Aside from the more overt erotic moves, marginal erotics line Exposition Park insofar as the subjectivity of desire is always uncertain, impersonal, hidden—beyond the purview. Tejada’s erotics are more aligned with Bataille’s theory of profanation than with Erich Fromm’s opinion of erotic love: “Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being—and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being.”28 Measured by this standard, there is a dearth of erotic love in Tejada’s poems, for the essence of any being is so inaccessible. Tejada obscures desire with wide-ranging diversity; in the first poem of the section “Cathedral Pyramid,” a heteromasculine subject, who finds the giggle of girls “the thrill of his falling,” reaches the “doña” and “unveils her body” until “in the blur of thumbing / her slender breast pressed back she / looked for a moment like a boy.”29 In the third poem of the section “Sketchbook,” a tongue slides “between teeth / and gums into daughter- / less corners” before the “booze + lubricants / choke-chain tighter / his footsteps rising / from my mouth,”30 reminding us of Bersani’s view that pleasure and pain “continue to be different sensations, but, to a certain extent, they are both experienced as sexual pleasure when they are strong enough to shatter a certain stability or equilibrium of the self.”31 In the very next poem in the sequence, “when odysseus / and penelope all night all night / under sheepskin covers” come together,32 Tejada recovers some sense of Fromm’s idea of erotic love, even if a desiring “I” is replaced with familiar figures from a global literary heritage.
But perhaps the most impersonalized (and marginal) manifestation of erotics in Exposition Park comes in the section “Walking Tour.” Composed of two prose pieces, “Guidelines for Professional Practices” and “Controlled Tour Management Policy,” it reads as a hybrid memorandum-manifesto-lecture of sorts for the “Art Institute Service Bureau,”
a prominent agency with a view both to local and global levels […] resolved to achieve its objective by adherence to the highest professional standards in the implementation of Controlled Lectures and Walking Tours offered to the interpretive community at large. The programs and facilities offered by the Bureau are for the pleasure and edification of the public […] Pleasure and pedagogy are an integral part of the Controlled Lecture and Walking Tours […] Bodily fitness, visual enjoyment and the claims to social truth are the universal green and pasture-happiness by which the Controlled Lecture and Tours aim to counter a sensation of safety-comfort—an easier life for us all. When the scenery of daily life and the general murmur of the world are discontinuous, when a moving body unlearns its position in public space and the social system that makes transit meaningful, the perceptual nutrients provided by each Tour will track a narrative that tells not only of actual ecological surroundings, built environs, and its human dwellers, but will probe with questions also about the combined impact of these categories en route […] Stewards are strongly encouraged to emphasize, by way of contrast, that the Institute perspective is life-advancing and species-preserving; that it recognizes the benefits of resisting customary value-sentiments with physical discomfort or limitations that may lead to appetites by which public space may be otherwise imagined.33
If “Walking Tour” has a voice, it is the Bureau itself that is speaking: a persona that is all mandate and as such, in step with its utilitarian goals, defined by imposing an ideology into practice. The balance struck between a doing of the public good and a discipline that borders on military institutionalism rests on the call to “pleasure and edification,” which is necessarily “bodily” and, in Tejada’s rendition of the logic, curiously grounded in the appeal of “resisting customary value-sentiments with physical discomfort […] that may lead to appetites.” Tejada seizes upon the Bureau as an instrument of biopolitics, asserting power loosely masked as morality, intending to intercede in the lives of unknowing subjects. And the pairing of the modifiers “Controlled” and “Walking” imply a dominant role of the Institute over the flesh, even a tinge of sadism in suggesting pleasure from discomfort. Here, the service of edifying the public through the arts is an activity at once tactile, repressive, and cosmopolitan: a species of bureaucratic eroticism that intertwines the global not with just the local, but with the “life-advancing and species-preserving” human body.
Tejada’s third and most recent collection, Full Foreground, opens with a twelve-line, three-stanza poem, and the first lines of the stanzas respectively speak to salient themes in his work—the aforementioned psyche, marginal erotics, and global culture industry: “I am a concept after the natural end of two objects / […] / I am in pornography a person not effaced /
[…] / The sorrowsong event or museum piece implausible.”34 At times the themes come together seamlessly:
how many of us on line and in rank
when it all functions at lower best
Electronic velocity to deepen capital’s
culture in the digital West an onslaught
by money demands and scientific compliance
in metropoles where rape is committed
every fifty-four minutes35
Tejada even manages the combination with remarkable economy, as in the line, “a wax museum’s prophylactic.”36 This thematic combination, on multiple scales and with a variety of topical referents—ranging widely across the globe, from NAFTA to African American slavery, Classical mythology, the Philippines, and beyond—sustains the inquiry Tejada articulated in reflecting upon his first collection: “who’s conquering whom and how are those power differentials established in a palpable historical sense, and what kinds of fear and fantasy prompt subjectivity?”
Full Foreground extends Tejada’s overarching project, a poetic discourse on the diapason of power, from the vastness of world events to the atomic level of the body. The poem from which the collection derives its title speaks to this dynamic, and through double entendres:
Full foreground and shortcomings of this intercourse
if our voices mattered amid this kind of predictable
thinking, institution of secrets civil-silenced
or stammered-over without filling the gaps
in an ecstatic state37
The “intercourse” of an “ecstatic state” suggests multiple meanings that make Full Foreground’s contexts and histories synchronous within the psyche, the “first-person atmospheres” of desire.
While much of this collection is concerned with “describing the link between modern commerce and / empire,”38 Tejada situates this in biopower, and poses it largely to the profanation of bodies at the hands of the state. In the appendix of notes, Tejada explains that “Full Foreground composes a musical sequence whose desire is for lyric discourse to voice bodily sensation in the shadow of global command.”39 With “intellect severed from a body wrong in specimens of flesh,”40 and “trapped / between the old art of the possible and this / global counterfeit,”41 the psychic attention of Full Foreground meanders through turn-of-the-twenty-first-century cultural politics to poeticize a global unconscious. In the poems of this collection, and by means of syntactic misdirection as well as thematic digressions, apperception oscillates between cynicism and unconsciousness. Silverman’s theory that “when the unconscious displaces affect from a repressed wish to a perceptual stimulus or memory, it does not create a new analogy; rather, it acknowledges one that already exists” applies here.42 Tejada’s poetic bricolage of political and historical events is somewhat reminiscent of Pound’s Cantos, but instead of a Poundian factive personality as the core first-person atmosphere, the dominant personality of Full Foreground, while ethically rooted, is far more desultory. This allows the unconscious to open “onto the world” and accommodate “not just personal memories but also the ‘reminiscences of mankind’”43 with greater nuance—and an attention to the body, its commodification, and even its urges.
Full Foreground delves into an array of world events: the Chiapas uprising, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of
Oklahoma City, and the war crimes of Slobodan Milošević among them. Poetic jump cuts function efficiently to establish Tejada’s subject rhyme, of the body outmatched by global power: “voting in a township on the outskirts // of Pretoria and can I enter places barred / from me once if O is for office clerk // St. Louis April seven when harass-arrested / watchful as a body snatcher indemnify this.”44 But other moments of the book, in the spirit of creating a “musical sequence,” provide thematic counterpoints to the overtly political meditations, reminding us of the erotics of biopower. In a section called “Prick Peel Shed,” Tejada addresses the idea of judgment, considering various hypotheticals that include the heteronormative judgment of sexuality and orientation:
An establishment containing such a furnace stoked in
keeping with the authorities to show me these
projects are plausible, I mean short of marching
in pairs to provide a sense of homeland or nation
state—or else this must be some kind of a joke about
the confidence in a personality that will
coax you from disdain or
indifference, an altered voice into so much
sexual activity involving wet gels and latex, groove
or slot into which some part of an arrangement
of parts may suit my
identity to say of any assertion, it’s
a failure, and a good thing I made so many mistakes
in the translation by dogs pulled to pieces, your
glasses full, our bodies cricking.45
This stanza develops a certain intimacy between hegemony and the self that, in the passing of judgment, brings forth a curious strain of doubt. The opening phrases characterize the self as vulnerable in the manner in which it defers to authority, a manner equally subservient (“to show me these / projects are plausible”) and informal (“I mean short of marching / in pairs”). The tone welcomes the reader in, approaching the ideal Jon Clay describes as the “passing into a poem,”46 for behind the notion of “homeland or nation” lies a register of significance, of “confidence in a personality,” that is more psychic than political, even if seemingly of both. Prior poems in this collection, in their erotic imagery—“the firmness of a lover’s crevice against / my tongue” before “the taste of money / I spend in the lube-city wet / dream,”47 and “harrowed corpses / everywhere once here in uproar / […] / receding now into the ecstatic / lather and stench as you quiver”48—establish bearings (insinuative as they are) from which to calculate what Tejada might be implying by “my / identity”: a queer masculinity aware of the threats of heteronormative judgment. The mood is akin to Judith Butler’s idea of “heterosexual melancholy” in that “a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love.”49 Tejada voices an endangered masculinity, the nature of its desire exposed to unforgiving power, and the result is, as the last lines of one poem read, “unequivocal and absolute, this / magnificent bondage.”50
Threaded through Tejada’s work is a sequence of marginal erotics that, by metonyms of power attuned to “who’s conquering whom,” replaces personal, subjective desire with large-scale sociopolitics in rendering erotic urge. At times the moves are small: almost quirks of Tejada’s inquisitive language play that dart around details cluttering the postmodern psyche. But at other times, and perhaps more often, Tejada explores these conceits with a heightened sense of ethics. Tejada has expressed in personal correspondence that “the entangled processes of sex and language as per the erotics of power and bondage activated in the poems […] are linked in my mind in the intertwining and chiasmus—flesh—that exists between sexed perception, death drive, and the historical uncanny; the ceaseless transformation of life processes that determines human embodiment as both exempt from and deeply embedded in nature and history.”51 His current book-in-progress, Why the Assembly Disbanded, collects poems that take further the marginalization of erotics; as he explained in conversation, the poems “engage with the reckoning of present and former selves and the amazements of behavior in the public domain.” In doing so, erotics are buried deeper, as in the poem “Liquid M.”52 The speaker in this poem is literally a speaker, at “this lectern” before some sort of assembly, ready to deliver “the many pages I was meant to recite.” His self is bifurcated into the present man and the child within him, a stained, “deviant boy”:
The assembly pointed its rotary ligaments as though
With flashing arrows to say look at the repellent
Little stain incriminating the deviant boy with my
Features and in possession of all my belongings.
I’d arrived from his displacements or he from mine
In a lament not of sorrow but of bitter obligation
To whatever it was the stain betrayed
Readying himself for the event, the man-child experiences what “appeared a physical but weirdly porous / Boundary between inside and out as this juncture / Between an ability for speed to excite my behavior / And a belated quality of attention that recalled / A wild pageantry.” There is no overt sexuality in the poem, but its diction (physical, weirdly porous, inside and out, sped to excite, with wild pageantry) runs up against an erotic boundary.
The poem remains on the side of public propriety but close to the limit, and thus a tempered erotic charge haunts the poem. The self-consciousness that causes the boy’s emergence
Was to incite the boy’s impersonation of the unfamiliar.
He palpitates for an increase in affability and euphoria.
I anatomize for a burlesque of bloodstream and combustion.
He gives good entrance in increments and transit losses.
Connotations of the words “palpitates,” “euphoria,” “anatomize,” “burlesque,” and “bloodstream” establish a tension that is metasexual. Moreover, the suggestive phrasing that the boy “gives good” anything flirts with taboo, and “the transgression of a taboo is no less subject to rules than the taboo itself.”53 By animating the puerile persona as an outgrowth of the poem’s speaking self, Tejada traces a single experience that conflates varied lines of thought—on the psyche and marginal erotics, but also on the creation of art. The emergence of the boy in the poem invokes the archetype of the child-mind vital to artistic impulse, and yet simultaneously, as a stepping-out of the adult self, “dissipates the self’s integrity” in an erotic way. In Bersani’s words, in the exercise of artistic attention, “‘[t]o go outside oneself’ is equivalent to allowing the self to be penetrated, to having it invaded, congested, and shattered by the objects of its attention.”54
In the newer poems, the peripheral quality that characterizes marginal erotics as outlined in this essay often takes the form of a kind of obscure poetic flirtation, of little more than fleeting allusions and insinuations: the “blindfold off the squadron history and into the dirty hole” of “Venus a Polygon,”55 the “[q]uiet pleasure of that blush of skin” of “Mortar & Method,” and the “solid / gold demands of your small slivers” of “Freestanding Form.”56 Considered in isolation, these lines do not convincingly offer a framework for considering Tejada’s recent poetry as dominantly erotic. Instead, in the context of his body of work, they marginalize erotics even more. By focusing on Tejada’s treatment of eroticism, we can understand not only the importance of sexuality-as-sentience in his writing, but also the extent to which control over impulse, desire, identity, and will is a definitive feature in his portraiture of humanism and society. As Bataille claims, “Eroticism as seen by the objective intelligence is something monstrous,”57 and it is true that eroticism in Tejada’s work is tinged with a feeling of danger, pleasurable yet looming, foreboding. As it is pushed to the margins of awareness, Tejada’s eroticism passes through iterations of synecdoche the disregard of our primal urge as living beings, by forces local and global, that inflict tragedy and motivate justice.
NOTES
1. Bernard Weinraub, “Alvarez Bravo’s ‘Lens of Revelatio
ns,’” New York Times, December 1, 2001, accessed February 1, 2016. Available online at www.nytimes.com.
2. Ibid.
3. Tejada, “Roberto Tejada,” Poetry Foundation. Available online at www.poetryfoundation.org.
4. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 2.
5. Roberto Tejada, Mirrors for Gold (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2006), 13.
6. Ibid., 27.
7. Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 2.
8. Ben Hutchinson, “Modernism and the Erotics of Style,” in Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature After Sexology, ed. Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 215.
9. Ibid., 221.
10. Tejada, Mirrors for Gold, 22.
11. Ibid., 11–12.
12. David Bergman, The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 116.
13. Sarah Jackson, Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 4, 56.
14. Tejada, Mirrors for Gold, 25.
15. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), 144.
16. Tejada, Mirrors for Gold, 37.
17. Ibid., 38.
18. Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 6.
19. Roberto Tejada, Exposition Park (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010).
20. Ibid., 66.
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