American Poets in the 21st Century
Page 47
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It’s what industry can render of a hard shell with surgical staples clamped across the upturned mouth to keep the cavity shut. I’ve a lip made bilateral and speech came in time, such that with practice I communicate decidedly. In all truthfulness, in my many-colored murmur, in what nation’s accent?
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At the rift of shared beliefs and common artifacts that detach a generation from the world or otherwise shield us from each other by means of learning and geography, is the partition of the nominal, grammar dash or no space; of value, habit, and behavior: flood-line, blackjack, starburst.
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Extent of a lifespan: degrees of undefined space.
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Membrane, make an effort to efface a feeling, now and then, of remorse for actions whose guilt I assumed from time to time as liability, a sort of quest or confusing narrative hanging at mid-breath, somehow never finding a finality or conclusion, yet seemingly specific in detail and urgent in command.
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Precarious conviction: common hemorrhage: suspended shape.
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If you pass for heterosexual, separate pink from the 50,000 tongues and a flimsy swath of fabric, hard part for lips gorged on a load as though starving to death in such deep action slit wide open for close up shots that resound around an outline for a number of us, fingers wet, faces tight with surge and stain.
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Please ascend out of this narcosis, sweetheart, into the form and value of interrogation skills, conduct deemed heinous and unlawful only when wrought by individuals; state flow blocked in ordinance of horizontal increase by means of arteries, stretched the length of my neck, vessels that harness sufficient blood to the head.
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Daylabor ante, checkpoint tease: identification at all times.
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Lost in downward spiral, impaled by a series of rods clamped between next of kin and state to make palpable a time in history when what the world measured of an uncommon life was secretly familiar, exacting of a stamina by which, wired and gaunt, those formerly withdrawn gain self possession such that productivity improved at the work place.
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What does self-possession contain?
Radiant barricade: half-strangled moan.
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Neither slain nor eaten in final distend or radical relaxing, irrefutable tools for building the house of behavior in the family relation, fiscal exchange and legal sanctions that fashion the subjects of money and bylaws, or I am a believer when the angel of elation sayeth unto me: slash, thrive, overcome, withhold.
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Because no scientific consensus can be reached, because patients continue to suffer, enhanced methods notwithstanding, because there are only so many stretchers and the institution understaffed, what cannot yield is a form of authority, dear porcelain sheen when sutures sustain the tissue.
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Labors erased in the telling; lives unruffled by war.
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Anodized aluminum security access and attaché, sleek detector in a minefield deterrent of biological assault, bodies fit for fear, repression and denial, protective device and life support system threatened by chemical effect, sexual infection, totemic club, and nightstick concealed or ascending to the glandular sun.
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Do not fail to corroborate the following:
a) skin color b) land use c) passport.
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Lactic, ineffaceable, and subterranean, diffuse on such a massive scale as criminal behavior is to a world fitful with suicide bombs on Tuesday, chrome metals rekindled in the populace, speech accountable to the district like money pledged as security for foodstuff, thick with carbonates and alkaloids, electrolytes and protein.
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Insofar as the margins between mirror and method double over, firm digital insertion performed with the purpose of clearing the fluid sac to eliminate built-up secretion, empty the organ of dead cells to relieve symptoms when the levels come apart, albeit obedient to the unforeseen emergency of uncertain settlement.
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The developers, who insinuate what all the others unbuild, confer as though form were an obstacle.
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Girdle, surrender your tassels and aperture, barriers dissolved in the vulnerability of night, invariable domain of attitude and action, influence of the dominant style that comes to the forefront when not otherwise subordinate and therefore bound to collapse.
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This is to say the pleasure it once provided approximate to her body, maternal volume existing nowhere sooner than it was lost to me in a world uncovered not by means of it encroaching but in the compulsion to recur what I forgot I always wanted.
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Repeat after me: inhale, awaken, and restrain—Broadcast that forbids to lay claim on the inflicting source, strap tethered with the intention to incite the flailing self now inferior, now supreme, surrendering endurance of a body’s appetite in pink and black entangled, spent, encased, uncontainable.
FROM Full Foreground
Untitled [Not a word of my surrounding]
Not a word of my surrounding not a half-whispered
go to catch the rattled ought of a third concurrent
universe unlatched the more you wait, chalk drawn
thick of old around the marred bodies left
by the citizen squads our authorities facilitate, fail
to prosecute, guilt being therefore—quote/unquote
when physical comfort, when bodily prowess
and sovereign shape are rendered command
over the meaning of a nimbus once in sprigs
of goldenrod or Indian paintbrush, chalice
owing to rock crystal and featherwork, ivory!
carved in supple limbs, remote gazes and crusty
wounds, gold-leaf reredos in bellows pyramidal
from an organ pipe: an opulence wrought from
the nightmare of native oblation, of x-ian zeal
waged on local hands in effigies, Saint James
the Greater made in Goa and the Philippines,
or Rose of Lima, in a ministry of Indians
and slaves fallen victim to epidemic, heroically
to God and in penitential practice so extravagant
—cat claws and fish bones across her wasted
flesh—as to be the subject of ecclesiastic inquiry
into questions of faith, soundness of mind
stretched the length and breadth of his midrib
and torso in taut spasms, teeth clenched and lips
in a slather of animal darkness in time spent under
thickets, our twin intelligence a forearm and grip
in fast strokes around gleam and edge, tips
wet with each other, then deeper, to a clump
of hair and fingers guiding the back of his
head, mouth over gloss and curvature, blade
inextinguishable when too-slow a swelter released
in sounds of who, whose ah spread soaked along
his back and thighs rubbed sleek across
the wonder imperfections of form, lips abruptly
pursed to each moan pillowed by the sudden
hush of skin a spirograph, his dark upper
eyelids and lashes down his own limbs
now in aftermath-order and lucible enormity
Untitled [Impulse in the great organism of terror]
Impulse in the great organism of terror whether with bombing
that led to throngs in flight from the sirens in light of global
command
who at the helm on account of what strife means or survival
and so liable of the same murderous effect as
compared alone when I want this to deaden a kind
of blight in my head sister the missing lips
of a mystified rhetoric or the paranoid moans about
cultural connections that do not exist �
��foresee-
able order of disclosure if a generation still reigned
in a state of sense and sound I object your
honor made plain and on what grounds have you any
right on behalf of the massacred when the last
word’s a promise barely stomached between
equal-signs or the end-rhymes of a sonnet
describing the link between modern commerce and
empire social category of race by means to
govern our colonial reaches with medicine and higher
learning family and God overarching in ways
enjoyed as homeless tongues and twitches exacted
by teeth so close I’m all over my phobic throat
and chest around a windpipe in upper body panic
by a figure this Milosevic with war crimes
semblance of blame that of NATO’s rejoinder
to the ethnic cleansing a life and purpose of its own
intellect severed from a body wrong in specimens of flesh
and branches under those I was ordered to
sleep all probe and tentacle a troubled fit when no
one visits in the interest of opacity or the last re-
sort a prayer that goes like this so listen terminus
unburden our improvident fruit of all other riches;
umbrage, temper this stray unsobered will the cold
touch of the given mother-of-pearl levigate
our gash kinship—notch or hollow compelled
forever to my hispid thighs and maternal treble
FROM Why the Assembly Disbanded
Kill Time Objective
for the sake of my acoustic self I lead out of danger an anonymous pack from the building entrapment secured by militia
first prompted was the mouth emission, other species techniques I thought would never keep from me the village immolation even now a third person plural to ask in a chorus concerned with all the unsanctioned disclosures, we had expressed in such adversaries our interest, we had divined from them a quantum of intelligence
soon adjusted of my amplitude I escape and striving escalate the only barrier dividing inside from out thick steel at first translucent, gleaming now but with a weathered crackle glaze suspending the ability to recognize a likeness and I panic overjoyed or appalled, anyway the base line exhausting the tonal pitch insofar as they see not my face, no matter how close they look, first and foremost classified, chiefly management, mostly disapproving
soon the phonic constellation after hours of the data harvest, room tone, proximity to source, boredom of the solar system, estuary trespass
soon as maps were to the mirror sequence by leaning on the present, complicity was to the frenzy of flesh, muddle of tongues, a ransom note
but for the sake of fighting for breath already the instrument for transposition in a parasitic image finally proper to this place: I’m the encryption I’m the statistic, no longer bristling in the heroics of metaphor, I’m equipped with artillery that enables me now to bullet an opening for everyone’s deliverance
but for the scene change lodgings very disinfected, new cause for residing in that I trace it back to the assignment room and retrieve, because arson, what I misplaced anew and under observation now, two performers licentious but so approving of the spinal-chord perspective as to marvel at the sheer outrage and wonder of the surgical incision
but for the tangled purpose of the anatomy we take to name eviscerate
but for the conference hour this week with my parishioners in exchange for the motion in multiple layers—overcoat, many trousers, uniform—in the process also of my ballooning self into unprecedented scales of subjection
as soon as I recite the lines that tell the world of the authority to petrify to touch and be tutored or otherwise curb but never entirely embraced no matter the many hours we waited on Ledgewood to trust the day
but for the amassing body attributes of my contempt and retribution, but for the ever more audacious interference at the level of my molecular resemblance
but for the album now children please open to lesson thirty-two
POETICS STATEMENT
The Acoustic Uncanny
Speculative moods give way to the desire for a standpoint, to dispositions of form, to the variability of behavior, and to wonder. When the hearsay of experience underplays the elements of line structure and sound design, when it confuses postulate for observation, adherence for experiment, and compliance for practice, is it with a vocation to the unfamiliar soundforms of life that audio techniques in poetry can provide timbre and frequency to the particulars of living as though undetermined by law? Is it—I’m given to wonder, I pause, I stage a scene of seduction …—Is it possible to convey the tremor of experience, the acoustic speed of sensation, the line as a polyphonic site of momentum, immersive, accordingly a providence of knowledge, an indwelling and extension able to account for a fading that, in composition, emerges at the meeting place of contrary truths? Is there so much intransigence owing to the global broadband and economies of scale, the workaday matter of society, one’s designated and elective selfhoods, as to prohibit in poems a habitat for mutuality? Do I undertake the material basis inherent to a practice comprised of words in exchange, a fable that ties me to public life and involves me in a relation to other people by way of lines that describe not a state of affairs—an object scrutinized or remarked—but rather stress points that activate to whom it is I speak my mind as when offered for public listening?
I live between my body and its circumstance, between molecular and political contingencies, between advantage and constraint, between indwelling and social legibility, between borderland self-possession and hemispheric bricolage, between sexed assertions and enacted styles that can make culture in the plural plausible by rehearsing nearness—fantasmatic and physical—in mediated or analog space. Emerging therein is a form of life I want a poem to inhabit in an empathic tense, a social engagement that, belated, will have occurred only by measure of a poem’s audible afterlife. The aggregate effects of alternating scenes and intonations reflect the uncertainty at stake when a second- and third-person plural is discernable in the equivocations, misgivings, mood shifts, or fluctuations between the external and internal viewpoint; forces that confront in poetic form a once-imagined social unity—the humanity and duration, so to speak, that a poem is able to contain. In the time span of its syllables, in the contact zone of its enactment, in the vocal enjoyment of pronouncing the written, the defense of one’s inscape is the refusal to be judged out of true, or rendered out of the picture. Sounded embodiment is a material force—a holding place, a threshold—wherein is activated a series of arrivals and departures that lead from physical reality to sensory perception, and back. This quality of attention subverts the natural order that gives form to the formless. Poetry becomes a vehicle that enables the overcoming of alleged antagonisms by having constituent parts—stasis and motion, past and present, order and chaos, complexity and unity—shed their multiple, differentiated status. It’s a method that enlivens experience with situations and arguments that so unsettle the agreement of cause and effect as to approximate the life process—and by extension, the discontinuous flow of history—as movements that amend, delay, curve, and surprise.… How will the society of poetry’s alternate belonging choose to steward or obliterate the untamed thoughts or passions at the core of existence?
Applied language may be the tool best equipped to shape sound-forms from ordinary life into emotional structures that alter how we act in society. It’s no small thing to acknowledge in poetry the spectacles of human devastation and slaughter that define the present, as well as the social commitments to counter despair, by making modest inflections in the chorus of hope. I accept a range of accents as both adequate and inadequate to the task of expressing transformative energies in excess of any individual capacity to open the space of the world so wide as to demand more than one person to see the par
ticular in the picture. I situate poetic practice in a field of action where the poem is an object in conflict with itself, ever coupled to the treacherous flux of life, and inseparable from many fields of intellectual vitality. The speculative experience I seek to convey inhabits a time lag separating present and former aspects of a self, future amazements of behavior in the public domain, and the ceaseless transformation of drives that determine human embodiment as both being exempt from, and deeply embedded in, nature and history.
MARGINAL EROTICS
Roberto Tejada’s Sexiness
David Colón
At the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Roberto Tejada curated an exhibition of pictures, on display from November 2001 to February 2002, by the famous Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The exhibit was named Optical Parables after the photograph “Optical Parable” (1931; see figure 1), a static yet arresting picture of an optometrist’s storefront. The angled view produces perspective and diagonal lines; the closeness takes the ground out of view. The storefront windows and shingle are adorned with illustrations of disembodied eyes (think Fitzgerald’s Dr. Eckleburg), seven in all counting the one reflection, and the business’s name, “La Optica Moderna E.Spirito,” is just too good to be true. Deceptively simple, Álvarez Bravo’s finishing touch is to invert the image so that all the lettering reads backwards. It’s as if we are looking at the storefront in a mirror, and it doesn’t take long to register that the inversion of an image is what happens within our own eyeballs whenever we see. But there is also a figurative inversion that happens through “Optical Parable,” conveying Álvarez Bravo’s appreciation for vanguard modernism without esotericism. His oeuvre’s subject matter predominates in street scenes and everyday Mexican people. Widely known as a photographer without a creed, he would tell his students to “[s]hoot what you see, not what you think. A photographer’s philosophy should be not to have one.”1 In his coverage of the exhibition for the New York Times, Bernard Weinraub notes,