Kilwein Guevara’s most dramatic bullshitting poem features a barbershop on Milwaukee’s Lincoln Avenue. “Hector the Colombian Who Butchered the Hair of Juan Ramón” begins in medias res, in a conversation between two unnamed Latinos.33 The first line’s conspicuous apostrophe lures the reader into eavesdropping on the conversation about Hector by implicating the speaker and his immediate interlocutor in his stereotypes, misogyny, and self-loathing, along with various forms of bullshit, such as rumor, innuendo, hearsay, chisme, and braggadocio that stretch into long, uneven lines:
You don’t know him? Oh, I figured cause he’s Colombian too.
I don’t get my hair cut from him no more. Used to.
Used to sit down with him in his shop over on
Lincoln Avenue, and he cut my hair, I guess he cut my hair
like maybe twenty twenty-five time, you know for least ten years,
y fueron cortes de pelo de calidad buena.
See the thing is Hector the Colombian he can bullshit so much
you need waders after a while, him talking about his village in the Andes34
As Mark Nowak’s collection Shut Up Shut Down suggests, bullshitting is often a masculinist posture produced by dispossession and displacement, as in “(former) railroad and steel workers (still) bullshitting in the restaurant.” Nowak juxtaposes this defensive (and largely powerless) bullshitting to the bullshitting that is the very infrastructure of neoliberal ideology.35 In both Nowak’s documentary poetics and Kilwein Guevara’s scavenger infrapoetics, bullshitting creates doubt about all sorts of narratives of how the world (and poetry) supposedly works. Whereas Nowak’s text questions presuppositions about deindustrialization, Kilwein Guevara’s poem undermines links between speech-based poetry and truth-value, national origin and knowledge. At the same time, the virtuosic dramatic monologue affirms links between form and meaning, a putatively conventional gesture. And yet the asymmetry of the bad haircut (“cutting big ugly bald shapes into my scalp like I got a dog disease”) has a more expansive corollary than as a reflection of Hector’s misogyny and his misconception of his sexism as a love of democracy. Its uneven, violent slices and copula-heavy syntax also mirror the uneven geographic development of capitalism in the Northern Andes: “Snip snip clip clip he starts up again on how perfect like an emerald / ripped out of the belly of the mountain the Colombian women is clip clip.”36
The relation between the head butchered and the mountain ravaged by multinational mining operations suggests the prominent function of scale in Kilwein Guevara’s poetics. He favors the tiny, the miniature, the infinitesimal, the cellular, in part because they are often the most vulnerable and least visible. But he also favors the diminutive as an aesthetic model because it entails the intricate and well drawn as well as the dense and incomprehensible. For Kilwein Guevara, the cellular scale produces a bright clarity that simultaneously confounds. “Clearing Customs” maps this scale as both subject and technique. In the liminal zone of inspection, vulnerability is an affective structural condition visited upon individual bodies, particularly acutely in Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport. When the officer questions the narrator about his typewriter, he replies that he writes “Poems that shine a little flashlight into the guts of my typewriter. Poems of small children who sleep under bridges. Poems through which rivers move.”37
“The Easter Revolt Painted on a Tablespoon” enfolds these three modes of poem making in a preposterous attempt to detail the events of Easter Sunday, 1966, when the Colombian army “destroy[ed] the squatters’ camp” in Policarpa, a Bogotá barrio in the shadow of “La Hortua” hospital.38 The poem employs compression, that calling card of lyric, on a scale that converts history to a kitsch folk art for roadside stands and flea markets. The verb “to focus” makes such consumable fare grotesque and horrifying, as “the hundred bodies of Policarpa filling up a common grave” are condensed “in the pit of the tin spoon.” Putting this history in swirling motion further reveals the illusory quality of artistic representation. “Above everything,” the poem begins, “I make a jagged, blue edge / and the Andes.” The surprising conjunction (and rather than of) jars the lyric I’s representations from the acts of drawing, beginning the process of “liquefy[ing] the borderline between the empirically historical and the fictive.”39 The “jagged, blue edge” of his brushstroke has a multisensory agency, turning tablespoon landscape into hallucinatory canvas, with “a greenhouse of fourteen thousand roses” on “the front and back of the handle,” and the ability to show “how it sounds / when the boy with five hundred roses / strapped to his back raises a burning branch”; to capture the movement of hooves and mist; “to freeze / the instant of boiling water splashed in the face”; and “to focus: / the quick slice of a bayonet through tarpaper, rocks in flight.” As in the later “Teusaquillo, 1989,”40 this poem blends the beautiful, even the ornate, with the ugly, only to give way to eerie quiet in a four-line coda:
On the back of the belled end, I make the other world:
where my mother lifts a clean shirt out of the aqueduct;
where my father shepherds our only cow, without a stick,
up the mountain from the grassy suburbs below.
In one sense, this humble labor offers a lucid spatiotemporal juxtaposition to the preceding hallucinatory, synaesthetic upheaval. Yet in another sense, it marks discontinuities between historic events (and their representations) and subaltern lives, and between the nascent Latin American megacity filling with displaced rural, indigenous migrants and the countryside being emptied and erased since the late 1960s. These historical-geographical processes have (re)produced an invisible subaltern below (“on the back” of) the visible world of official historical agents such as presidents and armies.
Kilwein Guevara’s innovative use of anaphora is often in this miniature scale. Anaphora is a common device in Latino poetry, more so than in contemporary American poetry broadly. Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s examination of the ways in which Latino poets, including Kilwein Guevara, reinterpret Whitman, who innovated the technique, suggests as much.41 Stephanie Burt claims that Juan Felipe Herrera uses anaphora more adeptly than any other living poet, positing that he is one of few poets since the 1960s to combine written and oral forms successfully, as well as collective ethnic (Chicano) and individual language-oriented poetics.42 I would propose that Kilwein Guevara belongs in both conversations. Two uses of anaphora at different stages of his career are good examples. In the first, a rat observes immigrant life in Pittsburgh in the first half of the twentieth century:
I stood on the crown of Pittsburgh Plate Glass
or
seventy stories down the pit of a mine
and opened in my hands the invisible book
from which I sang
[…]
Death came with the Light Man
Death came with the Gas Man
Death yanked the huckster’s bell
Death took tickets at the whip and let the little ones sneak by
Death was the cat picking at the fish with two heads
Mrs. Death and her daughter worked overtime during the war
Death snowed on bridges and roofs and playgrounds
Death called out Bingo Bingo Bingo here
Frick with Mellon and Death firing up Cuban cigars43
In the second example, from POEMA, the poet moves from the figure of Death prominent in Mexican and Chicano cultures to something stranger and multihued. Here is part of “Joan Brossa as the Emerald Moth Discharging Energy,” which takes as its departure point the Catalan avantgarde poet’s 1967 art-object:
This is the strophe starring Joan Brossa
as the panicked emerald moth,
Joan Brossa en España, ensnared,
Joan Brossa being eaten by a wet strawberry,
Joan Brossa writing POEMA on a clear lightbulb,
Joan Brossa swimming the butterfly,
Joan Brossa a shape of color balancing
on a blush orchid
in tierra caliente,
Joan Brossa at twilight staring up at Gederme,
Joan Brossa’s statue with mountainous feet and legs,
genitalia and twisting torso transparent liquid glass
with buzzing filament.44
This passage’s sensual liquid movement is a long way from Espada’s Whitmanian anaphora and Herrera’s rollicking, shamanistic list poems. Like the infinitives in “The Easter Revolt,” progressive tense verbs and adverbs (“starring,” “writing,” “swimming,” “balancing,” “staring,” “twisting,” “buzzing”) propel the poem’s energy outward, away from the object (“tablespoon,” “lightbulb,” “moth”) to radiate in the night sky, the embodied strophe simultaneously gigantic (“mountainous”) and tiny as filament.
Mauricio Kilwein Guevara has consistently worked at the intersections of lyrical and experimental and Latin and North American practices in idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and disjunctive ways. They converge in the explosive energy of poema, in the pumping arms and legs of “Nobody.” His scavenger cartographies are coded with the grim landscapes of the twenty-first century—environmentally degraded, populated by the anonymous dispossessed, textured with a decontextualized mash-up of pop and high culture signs, and haunted by the conquest, from “the moment of that first Spanish sword.”45 But Kilwein Guevara’s work is also disarmingly lush and light-filled. For him, poema requires returning to that originary first death in the “new world.” Appropriately, then, the survival of indigenous peoples along the spine of the Americas—from the Appalachians, to the Sierra Madre in Mexico and Central America, to the Andes—serves as a multiform, animating breath in his books. “If the spirits know anything,” he writes in “From the Carib Word Mahiz,” “it’s how to survive even bulldozers and baptisms.” In this poem, the murdered relatives of Guatemala’s Maya-Quiché “become foxes and hunting birds.”46
Throughout Kilwein Guevara’s collections, such figures of animals and insects appear almost obsessively. These variations on “Nobody” set him apart from many of his predecessors and contemporaries—innovative poetic practices are usually associated with more explicitly textual signs rather than with rats, bats, buzzards, ants, flies, cockroaches, pigeons, raccoons, mosquitoes, gnats, and canaries in mines. In the animal poems of José Emilio Pacheco, such creatures often symbolize human vulnerability, allegorizing the consequences of exploitation, injustice, and environmental destruction. Kilwein Guevara’s animal poems are not as direct or selfconsciously literary as the Mexican poet’s.47 Though unmethodical, his bat and rat figures form a cosmology of above/below and overhead/underfoot. One poem reveres the rat as a
cornered fighter to the death,
pillager of the small blue eggs of birds,
[…]
landscape artist, tunnel maker,
mate, destroyer of whole libraries,
nightmare in the sweet dreams of the candle maker,
brother, stargazer, ordinary creature48
In contrast to the scrappy rat, the bat is a repeating reverse-negative afterimage indexing the proliferating signs and injustices of the twenty-first century, popping up near “the endless whirring motors” and “the roar of Exxon trucks,”49 mapping a poetic geography of flapping wings and unheard songs. After all, bats communicate at frequencies undetectable to human ears, creating a nightly absent presence. And as in the final poem of Postmortem, bats live communally, sharing their hard-won sustenance with the hungry: “In a hollow tree she who has twice failed / is being fed. It is the gift of blood vomit.”50 Sticky, strange, surprising, and generous, a regurgitated communion made by scavenging on living bodies, “the gift of blood vomit” is an apt figure for Mauricio Kilwein Guevara’s scavenger infrapoetics and the embodied poema. As proximate forms of otherness, the feared, misunderstood, and despised rats and bats become “ordinary,” so much like us and so different they cause us to wonder.
NOTES
1. Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, Postmortem (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Poems of the River Spirit (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996); Autobiography of So-and-so (Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2001); POEMA (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009).
2. Kilwein Guevara, Postmortem, 3.
3. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 80.
4. Kilwein Guevara told me by email (January 24, 2013) that he “sensed early on that [he] was culturally different from” Latino writers on the east coast and in the southwest.
5. Kilwein Guevara, “Prose Poem Electric,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice, ed. Gary L. Mc-Dowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek (Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press, 2010), 80.
6. María DeGuzmán, Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2012).
7. Kilwein Guevara, Poems of the River Spirit, 33.
8. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 15–16, 57.
9. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 38, 72; Autobiography of So-and-so, 43.
10. Kilwein Guevara, Autobiography of So-and-so, 39, 70.
11. Martín Espada, “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits,” in Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1990), 92–95; Jimmy Santiago Baca, Martín and Meditations on the South Valley (New York: New Directions, 1987), 72–73.
12. DeGuzmán, Buenas Noches, 122.
13. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 56.
14. Kilwein Guevara used “the compost of the past” in a phone conversation (March 22, 2013). His poetics can be read through the lens of Jed Rasula’s This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).
15. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 3.
16. Kilwein Guevara, Autobiography of So-and-so, 9.
17. Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
18. James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), xx.
19. Kilwein Guevara, “Prose Poem Electric,” 81, 80.
20. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 56.
21. Kilwein Guevara, Poems of the River Spirit, 54.
22. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2002); Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1990), 201; A. R. Ammons, Garbage (New York: Norton, 1993).
23. Kilwein Guevara, Autobiography of So-and-so, 45, 70, 77.
24. Jonathan Skinner, “Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape,” in The Eco Language Reader, ed. Brenda Iijima (New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs/Nightboat Books, 2010), 30–31.
25. See Michael Dowdy, “‘Andando entre dos mundos’: Towards an Appalachian Latino Literature,” Appalachian Journal 39.3-4 (2012): 270–88.
26. Joshua Clover, “Once Against (Into the Poetics of Superinformation),” in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, ed. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 163; Urayoán Noel, Hi-Density Politics (Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX, 2010).
27. Kilwein Guevara teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
28. Kilwein Guevara, Autobiography of So-and-so, 9, 38, 51.
29. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 15, 18, 32.
30. Kilwein Guevara, Postmortem, 49.
31. Ibid., 33.
32. Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2012), 129.
33. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 51–52.
34. Ibid., 51.
35. Mark Nowak, Shut Up Shut Down (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2004), 11; Nowak, “Poetics Statement: Notes toward an Anti-capitalist Poetics II,” The New Poetics, 332–33.
36. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 51.
37. Kilwein Guevara, Autobiography of So-and-so, 50.
38. Kilwein Guevara, Poems of the River Spirit, 55. Kilwein Guevara told me that a source for the poem was Wendy
Ewald, Magic Eyes: Scenes from an Andean Girlhood, from stories told by Alicia and María Vásquez (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1992).
39. Kilwein Guevara, “Prose Poem Electric,” 80.
40. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 70–71.
41. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “Walt Whitman, Latino Poet,” in Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 161–62.
42. Stephanie Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009), 92, 94.
43. Kilwein Guevara, Poems of the River Spirit, 17 (italics in original).
44. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 10–11.
45. Kilwein Guevara, Postmortem, 8.
46. Kilwein Guevara, Autobiography of So-and-so, 63.
47. See José Emilio Pacheco, An Ark for the Next Millennium, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).
48. Kilwein Guevara, Poems of the River Spirit, 23.
49. Kilwein Guevara, POEMA, 8, 64.
50. Kilwein Guevara, Postmortem, 75.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Mauricio Kilwein Guevara
BOOKS
Postmortem. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
Poems of the River Spirit. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2001.
POEMA. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009.
The Thieves of Guevara. Novel-in-progress.
TRANSLATIONS
Cansancio Prematuro / Womb Weary. By James Ragan. Madrid: Travesías Ediciones, 2010.
DRAMA
The Last Bridge / El Último Puente. Directed by Charlie Schroeder. Off-Broadway staged reading by Urban Stages, April 12, 1999.
FRED MOTEN
POEMS
FROM Hughson’s Tavern
American Poets in the 21st Century Page 37