American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  As she enters mid-career, Carmen Giménez Smith operates in the crux of these paradoxes. Her body of work forms a rich matrix of versions and inversions as she examines the contradictions and confluences between motherhood and daughterhood, power and subjugation, identity and identification, poem and poet. Across her books, Giménez Smith reaches out to, separates from, reevaluates, and reapproaches a variety of mothers/matrices: literature as a political/aesthetic mother, feminism as a political/aesthetic mother, the poet’s own mother, and the poet herself as a mother to children. Her writing conducts a Kristevan current of affects: desire, grief, anger, frustration, joy. In Giménez Smith’s work, paradox and poetry co-constitute each other; her writing is a way of claiming coauthorship with paradox, and with the matrices that constitute her. This is to say, as her poems and essays become the grounds on which certain affiliations are tested, such contestations become the form through which the poems are embodied—affiliation, rejection, and rapprochement form the bodies of the poems themselves. This is one way of describing the palpable necessity driving Giménez Smith’s relentless (re)invention. As she herself writes, “Necessity is the mother of all that pours out of me.”2

  2.

  Giménez Smith’s body of work so far includes five books of lyrics and one prose memoir, which itself is made up of lyric fragments. A consistently renovating energy courses through all of this work, uniting it as an oeuvre while at the same time revealing individual pieces to be partial, fragmented, and triaged, recalling the initiating phrase from Roberto Bolaño’s “First Infrarealist Manifesto”: “DÉJENLO TODO, NUEVAMENTE.”3 This orientation is reflected in the titles of Giménez Smith’s books—Odalisque in Pieces (2009), Bring Down the Little Birds (2010), The City She Was (2011), Goodbye, Flicker (2012), Milk & Filth (2013), and Cruel Futures (2018)4—retrospective, contrarian, or smashed-up titles which suggest that artmaking is provisional, that a book once finished must be moved on from, that affiliation leads to rejection and on to the next affiliation, the next rejection. This is the true path of the artist.

  It makes sense to speak in such broad strokes of Giménez Smith’s work because at several points in her career, she has herself sketched such frames—the poem “Vita” in The City She Was; her book-length memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds; and her most characteristic poem, “Parts of an Autobiography” from Milk & Filth. “Parts of an Autobiography” is a magnificently self-contradictory and tenacious piece, which, even in its concrete appearance on the page, enacts the drama of affiliation and rejection. Its wide, numbered stanzas in all) resemble the long banners of protesters marching down a street. In this context the whiteness of the page becomes active and thrilling, as if indicating a space of newness and possibility into which the stanzas (and, by implication, the speaker-poet) march.

  Like any manifesto, “Parts of an Autobiography” makes a claim on the present moment—“I want to stage a coup, mostly an aesthetic one”5—and describes the historical conditions that necessitate this claim: “I’m a feminist for all the bodies strewn over history and semi-emerging from the earth.”6 The poem’s dazzling yet unpredictable progress begins with a series of claims about the speaker-poet’s mother:

  1. My mother was a cater-waiter. She wrote rubber checks that kept our dysfunction afloat. She didn’t cook or do windows.

  2. Her life was difficult because she was a brown woman. This was and is indisputable.

  3. She taught me to braid a rope of my hair out of the abyss of our class, poems for ascension.

  4. She gave me androgyny when I was trying to defy category.

  5. Or: the rules were out of my reach.7

  The “indisputable” origin point of the poem and the origin point of the poet’s aesthetics and politics are the mother. But as Deleuze and Guattari have suggested, this origin point is in fact already a site of contestation, of conquest, and in the next stanza, the mother endows the speaker with anti-taxonomical strategies of political and aesthetic resistance—“She gave me androgyny when I was trying to defy category”—which also involves a qualification of the absolute similarity of mother and daughter along the axis of biological sex. Most characteristically radical in the passage just quoted is the spasm between “indisputable” in stanza 2 and the “Or” in stanza 5; stanza 5 suggests that defiance has been not so much a choice, but a triaged strategy in response to the insurmountable summit of privilege. The speaker defies it at least in part because “the rules were out of my reach.” The “Or” statement qualifies the triumphal progress inherent to the manifesto’s conventionally serial form but is also a way of strengthening this assemblage at its sutures: moving backward, adjusting, then moving forward again.

  Paralleling this self-modifying Or-logic, the poem proceeds, like Giménez Smith’s entire body of work, to move away from and back to this mother figure as well as other mothers, including feminism-as-mother: “14. Sometimes feminism seemed a miracle, a cork bobbing up for air in the ocean. / 15. Or I was the cork and the ocean was everything else that conspired and conspires to be like a cage.”8 And poetry-as-mother: “I was certain that I could rely on the I/eye, which turned out to be the most elusive quality.”9 And iconic figures such as Dworkin, Plath, Sexton, Joni Mitchell, and “my friend Jamie’s Mom.”10 At one point, the speaker-poet delights in the feminist gesture of simply listing the feminine names of her friends, casting her poems as inscriptions bearing these names: “I write poems to Christine and to Krystal and to Lily and to Rosa and to Rachel and to Tawnya and to Aïda and Kari and Larisa and to Lety and to Courtney and Barbara.”11

  Apart from this interval of joyous listing, however, more frequently the clausal sentence structure and the successiveness of the stanzas allows the speaker-poet to make a claim of affiliation and then modify this claim, creating a continuously helical structure of stanzas or clauses that pair and yet invert each other, like mirror twins. This can be seen in the passages I quoted earlier, with their inverted yet mirrored claims about feminism or about poetry. This system of doubling, reversing, and splitting recalls the cell division by which complex organisms are shaped in the womb and continue forming bodies after birth. It is a generative system that copies and preserves errors: “58. I’m the Shitty Parent, I’m a Shitty Parent. I write my reparations but don’t back off from the art. I’ll be the one that teaches my children about complicated people.”12 Such “errorism”13 also allows for the generation of powerful, uncanny mutants, what the speaker calls “femme-chivalry”:14 “Part-Césaire, part-Solanas, part blood-sweat-and-tears.”15 Importantly, this is a system of gendered yet nonheterosexual generation in which the male contribution is almost entirely elided: “54. I want my problems to be Wallace Stevens, but they’re Anne Sexton.”16

  The elision of motherhood and twinship is at first counterintuitive, but is in fact apt as a reflection of the physical experience of a female poet whose body comes to resemble her mother’s during adolescence and more so if she becomes a mother; mother-twinship also reflects the cell-level process of DNA transcription that involves copying, reversal, replication, and errors. As Giménez Smith’s body of work suggests, she is wary of becoming her mother’s twin and yet hopes for this too; the mother in this poem is tough and resourceful, and has a cosmic, generative glamour. The political possibilities of the speaker’s susceptibility to twinship are embodied in this claim about her “baby sister”: “87. I am my baby sister’s surviving twin, narrowly averting the piano from the window, and I will use that survival as tribute.”17 As with the opening gesture of the poem, here the speaker claims power by making a claim on an (in this case, paradoxical) origin point—a temporally and biologically impossible twinship with a younger sister. The power of paradox is thus harnessed to the abject position of the survivor to voltify the speaker and allow her to claim “I will use that survival as tribute.” This idea of survival itself as a “tribute” to those who, like the sister, could not survive, locates a power source for Giménez Smith’s political aesthetic. It is
mundane yet supra-mundane, cosmic, affect-driven, both logical and irrational like the cosmos itself:

  22. I wanted to make bloody holes in the earth with my body like Ana Mendieta, but with poems.

  23. That was when I was young, but it’s still true now.

  24. I saw power and its limited scope, and I wanted it.

  25. This want created a monster, a feminist.

  26. I’m a feminist for all the bodies strewn over history and semi-emerging from the earth.

  27. There are deserted bodies and ruined bodies and starved bodies all around me.18

  In this highly charged series of stanzas, the speaker gains power by claiming likenesses. In stanza 22, the printing of the earth with bloody holes is transferred from iconic midcentury Latina intermedia artist Mendieta to the speaker, just as holes are transferred from body to earth or from earth to paper. This implicit model of stamping and transferring is a kind of description of matrilineal inheritance and is the method by which the poem progresses, stepping back and then redoubling strength. “I” is twinned with “Mendieta,” “monster” is twinned with “feminist,” the speaker’s power is multiplied as she is twinned with “all the bodies strewn over history,” and the poem itself multiplies this stanza and becomes proliferant and abundant through this charged process of twinning and multiplication. In this sense, by setting up these chains of twins that double for each other, move apart from each other, and reconverge, Giménez Smith builds an anachronistic, multi-bodied transdisciplinal power station that runs on gyno-power, using blueprints from Kristeva and Cixous.

  But for all this poem’s exhilarating claim making and identification, it would be a mistake to see Giménez Smith’s poems as performing invulnerablity. Instead, in Giménez Smith’s work, vulnerability and invulnerability, resourcefulness and dispossession are also mirror twins, generating energy and affect through their likeness and unlikeness. Vulnerability is indicated in the admissions Giménez Smith works into the poem, such as “My history with writing is a history with failure. Not elegant aesthetic failure, but fuck-up-failure like I have detention for life.”19 And “Know what I have to do, but I don’t do it.”20 Or even this breathtaking revelation: “28. My mother’s body once was sharp. Now, it’s delusional and rotten with dementia.”21 The listing, advancing structure of the poem means that Giménez Smith does not have to work toward false synthesis; the abrupt admissions and reversals of the poem instead generate a dark, yet radiant energy that keeps the poem moving forward as a paradox-powered juggernaut: “I like the crystalline tear like morning and climax with crying of language that overflows with afterbirth and rainbows and applause.”22 This strategic non-arrival of the poem at synthesis also suggests that there is a future tense for this poem, that this poem is provisional, a climbing toward that future tense: “32. What I will do with power might terrify.”23 The final utterance of the poem—“111. Necessity is the mother of all that pours out of me.”24—returns to the gesture of naming “the mother” yet also suggests that the process of pouring is ongoing, that “Necessity” is pouring, infinite and unassuageable, that the “necessity” of writing will be irresolvable and inexhaustible. This interpretation also provides a reading of the poem’s title, which marks itself as “Parts of an Autobiography”—something to be abandoned and/or returned to, but at any rate incomplete.

  3.

  Aside from her own mother, the figure that most cannily serves as mother-twin of Giménez Smith’s authorship is, as I have briefly mentioned, Ana Mendieta: “22. I wanted to make bloody holes in the earth with my body like Ana Mendieta, but with poems.”25 Mendieta mothers/models the “viscerality” the poet-speaker sets out as her goal, presenting an epitome of her political rationale (“26. I’m a feminist for all the bodies strewn over history and semi-emerging from the earth”26), and affecting a version of female insemination, planting the world with her image: “She took her body and put it everywhere. She took her sex and put it everywhere. She bruised the earth with slits.”27 For Giménez Smith and others, Mendieta is an ultimate figure of a female artist’s parthenogenesis: a Cuban émigré exiled as a child to Iowa, Mendieta birthed a distinctive body of art by twinning her own image with an amalgam of Santerian and indigenous American chthonic goddess figures. Mendieta’s is not a literal, biological motherhood but a willed, invented motherhood based on an eclectic and politically necessitated “twinship” with pre-Columbian and Afro-Caribbean archetypes. However, this parthenogenesis, while self-authored, is not painless; instead the female form, throughout Mendieta’s oeuvre, becomes visible through media of violence, pain, distress, flesh, blood, fire, snow, hair, ash, and mud, and by the violent replacement of presence by absence, as well as through documentary films and photographs shot by occluded (often male) collaborators.

  Milk & Filth hosts an eight-part sequence, “A Devil Inside Me (after Ana Mendieta),” the main title of which references a phrase appearing in a series of Mendieta’s performance/inscription works, in which she marks white walls with blood mixed with red paint. Mendieta’s commitment to working with blood was diverse and dynamic; one element in this dynamism was a commitment to ritual, magic, and the “real.” Mendieta writes that “the turning point in art was in 1972, when I realized that my paintings were not real enough for what I want the image to convey and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.”28 Giménez Smith’s poem sequence is itself a ritual of devotion to Mendieta, beginning with a cosmic invocation to the Santerian “Seven Powers”: “See my petition and grant / me agency and vision,” she writes.29 The sequence alludes to various images and materials from Mendieta’s oeuvre, but seems at its most crucial moments to attempt to colocate with Mendieta at the matrix of artmaking itself:

  Inside the thicket, the tree.

  Inside the tree, heart.

  Inside heart,

  the water where body garlands

  the surface like fur.

  The body, a territory.

  From inside the territory

  call for reversal. The call

  for reversal is native, first.30

  This passage calls up the nature-based, chthonic, elemental quality of Mendieta’s body of work, but it also locates a paradoxical origin point that is womb-like, amniotic, active—“the water where body garlands / the surface like fur.” The chanting, liturgical power of the short lines pushes us through the end-stopping punctuation, to read (in error) the appositive phrase “The body, a territory. / From inside the territory.” This womb, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s maxim, is a territory-within-a-territory, and might entail a site of counter-conquest, the site of a “call for reversal” which is “native, first.” The body is born in the womb in a state of colonization and resistance; there is no “native” state in the sense in which this word is conventionally used—originary, unmarked, without precedent, “first.” Instead, the primacy of the womb is a primary responsibility, a necessity, a counter-conquesting, a resistant nativity, always already resistant. The grammar of this penultimate sentence reads like a command—a command to resist.

  Twinship with art-mother Ana Mendieta allows Giménez Smith to completely reconfigure the conventional model of motherhood as beneficent and of the womb as originary, safe, calm, the site of origination. Instead she shows the body in the womb as already a subject of conquest and already counter-conquesting, embodying a “call for reversal.” Art is the womb where these births and reversals can happen, by “magic,” as both Mendieta and Kathy Acker would say. Giménez Smith’s own bloodtide of conceptual reversals is evoked in the penultimate poem in the sequence. “It’s natal,” the poem begins, but what’s described in the poem are the conditions not by which Mendieta was born, but by which she confected her art practice:

  Automaton just never felt right,

  neither did provincial white goddess.

  The traces of fervor in the very

  ventricles of the conjoined earths.

  The terrain is dark asylum,

&nbs
p; positive darkness. Naturally, mutilation.31

  The first two lines suggest a rejection or reversal of Western art practice, away from the fetishized “autonomy” of the artist or the provinciality of imputing Western axes of sexist praise and perjoration to the rest of the world. The second two lines move rapidly under the earth, on bolts of “fervor,” which looks like “fever.” Fever/fervor is blood, “in the very ventricles of the conjoined earths,” with this last adjective, “conjoined,” suggesting precarious twinship derived from a splitting error in the womb: the single heart shared by conjoined twins. (This image also evokes the famous Frida Kahlo double portrait, “Las Dos Fridas/The Two Fridas,” in which Kahlo is both like and unlike herself, in European and native dress, two exposed hearts looped with an artery.) As we plummet swiftly to the subterranean stratum of this poem, we learn that this “dark asylum” is a “positive darkness.” Lest we feel we are in a safe womb-space now, we are faced with the final phrase of the poem, “Naturally, mutilation,” a typical Giménez Smith inversion or reversal. To reenter, reclaim, to make a reconquest of the womb (which is now also ventricled, like a heart) is to welcome, “Naturally,” mutilation, pain, bloodshed, self-evisceration, enviolencing, self-sacrifice. As with the work of Mother Mendieta, such violence is both the method and the motivation for Giménez Smith’s work. She is the surviving twin of “all the bodies strewn over history and emerging from the earth,” not the white goddess of artistic removal, but sharing a fervor, conjoined with that dark ventricle.