American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  María DeGuzmán’s Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night examines the clandestine, subversive, and taboo tropes of night in Latino cultural production.6 The double movement of buenas noches, signifying both good evening and goodnight, greetings and farewell, symbolizes how Latinos haunt hegemonic US cultural constructions by virtue of their split subjectivities, as both (in)visible reminders of “the other America” and North Americans in their own right. Kilwein Guevara’s poetry enfolds a similar double movement, beginning with the autopsy, which includes the properties of death’s unknowable darkness and scientific examination’s harsh fluorescence. In a corollary manner, his oblique continuities with Latino poetry and radical departures from it expand conceptions of American, Latino, and experimental poetries. In this sense, the code-switching in a poem such as “Doña Josefina Counsels Doña Concepción Before Entering Sears,”7 and references to José Martí and the Mexica/Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, a de facto patron saint of Chicano Movement poetics,8 more than simply affirm Kilwein Guevara’s Latinidad. They also function contiguously. Although often rendered fragmentary, the depth of details about Colombian history, including the period called La Violencia, the lasting impacts of Plan Colombia, and the contemporaneity of the conquest in the neoliberal present, expand the textual geography of American poetry to a prominent occluded other, a destination of billions of US taxpayer dollars. Likewise, “A found poem with translations,” with its Oaxacan graffiti; “Poema andino (after Celan),” with its imagistic, atmospheric rendering of Andean life in the manner of Paul Celan; and his homage to the baseball player Roberto Clemente that obliquely recalls Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” stretch the expressive, formal, tonal, and allusive ranges of North American poetics.9 And why do the poems feature so much Appalachian flora and fauna? Why do hillbillies appear not as foils or antagonists, as we might expect, but as disturbing sages implicitly defended against their stereotypes, as in the prose poems “Grimm the Janitor” and “Late Supper in Northern Appalachia”?10 Placing “Grimm the Janitor” next to Espada’s “Jorge the Church Janitor” and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s janitor “El Pablo” makes it apparent that Kilwein Guevara is interested in expanding and complicating conceptions of the subaltern, wherein poor Appalachians, Colombian peasants, and displaced indígenas find themselves in strange company.11

  DeGuzmán argues that the poetry of the late Rane Arroyo has an “aesthetic of cultural anthropophagy or cannibalism in which cultural references from a dominant ‘external’ European culture are greedily devoured by the subaltern subject and then spit up again and recycled back into the text.”12 Kilwein Guevara uses a perpendicular mode to map a peculiar, flexible form of subaltern subjectivity. Tracing backwards from the prose poem “Pepenador de palabras,” in POEMA,13 through Kilwein Guevara’s corpus to the “blooming” corpse of “Postmortem,” allows us to see his poetics as a process of scavenging through the detritus of culture and the debris of language. For Kilwein Guevara, a poet sifts “the compost of the past” as a “pepenador de palabras,” translated as scavenger of words or word scavenger, depending on whether the scavenger or what is scavenged is privileged.14 Rather than preserve or repurpose the canonical, or make new various literary traditions, as in many modernisms, here the poet prefers what has rotted, mixed, and been left in darkness, where it has become fertilizer laced with the absent presence of the dead. This scavenger roams various types of darkness in Kilwein Guevara’s poems: night, caves, subsoil, underground, underwater, fungus, drainage ditches, coal mines and mine shafts, landfills, aqueducts, behind stoves, under bridges, mountain passes, deserted roadsides. As his meditation on the Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio detours through the fermenting waste-food of leaf-cutter ants, it proclaims, “Poetry is spit and fungus growing underground.”15 Such poetry necessitates an approach from below. The narrator of “Self-Portrait,” the opening poem in Autobiography of So-and-so and his variation on the Latin American autorretrato, tells readers to “get down on your knees” in order to see his “moth wings [that] are spread like a dark bell in the city.”16

  Kilwein Guevara’s “scavenger infrapoetics,” as I am calling his aesthetic, emerges from below the sight lines of subjectivity in most veins of Latino and North American lyric poetry and in the interrogative modes in North American poetry’s experimental strains. His poetics reject Charles Altieri’s “scenic mode,” but they are also a distance from the Language poets and their successors.17 “Infrapoetics” revises the anthropologist James C. Scott’s term “infrapolitics.” Scott means that which “is practiced outside the visible spectrum of what usually passes for political activity,” including “such acts as foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absenteeism, squatting, and flight.”18 Scott has in mind subaltern and peasant classes using dispersed acts when open rebellion is ineffective and risky. For Scott, they are models for an anarchist praxis emphasizing a non-compulsory mutual cooperation without hierarchy that values the unpredictable and variable. Kilwein Guevara’s infrapoetics uses and praises similar acts from approximate subject positions and spaces of dispossession and with equivalent formal-tonal unpredictability and variability.

  The anonymous subaltern subject in “Pepenador de palabras” has numerous variations in the four collections. Beginning with the strange nominalization (“Mr. Tunis Flood”) and shape-shifting persona (“the young beast”) in Postmortem; to the rats of “The River Spirits” in Poems of the River Spirit; to “So-and-so,” the janitor, and mine canaries in Autobiography; to the garbage picker “Nobody” in “Pepenador,” the collections become increasingly haunting, echoic, allusive, vanguard, lushly textured, paratactic, and difficult. “Pepenador” begins with a short trochaic chant that celebrates sifting through, finding, and appropriating cultural detritus. What follows is simultaneously propelled forward and halted by proliferating colons, as if the anonymous, nimble garbage picker is bounding down the undulating ridges of a landfill to the antagonistic dialectical rhythms of global capitalism, progress and disaster all at once. These colons create “a metaphysical circuit” with “voltage” coursing through “gaps between sentences,” as Kilwein Guevara describes the workings of prose poems:19

  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 bullion: 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 good20

  Kilwein Guevara locates this poem in the underbelly of global capitalism, the settlements rising on landfills in the Global South where the dispossessed survive on capitalism’s constitutive margins. Like many of his campesinos, indígenas, hillbillies, coal miners, and steel workers, this garbage picker is not an idealized type but a humble hustler, entrepreneur, and survivor making do with composure and style—conversational, intelligent, playful but dire, friendly and inviting but admonitory, with a leisurely bounding pace that is also urgent. The subtext is clear: he will die soon, for the proximate threats inhabiting the topography of his daily work are far too great. In the meantime, he will save what is useful, from the obscure, the discarded, and the debased, to the debris of language. Here both bones and words are useful material.

  Few poets wear their influences and allusions so casually and baldly but also obliquely.
The reference to the Spanish exile surrealist Remedios Varo (1908–1963) suggests that the names proliferating in Kilwein Guevara’s poems as an idiosyncratic, obscure(d) personal canon are not sacred; rather, in some sense they are just more material, more compost, like “common nouns red as brake fluid” and “bloated cardboard.” In this case, Remedios Varo is an amulet with a suggestive name (translated as “remedies”) that momentarily leads the humpback “Nobody” out of the landfill. Yet the spell (or “remedy”) of tranquility does not hold—nature (“trees and a stream”) here has been so degraded as to threaten human survival. High culture, too, has been leveled. Although he finds “a garbage bag stamped with the insignia of the National Library [in Bogotá],” which holds “the desiccated arm of Cervantes clutching a rusted sword,” it goes unremarked in the transition through colons. The poem then ends: “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.”

  The disembodied wails and cries of orphaned children are the poet’s most acute variations on poema as the endangered, vulnerable body. In an earlier poem in the “lonely” Andes, for instance, a child describes his house “made only of sticks / only a frame nailed together of the straightest branches / my widowed father could find in the wild grove by the river / and shave down with machete to the bone-soft wood.” Like the garbage picker, this child is a scavenger, taking a “wheelbarrow to look for scrap lumber, sheet metal, / plastic, and tarpaper. Always our chronic lack of nails.”21 Like “ridges” and “rivers,” “bones” and “bridges,” “tarpaper” appears frequently in Kilwein Guevara’s poems. Tarpaper has several significant properties: rough, durable, and black, it is meant to provide insulation, protection, and strength below finishing materials. It is not meant to be seen. And unlike the white paper on which poems are printed, tarpaper does not take text. Rather, it is text, providing a visible testimony to survival, ingenuity, necessary pilfering, and lives turned inside out.

  From the Latin American space-time to its empathy for the garbage picker, “Pepenador de palabras” should be differentiated from the cultural location and mythic synthesis of The Waste Land and the landfill “full / Of images” in Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump.” Even A. R. Ammons’s Garbage, with which it shares some syntactic features (the use of colons in particular) and the lament for environmental devastation, fundamentally engages modernist projects, and its Taoist spiritualism contrasts Kilwein Guevara’s lush sensualism.22 Unlike these poets, he is not bound by a literary tradition to exceed or to conform to. Whereas their poems have monumental frames and targets, Kilwein Guevara uses the miniature scale to imagine monumental historical events. In these ways, scavenging is a haphazard process in which randomness is structural, evidenced by the words “Nobody” tweezes into his “glass vials.” Scavenging should also be differentiated from the cannibalism DeGuzmán locates in Arroyo’s poetry. Rather than devour and spit up a well-preserved and closely guarded canon, Kilwein Guevara offers us scavengers, eating whatever they can find, what has been thrown away that remains useful for their survival.

  Figures of weeds often demarcate these scavenger cartographies. In Autobiography of So-and-so, they are metonymically revelatory. In one prose poem, the narrator’s immigrant grandfather, “a cobalt blue silhouette” holding his own disembodied head, stops to “stare through his glasses at the dark foothills. While he whistles, a mother raccoon is busy searching through the dense weeds for food.” We do not need to be told that he must scavenge for his family. Elsewhere in the book, “thickets” conceal pernicious stereotypes about Appalachia, and “goosefoot” covers the ground of a Monongahela village that appears in an apparition.23 In his essay on ecopoetics, Jonathan Skinner explains that although the weed is frequently a trope for the undesirable or out-of-place, it has other significant properties:

  Another definition of weed is as a specialist of disturbed areas, or as the parasite on an ecosystem’s more dominant species, a scavenger on the leavings of civilization. Here weeds would seem to be disliked precisely because of their supposed dependency on us; in their opportunism they are too much like us, and so cannot teach us about being “wild and free.” Wherever you find humans, pigeons and mice and rats and cockroaches and purple loosestrife are not far behind: they are our “footprints,” the ubiquitous trace of our heavy touch, registering ecological imbalance.24

  In Kilwein Guevara’s poetry, weeds, cockroaches, rats, and the like register ecological, economic, historical, and cultural imbalances. But they also index and stage productive collisions. Like “landscape” and “landfill,” weed/terroir and immigrant/native cease to function in opposition, where one desecrates the other; instead, they converge, as I have argued about his Appalachian Latino poems.25 Once bourgeois, now gauche, landscape art now occupies the low end of the bourgeois commodity chain. Obversely, the methods of collage, pastiche, parataxis, and disjunction common in avant-garde and experimental poetics often create poetic “landfills” of signs, discourses, and languages. In some sense, these are the new landscapes, commonplace, expected, even pastoral. In these contexts, Kilwein Guevara’s “tweezers” work on a miniature scale, pairing with the elegant, beautiful, and lush to reveal a difference from, for instance, Joshua Clover’s poetics of “Superinformation” or Urayoán Noel’s “hi-density” poetics, which otherwise take similar approaches to gathering and dis- and reassembling cultural detritus.26

  Kilwein Guevara also uses masks as figures of infrapoetic dissimulation. The paradoxically non-identitarian identity poetics of Autobiography of So-and-so emphasizes anonymity as a tentative route to visibility. The book’s transhistorical, oneiric “I” occupies the shifting center of a kaleidoscope of interpersonal relations with ancestors and historical figures such as Bolívar. The disjunctive, nonlinear, surreal narratives move from preconquest Colombia to Pittsburgh to Wisconsin.27 At times intensely personal, indeed autobiographical, with many intergenerational family poems about his grandparents and adopted sons, the book always edges toward myth and the surreal rather than realist representation. The title character, “So-and-so,” subverts the generic expectations of “autobiography.” Rather than detail the development of a significant public life, the text tracks the development of “the long molecule of a pheromone [that] has just caught on a lash” “by chance” when the narrator first opens his eyes in “Self-Portrait,” through the longue durée of Colombian history in the section “History Before Me,” to immigrant life in Pittsburgh’s housing projects, to the final section of poems, “Afterlife.” “So-and-so” appears only twice, at a Halloween party, when he is asked, “‘Hey, so-and-so, guess who I am?,’” and in “A Tongue Is a Rope Bridge,” where the figure shifts subject positions: “Reader of this page, So-and-so, with your arms at your side and a taste of pennies in your mouth.”28 As a syntactical placeholder, “so-and-so” can pop up anywhere and everywhere, unnamed, anonymous, insignificant, alive or dead, imminently replaceable.

  Three references in POEMA expand these potential subject positions: “that rich so-and-so”; “Sorry, I have to go to so-and-so’s viewing”; and “some shit-smelling so-and-so [who] manages to press the nape of [an oligarch’s] neck with the cold-flat side of a machete.”29 “So-and-so” is often used in conversation when the person in question’s name has been forgotten or when their identity is unimportant in comparison to who I am or where I have to go. “So-and-so” can be rich or poor, but like “Nobody,” “so-and-so” is almost always unvalued in one way or another, if only with the oblivion of others’ forgetting. This figure has some affinity with the trope of “nobodying” in Mexican poetics and with the Zapatistas’ “erased faces.” After all, Kilwein Guevara writes in a time when ethnic studies programs are under threat (see Tucson, Arizona), and his first collection appeared in 1994, the ominous year of NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising against neoliberalism. In setting economic and political policies from above by
erasing place, the neoliberal technocratic “view from nowhere” produces exactly this view from a “Nobody,” a “so-and-so.” Such anonymous figures implicitly critique the hegemonic ideology that we live in a “post-racial” and “post-identity” era. Within this official story of equality, “so-and-so” builds his identity with discarded, unmoored figures, “lumber, sheet metal, / plastic, and tarpaper.” He is the new, hyphenated American stripped of cultural specificity and without the “nails” to hold himself together.

  Yet another form of dissimulation in Kilwein Guevara’s poetics is bullshitting. Mimicry, antic play, linguistic virtuosity, and register shifting feature in many poems that bullshit or that examine the act. The ghazal-like couplets with frequent caesura of “The Young Beast in Spring,” in Postmortem, address the young poet’s influences, ending in a dark train tunnel as the speaker echoes his predecessors’ bullshit: “Thoreau, Berryman, Kane, Gilbert, known liars all: / In spring I proved my voice, in the throat of a tunnel.”30 Alongside Pittsburgh natives Gertrude Stein and Gerald Stern, the two Pittsburghers here are significant to Kilwein Guevara’s poetry. The Scottish immigrant John Kane, a self-taught painter, coal miner, and railroad worker, serves as a tentative figure of an outsider art and a working-class Pittsburgh infrapolitics. He uses boxcars as “wide, steel canvas[es],” painting them brightly “in the plain style” during lunch breaks, only to “cover his work with black paint” when break ends.31 Jack Gilbert’s conversational, declarative poetics and archetypical figurations of Pittsburgh as a crumbling monument to childhood memory also mark Kilwein Guevara’s collections.32