American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  The American Flag

  Near the casino at Lac du Flambeau: no clouds, a deer skull in red leaves.

  FROM POEMA

  Against Metaphor

  for Santiago Calatrava

  Chair is not Mine Sweeper

  Chives not Tympani

  Sweet Potato not Chimes

  Tortoise-shell in Heat not the Port of Milwaukee at Quitting Time

  I not the Grandson of Carlos Guevara Moreno

  Frame not Bolivia with Lavender Mountains

  Barrel Hoop not Acrobatic Girl with Pinned Braids

  Dark Moth on the Kitchen Windowsill not Syllable of Julia de Burgos

  Walt Whitman not Esprit d’Escalier

  Ruana not Memory of Birth not Turning Torso

  Clarinet with Reed not Dolphin in Underwater Caverns

  Poems not Iron Lung not Kidney Transplantation not Faith Healing

  Truth not Unpainted Back Door Half-Open near Cooper’s Rock, West Virginia

  Ground Squirrel not Swallow not Dry Axle

  6 and 496 not Perfect Pitch

  Beads of Rainwater Rolling down Pale Leaves of Broccoli not Ellipsis

  How then should I explain to you the Undetonated Woman at once on the banks of Lake Michigan and Texcoco who is my Sailing Ship and White Bird and Kiss and Blowing Huipil Embroidered with Orange and Lime Threads?

  At rest

  We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other.

  SAMUEL BECKETT

  La casa arde,

  la abuelita se peina.

  Streaks of spinning planetary stones,

  the horse’s hooves

  skating

  down the canyon path, another tourist on her back.

  How long will he hold his breath under water for me?

  Humpback males

  in July

  breaching

  halfway between

  Puerto López

  e

  Isla de la Plata.

  How long will he hold his breath in the water for me?

  How long will he not live in the deaf dark wet mother-sack?

  How long will he not be born?

  Listen to that:

  Nails biting into the horse’s hooves.

  Is this the augury of the equine fetus?

  You ask too many questions.

  From now on, you may only ask one question a day.

  From the fish to the krill.

  From krill to the orange clown fish.

  Fish to krill.

  Krill to school.

  Going down to the underwater depth of groundlessness,

  will he kill himself for me?

  Shale formations in the desert tall as twin towers,

  an almost unseen choza at the bottom of the canyon.

  In the open window, the grandmother is combing out her thick, iron hair.

  Transistor radio battery on steel wool:

  This is not the United States of America or México.

  This is not the Hopi Nation.

  The gray wood of the hut begins suddenly to burn

  while the humming bird beside the sweet water,

  speckled jade breast,

  seems

  almost

  still.

  Pepenador de palabras

  Landscape, landfill: from a couple hills away with papers flying and ink-beaked gulls I’m a scavenger rooting about, picker of words, new father trailed by a long cotton sack, Nobody, now a humpback: reader, be careful: intensifiers combust: it’s easy to lose your footing: noxious puddles of common nouns red as brake fluid: bottles and fins and the detritus of feathers: iridescent condoms, bloated cardboard: the leg bones of pig and cow I can resell to the soup factory for bouillon: bending with her little sleepy weight from dawn until scudding clouds darken the late horizon: dull ache in the back of my thighs turning to numbness as I hunker with tweezers to fill one of four glass vials clipped to my breast pocket: scry, emunctory, sugared, tic, comma, priapism: once I dreamed of Remedios Varo in a hammock between trees and a stream: wake up: that slope is where they slide and dump the near-dead fish without permission after closing time: you fall there, you go under for good: the sun at noon chomps at your neck: once I opened a yellow garbage bag stamped with the insignia of the National Library, cut the corded muslin: finger-tagged, it was the desiccated arm of Cervantes clutching a rusted sword: strata and skin: who knew the next day from a fruit crate I’d hear her infant cry: wrap song to my back: bring her home to the sound of boiling water: constant wing-flap of tarpaper: Lucero.

  Poema without hands

  Whatever it is that is wanting

  is poema: her light blue sweater on the train.

  The families in the unventilated

  truck,

  the leeks

  in the leek soup. The pal-

  pitations whenever he reads

  certain words: alive, wild rat,

  Cocteau, acid, noose.

  Her ring finger in the metal

  lathe at work, Guevara’s

  hands from Bolivia, the

  painted frog from Boyacá,

  drusen

  accumulating in the macula of the painter’s son.

  The mountaintops near Caney Creek

  in eastern Kentucky,

  Ishák her tongue and half her face

  in shadow, the cistern on the beach where once their sweet

  bones rocked, honeycombs in the eyes of the honeybee.

  POETICS STATEMENT

  I

  … I am everywhere,

  I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move

  With all that move me, under the water

  Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

     from “The Ball Poem” by

     JOHN BERRYMAN

  When I was a boy in Pittsburgh, my immigrant grandparents, both now long dead from cancers, lived in the filthy shadow of the colossal Jones and Laughlin coke plant. This was the same Laughlin wealth that allowed great-grandson James Laughlin to start New Directions Press in New York, which had published “The Ball Poem.” But I didn’t know any of that at the time because I was six or seven and listening to the immigrants and the natives and the migrants (some transplants from Germany, Italy, Colombia, Ireland, Poland, Hungary, Jim Crow Alabama, Mississippi, Mexico by way of Weirton, West Virginia). I listened in the backyards with morning glories closing or on the bright Elizabeth Street Bridge or on the 56C bus from town. To speak with an accent, to speak another language, to coexist giddily with tongues I didn’t understand, to listen for tenor, to study how people laughed at the deli or pointed at the bread counter, to imitate how we learn to injure or soothe, this was quotidian. This was our bread and beer, our religion, our sputum, my ongoing apprenticeship with poetry.

  II

  When I was a boy, I was given a cassette tape recorder one Christmas and I recorded the sounds of my house, neighborhood, our sky. I recorded the crunching of my grandmother’s lower spine as she stretched next to her chair, bending backward in a feline arch.

  III

  Around 1981, I landed what turned out to be the most important minimum wage job of my life. At the University of Pittsburgh, as a student worker, I was assigned to “man” the desk of the Spoken Arts Collection on the first floor of the Hillman Library. It held magnificent petro-chemical artifacts (voice prints in the form of audiocassettes and vinyl recordings) in a building named after the coal magnate John Hillman, then the richest man in Pittsburgh, heir to blood-rust barges piled high with robber baron loot.

  It was here, for the first time, that poetry physically entered my body as human thought, songburst, spoken word, balderdash, sound composition, blackbird’s brew. I remember hearing Gertrude Stein for the first time (cold earring, gold hearing, old herring bones born on the banks of the Allegheny). Of course, there were others. Yeats, full of attitude and the arrogant insecurity of old age, said things to me as well, such as “but his (Mr. Eliot’s) revolutio
n was stylistic alone” and “there is but one obscurity in the poem. I refer to noon as a purple glow. I must have meant by that the reflection of heather on the water.” In Hillman I also heard Neruda, Eliot, Plath, Sexton, Martin Luther King Jr., Jon Silkin, Delmore Schwartz, e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Roberts Hayden and Frost. But more than anyone, through headphones plugged into a record player, it was John Berryman’s nasal, nervous, pseudo-British voice that shattered me, John Smith who became John Berryman who became Henry until he could no longer even be. His singing helped me hear what poema is. Poema feels and is thought by a human body. Poema hunts and is haunted. Cut a line of poema open and it glows optic red. Poema spreads by capillary effect. In that sense, it is similar to history, sex, food, and sips of Asian smoke. It involves pain, like torn muscle between ribs. Poema celebrates joy and dolor and boredom. It is many tongued, polytropos. In particular I found poema in Berryman’s “The Ball Poem.” I played the cut so often that the black concentric circles became muscle memory. The poem is simple until it breaks away from the primary narrative and descends into the multi-perspectival waters of empathy. It explores “the epistemology of loss.” It recognizes that to dream in words, in images, in sensations and ideas, involves immense play and responsibility. Strike a blue tip in the night.

  IV

  I have long thought of poema as a miniaturist form, especially the combustible lyric. And curiously, there’s a paradoxical effect at work: the tinier the space, the greater the poem’s expansive energy. If you want to write about violence, is there a more fragile cosmos than the testicles of a small child? If you want to write about love, describe the forearm that her breathing makes. If you want to know history, start with a name. I was named Mauricio in Boyacá, Colombia, where I was born and where Bolívar defeated the Spanish in 1819. I lost my name when, as a small boy, I came with my family to the United States. Mauricio comes from moro, Moor, dark one. It suggests the eight hundred years before the fall, in 1492, of the Emirate of Granada to the Spanish Crown. It spreads to that other event that began in 1492, in rebranded Hispaniola, where the soon-to-be decimated Arawak people were called Indians. Indios.

  If you want to embody “the epistemology of loss,” start with a little boy and a lost ball. Let him play. I would not intrude on him any more today than thirty-three years ago. He lives forever within the temporary acoustics of a poem. He is still learning.

  MAURICIO KILWEIN GUEVARA’S SCAVENGER INFRAPOETICS

  Michael Dowdy

  Mauricio Kilwein Guevara’s first collection, Postmortem, initiates an inter-American poetic project that becomes increasingly idiosyncratic, experimental, and beguilingly beautiful in three subsequent collections, Poems of the River Spirit, Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose, and POEMA.1 Its announcement comes in a deceptively simple piece of paratext, an epigraph from the poet Victor Hernández Cruz. The sentence “We’re all immigrants to this reality” concedes that Latino and other (im)migrant poets must navigate and ultimately exceed the symbolically fraught contours of the terms “immigrants” and “reality.” Kilwein Guevara disentangles the first from its identity-based political, geographical, and historical registers by exploring the metaphysical valences of lyric subjectivity. The second undergoes deformations with allusions to and uses of surrealist, magic realist, and vanguardist practices.

  A distinctive aspect of Kilwein Guevara’s poetics is the way in which these aesthetic approaches emerge from materialist and ecological conceptions of language. As the beginning of his poetics statement suggests, his poetry explores embodied affective states of pleasure and pain in which the human body is doubly immigrant, highly alert, and always in proximity to loss, absence, and death. For Kilwein Guevara, poetry emerges in the currents of rivers and in the shadows of smokestacks and cancers, in the convergent aftermaths of environmental and human disasters. It is bound intimately to the production of bread, beer, and spit, the sticky spirits of daily life for displaced but resourceful immigrant working classes. The frequently subversive meanings in these fermenting processes disperse in the explosive energies of Kilwein Guevara’s poems, particularly in POEMA, where they trouble an underpinning of conceptual poetics. Rather than view the body/the (lyric) self as constructed from various discourses, the poem (poema) itself is a fleshy, sensing, and paradoxically plural body. More specifically, poema is (de)composed from both the human and the social body’s wastes and leavings, their losses, absences, and hauntings, their optic nerves and capillaries.

  As the opening of Postmortem, the title poem tacks the epigraph’s metaphysics to an iteration of embodied absence prominent in Kilwein Guevara’s recent poems. The epigraph’s announcement of a Latino poetics with a difference undergoes its initial reinscription in “Postmortem,” in the form of an autopsy.2 Another piece of paratext, this time an epigraph from Emerson—“Even the corpse has its own beauty”—signals that the poem will map the poet’s aesthetic through the quotidian but peculiar deconstruction of a dead body. The poem’s clipped first-person declarations catalog the process of an unnamed medical examiner using tools (“fluorescent light,” “syringe,” “knife,” “mallet,” “chisel”) to illuminate, dissect, examine, and “weigh and record” the corpse of “Mr. Tunis Flood.” With deadpan candor and jarring enjambment, the doctor finds alarmingly sensual pleasure in wielding his most nimble tools: the mind, the hands, the pen. Fragments of his examination notes appear after well-marked verbs signifying the instrumental properties of enlightenment knowledge: “Think. Write, ‘Nipples the color of avocados’”; “I // Concentrate. Write, ‘Tardieu’s spots / Bruise the livid skin. Like violets in a shade.’” Despite these conspicuous similes, the poem largely moves in the realm of metonymy rather than through the territory of metaphor. What (and how) we learn arrives primarily in disembodied parts, glances, shadows, shadings. Rather than empirical knowledge gleaned from actions (“think,” “discover,” “prick,” “weigh,” “record,” “trace,” “watch,” “remove,” “write”), Kilwein Guevara favors the unknown, absent, irretrievable. The poem’s eerie stillness paradoxically moves through such empirical voids.

  “Postmortem” thus initiates what Kilwein Guevara calls an “epistemology of loss” that extends through POEMA, where the disjunctive couplets of the ars poetica, “Poema without hands,” declare, “Whatever it is that is wanting / is poema.” This “wanting” includes dynamited mountaintops, extinct “painted frog[s],” and oxygen in border-crossers’ “unventilated / truck[s].”3 And so it is in “Postmortem.” The doctor is unidentified. Mr. Tunis Flood is unknown beyond his strange name, which frustrates any etymology other than the hint of disaster, and his Tardieu’s spots, which result from death by suffocation or strangling. This deconstruction is all text (body) and no context (being-in-the world). Although the corpse “blooms” with “cornflower / Blue” lips and a neckline “like violets in a shade,” it is the doctor who is most alive, blooming with confusion, taken apart as he takes apart. By the end he is disoriented and unhinged, a subject-object and self-other disorientation common in Kilwein Guevara’s poems. Unlike the cultivated detachment of the discipline of pathology, wherein the doctor-speaker says, “there’s never any rush,” the poem eschews rationality for “wonder,” “rush,” and “vision.” It ends:

  Where is my mallet,

  My chisel? Calvarium: crack.

  I hold your brain, Mr. Flood,

  Like a baby, and wonder what matter

  Holds back the rush of memories.

  And in what soft ridge lies the vision of your death?

  The notably material properties of imagination, language, and memory gesture at a phenomenology of embodied affect, where any knowledge is always already fleshy material, and where the “flood” of a human history (“memories”) is “h[e]ld back” by a dam of “matter.” For Kilwein Guevara, the poet, like the medical examiner, takes such matter apart in search of small, tentative truths, but the former, unlike the latter, seeks out floods, rushes, and wonder(s
). This poetics requires a transition from “the lab,” whether the workshop that produces hyper-refined poems or the sterile steel gurneys of a morgue, to the “ridges.” Variations of these mountain figures appear repeatedly in Kilwein Guevara’s poetry as liminal folds that undulate unexpectedly, concealing and revealing, endangering and surprising.

  Whereas “Postmortem” frustrates the nominal reproduction of Latino and immigrant subjectivities, suggesting that for Kilwein Guevara they are dead on arrival, the poem’s strong lyric-narrative line synchronizes many poems in Postmortem and Poems of the River Spirit with poets such as Martín Espada and Lorna Dee Cervantes.4 However, this line constantly verges on disjunction and dissolution, often via the mythic, surreal, and oneiric. This is especially true in the metanarrative prose poems of Autobiography of So-and-so, which Kilwein Guevara has said are “lyrical, imagistic, mercurial, metaphysical, sonic […], and subjective as the premonition of a penny in your mouth.”5 The dissolution is even more pronounced in the radically dispersive and dissociative energies of POEMA. Yet the challenge of reading Kilwein Guevara lies not in navigating the syntactical disjunctions of a more experimental lyric poet, such as Edwin Torres or Fred Moten, but in how to place within extant critical paradigms a poet of Colombian descent who grew up in Pittsburgh and who draws equally from Appalachian historical geographies, Gertrude Stein’s and William Carlos Williams’s modernisms, Borgesian metaphysics, the antic gestures of Nicanor Parra and the actor/comic/performance artist John Leguizamo, the midcentury subjectivities of Allen Ginsberg and John Berryman, the Catalan avant-garde, and ecopoetics. Kilwein Guevara’s corpus—with all of the embodied implications of the word—has mesmeric allusive, formal, and tonal ranges. Largely set within and between the fraught image stores of two mountain regions, the Northern Andes (largely in Colombia, where he was born in 1961) and Appalachia (largely in and around Pittsburgh, where he grew up), Kilwein Guevara’s lush, textural, sensuous poems often tend to the baroque, but with a greater degree of historical-geographical specificity than is present in the Mexican neobaroque poets Coral Bracho and David Huerta. To navigate his corpus, his single, continuous “poema,” it is useful to follow two intersecting vectors. The first is spatiotemporal and affective—the night/darkness. The second is a subjectivity and process—the scavenger/scavenging.