughtered animals. Who will put the stories back together and who will restore the bodies? I am working towards the end but first I need a stab, a small slice. The stories they are there but we need a bit more wit. We need something lighter to get us to the end of this story. Did you hear the one about the guy who picked up girls by quoting the oral testimonies of the illiterate villagers who watched their brothers and sisters get slaughtered?

  Or:

  Andalé andalé arriba arriba welcome to Tijuana you cannot eat anymore barbecued iguana.

  Have you met Speedy Gonzales’ cousin?

  His name is Slow Poke Rodrigues.

  En español se llama Lento Rodrigues.

  He’s a drunk little fucking mouse.

  His predator, the lazy cat baking in the sun, thinks he will taste good with chili peppers but there’s something I forgot to tell you. Slow Poke always pack a gun and now he’s going to blow your flabbergasted feline face off.

  It was 1987 and my friends from junior high trapped me on the floor and mashed bananas in my face and sang: it’s no fun being an illegal alien!

  You know you can die from so many stories

  The puddy cat guards the AJAX cheese factory behind the fence, right across the border.

  The wetback mice see the gringo cheese.

  They smell the gringo cheese.

  Your gringo cheese it smells so good.

  They need Speedy Gonzales to get them some ripe, fresh, stinky gringo cheese.

  Do you know this Speedy Gonzales, asks one of the starving wetback mice.

  I know him, Speedy Gonzales frens with my seester (mice laugh). Speedy Gonzales frens with everybody’s seester.

  Ha ha ha the little border-crossing, sneak-fucking mouses think it’s cute that they’re invading our culture to steal our cheese but it don’t make a difference because you and I (cue the rhythm and blues) we are taking a stroll on the electrified fence of love cause I feel a little Southern Californian transnational romance coming on right about now.

  I feel like Daniel from the Karate Kid because I too once had a Southern Californian experience where I wasn’t aware I was learning ancient Japanese secrets when I was waxing on and waxing off.

  And I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Reseda.

  I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Pasadena.

  And I am with you Mr. Miyagi at the All Valley Karate tournament.

  And I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Okinawa where you went in Karate Kid II to meet your long lost girlfriend when you discovered that she wasn’t married off when she was just a teenager to your fiercest Okinawan rival.

  And I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Tijuana where it’s murder and diarrhea and always kinda kinky.

  But seriously, friends:

  What do you make of this darkness that surrounds us?

  They chopped up two dozen bodies last night and today I have to pick up my dry cleaning.

  In the morning I need to assess student learning outcomes as part of an important administrative initiative to secure the nation’s future by providing degrees of economic value to the alienated, urban youth.

  So for now hasta luego compadres and don’t worry too much about the bucket of murmuring shit that is the unitedstatesian night.

  What does it say? What does it say? What do you want it to say?

  POETICS STATEMENT

  the continuum a broken introduction

  1 I tend to only be accepted on conference panels whose titles include the word “translation” or “Latino.”

  2 One year, I thought it would be funny/useful to propose an AWP panel that had both
the words “translation” and “Latino” in the title.

  3 The panel was called “Translation/Trans-Latino: Writing Across the Borders.”

  4 This was the description: “For many reasons, it has become common to place Spanish-language writing from Latin America in a separate category from English-language US Latino writing. While we recognize the context and importance of this split, this panel seeks to start a new dialogue about writers who skillfully navigate both categories. In the process, we will discuss how a multilingual, multinational, ‘Trans-Latino’ vision has shaped our writing, translating, editing, and teaching in productive and challenging ways.”

  5 This paragraph is making me laugh.

  6 The adverb “skillfully” is making me laugh.

  7 The word “productive” is making me laugh.

  8 I guess I wrote this thing, or had something significant to do with the writing of this thing.

  9 I’m going to spend this sentence making fun of myself for using words like “skillfully” and “productive.”

  10 But despite the pseudo-professional barf words, something important happened in this paragraph.

  11 I was starting to formulate a position, a poetics, and maybe even an ethics.

  12 And by ethics I mean where I want to stand in the world, how I want to understand myself in relation to others, how I want to understand myself in relation to the problem of myself.

  13 Which is to say that I wanted to stand in both worlds, on both sides of the border, in Spanish and English at the same time.

  14 Which is to say that I was starting to understand something about continuums.

  15 Continuums of language, on one level.

  16 But more than that what I was starting to articulate was something about why I write and why I translate, or what it is for me that writing and translation actually writes and translates.

  17 At the time of this panel, I had just published The Book of Interfering Bodies and I had just published my translation of Raúl Zurita’s Song for His Disappeared Love.

  18 When I started writing The Book of Interfering Bodies, I had been trying to write a novel about a guy who was obsessed with watching online videos of people from around the world committing suicide.

  19 But I couldn’t write the novel.

  20 Things kept appearing in the protagonist’s eyes and in my nightmares everything was equal in value. Because when you watch the evening news, I dreamed, everything is presented as being equal in value.

  21 The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, laughed a journalist, as he fondled the ashes of a dead book. And the death of forty-two babies was equal in value to the ninety-year-old woman who shot herself while the sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which was equal in value to the collapsing of the global economy which was equal in value to the military in country X seizing the land of semi-nomadic peoples who had lived in the local rain forest for thousands of years which was equal in value to the girl who was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which was just about the same as a bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while water was dumped over it, etc …

  22 Continuums.

  23 How was it that there was a South American war happening in the streets of Chicago?

  24 How was it that there was a unitedstatesian war happening in the streets of Santiago?

  25 How was it that, in Raúl Zurita’s words, “Nagasaki and Hiroshima were passing before the Chilean sky?”

  26 The nation-state was collapsing as the unit of measure for how I was understanding experience.

  27 The continent was collapsing as the unit of measure for how I was understanding experience.

  28 In my nightmares, African slaves were being transported by helicopter along the river Danube.

  29 European Jews were being slaughtered by Spanish colonists in the Caribbean.

  30 The Mapuche of Southern Chile were being shot in the streets of Chicago.

  31 A refugee from Hiroshima was caught in the Liberian civil war.

  32 These were my nightmares.

  33 Boat people. Train people. Desert people.

  34 Slaughtered lands on a continuum of borderless slaughter.

  35 What started as a translational translatinidad became something bigger.

  36 Which is to say that I was starting to understand something about translation and continuums.

  37 Continuums of language in one way.

  38 Continuums of culture in another way.

  39 And continuums of violence in all the ways.

  40 I was starting to understand that my life as a Chilean and my life as a Chicagoan were inseparable.

  41 In my dream-writing, the portrait of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was projected on the John Hancock Tower on North Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago.

  42 Mayor Rahm Emanuel held a gun to his head and committed suicide in La Moneda, the Presidential palace in downtown Santiago that was bombed on September 11, 1973.

  43 Everything, writes Gertrude Stein, is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.

  44 The children in my dreams were screaming: everything is the same except decomposition and the time of the decomposition and the time of the decomposition.

  45 Someone must have once said something like: nationalism is the belief that the shit on one side of a border smells worse than the shit on the other side of a border.

  46 Maybe I said it?

  47 I think I copied it from somebody.

  48 Nevertheless, continuums.

  49 Continuums of violence, of fear, of language, of terror, of slaughter, of broken bodies of pollution, torture, ethics and power.

  50 Because we are surrounded by people who live and breathe and die with no voice.

  51 Because everywhere houses and streets and cities and states and nations collapse with no voice.

  52 Because everywhere there are people with no voice who cannot be absorbed.

  53 Because there are things like this, writing continues to take place.

  PARDON ME MR. BORZUTZKY / IF

  Kristin Dykstra

  PARDON ME MR. PARRA

  If you admire Rulfo so much

  Why don’t you write a novel?

  NICANOR PARRA1

  Daniel Borzutzky’s 2005 collection, Arbitrary Tales, seemed to promise the arrival of a new fiction writer.2 The short stories operate as fiction: they mostly read as narratives with identifiable beginnings, middles, and ends, even accounting for hybridity introduced by obvious interventions in genre, such as a “silent opera” in three acts. Interviewed after the collection’s appearance, Borzutzky stated, “I try to tell stories as historical allegories, as plays, as operas, as rituals, as untold stories.”3

  Despite this early emphasis on storytelling, Borzutzky’s diverse projects published between 2007 and 2016 circulate in worlds dedicated primarily to other genres: poetry, literary translation, and nonfiction engaging poetry and translation. In November 2016 Borzutzky won a National Book Award for Poetry with The Performance of Becoming Human, public recognition associating him more directly with that genre.4

  Upon closer examination of the work that led up to that moment, however, his apparent switch in genre becomes visibly complex because it does not project or isolate poetry as an endpoint. By 2015 Borzutzky had claimed an inter-genre space where he could repurpose components of narrative:

  For [The Book of] Interfering Bodies, I was really trying to write a novel at the beginning of the process.5 I failed at writing that novel. So what I started to do was create all of these pieces, poems, texts (whatever we want to call them) that were about invented novels, summaries of impossible novels that I couldn’t actually write. The poems became a way of writing the novel I wanted to write. In many ways, I am much more interested in novels. I’ve been much more influenced by novelists, I should say, than I have been by poets.6

  Within his inter-genre compositions, Bor
zutzky focuses on the unit of the sentence, enabling his dialogue with prose. Most often the sentences are complete, although in the 2015 and 2016 works, he begins to cut off punctuation, leave some statements and questions hanging, and use a small amount of enjambment.

  As inter-genre pieces, Borzutzky’s works are consistent with a tendency toward hybrid approaches to contemporary North American English language writing. However, his “hybridity” extends far past formal concerns, due to significant cultural content linked to points south. The works from 2007–2016 emerge from selective cultural repertoires particular to an author drawing on diasporic family life from the perspective of a second generation—that is, as a transnational subject born in the receiving country to emigrant parents.

  To refer back to the US side of his transnational poetics, Borzutzky mingles with contemporary poets who present “the poem as a document that extends into and participates in history.”7 His “documents” invoke a transnational continuum not only lived by the author, but expanded through long-term commitments to Latin American literature and US Latinx studies, Spanish-English literary translation, and attention to transnational discourses about violence, human rights, and neoliberalism.

  The transnational Latin American underpinnings sustaining Borzutzky’s poetics surge into view the more one seeks their landmarks. They remain under-remarked, probably because his geographical and rhetorical spans are unusual in contemporary transnational work, including work by other self-identified Latinx writers. Borzutzky bridges the United States to a nation far from its borders and minimally represented in US and/or US Latinx literary panoramas: Chile, whose conflict-generated diaspora spread to at least 110 nations, and probably more, after 1973.8

  In his poetics, Borzutzky crafts the literary version of phenomena now seen in other affective practices of the international Chilean diaspora, particularly recent iterations from its second-generation descendants, who generate their own connections to a Chilean landscape of memory across many distances. Second-generation transnationals produce “a radical resignification of traumatic memory in the diaspora space, creating opportunities for new bonds to be articulated among a wider audience beyond traumas of dictatorship.”9 Borzutzky makes use of cultural looping and the assertion of continua throughout the Americas as central features of his poetic bonds.