American Poets in the 21st Century
Page 51
Bodycatch/Mindtrap: No Edge But In Things
the object we make—(language)
the object we carry—(body)
The defining moment of the poet is to not be. As the poet prepares to receive what the poem is giving, both messenger and receiver lose body to word. Once the word is processed, the body returns—changed/charged—losing body identity to word identity.
Define the poet—as the one who loses themselves—to the poem.
Gain the poem—by finding yourself—in the poet.
The poet—becoming—the poem—is the human cycle—brought to language.
The poem’s infra-structure, a heightened object of reality—my job, to travel its beams, to know what I stand on is as fragile as I am, to land on a complexity of surfaces that invade the journey—given free reign to run the field.
I—my technological is—am
a finger
I have ten I’s, five on each hand
I—my human is—am
a poem
I have ten thousand I’s—one
on each is
My advanced is—has no territory—aside from the page before you turned by me.
My advanced is—becomes othered—by reaching through now before tomorrow shows up.
Define the other—as one who loses themselves—to the other.
Gain the other—by finding yourself—in the other.
The other—becoming—the other—is the poem—realized.
If we claim the object as the space it becomes, before recognizing the object in its present form, we can consider the action of becoming as the object itself, that edge between—becoming the poem’s core, the poet’s journey. My journey in language—becoming the vessel I inhabit—as Nuyorican, Khlebnikovian, Nuyo-Futurist, raza pura, poet human, person of other.
That transfer of definition, the refocalized shift of perception starting in the brain and filtered into nerve endings, is the borderless territory I find myself in—leading me to the edges of my peripheral identity. A New York Puerto Rican poet with a porous ignition between languages, between cultures, between receiver and messenger—the body as interface between realms at the service of imagination—these are the edges I claim as porous awakenings.
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The animal using its peaks and valleys could define itself as The Opposable Human. To be human is to define. To be poet is to undefine—to extract definition where there is none, seemingly. Beginning with the edges we present: the body’s shell, the imaginary page, the chosen definition—available, over there at the margins. The stories at the corners of my page, the sounds just out of reach, the edges I choose, to separate page from boundary—all viewed from a safe distance, such as—not here. Here at the center is not safe, too exposed and real. Not here—over there—gives me a chance to approach here, over here—which makes not here, at the edge, safe. Perception as a journey is fraught with incompletion, where connection is forged in the incomplete.
The imaginary turn, between eye and page, can be seen as a first layer—the front edge of our independent cognition. A porous trigger—where your page turn is not mine, where my safety is not yours. Which of my layers is talking for me? Are you the recognition of my turn, where we meet under our mutual edges? Are you where I land? My signifier? The point I reach for in the continual motion of our human need to know each other—from our settled differences to the unsettled binaries that define our reach for definition … the attempt at clarity among the alphabetics. We are hormonally alphabetic, neurons at the seed of a core, craving connection.
Consider idea—as immigrant—traveling across—bodyocean mindtrap.
With orbit in place, the poem explodes—looking for change—looking to realign its awakening. The embodied bits that make up the vehicle we breathe in. The history that connects to whatever you need right now—made alive, back when the word first became a membrane—a thought before a form—the transitory episodes that envelop, contain and release you. Your edge is incredibly porous, your existence unfolding within it.
Wearing your atmosphere as an accent, the dare emerges. My natural Puerto Rican/New York inclination is to use sound and humor as liquid tendrils between ear and mouth. My natural New York/Puerto Rican inclination is to use identity as a verb.
Meet me at the edge, where I transition among the levels of selves I submerge myself in. Something there, about the need for connection and new day’s reticulation—letter stars arriving out of an atmosphere stillborn in possibility’s breath. Realign a country’s disappearance as an island’s opportunity—a writer’s ignition—the newly emerged illusory, the fluidly impossible definition—claimed as poem.
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How to loosen the give to yourself? How to make fluid the internal available, the raptured here? Our habituated interferences are seeking their source. Peeling through layers over a lifetime, to reveal a perpetual core, a mutual holding at the crevices we shape—our shared language, a human passage among the steps we transition from.
In the spaces we leave behind, in the empty determination of our most-lived promises, lies an undetermined acceptance. A catch at the back of the throat, fully absent in form—where the experience we allow, is in step, with the one we invent.
We select natural points of entry—where to come in, where to tune out—to acknowledge the edge and praise the separation. Of body—of mind—of spirit. To remind the human sensory not only that something is waiting on the other side of our receptors, but that we move to find that something. And that motion, right there, is sacred to the objects we make.
THE US IS POROUS
Edwin Torres in Other Words
Urayoán Noel
How Big Are Your Questions?
If I were you, would I listen to you? Where is your ear?
I say, it is here! (touch tongue) I.E. it is here! (touch soul)
There are ears on the surface of your tongue.
Swallow these words, so they may d i e again …
for someone else to …
Swallow these words, so they may l i v e again …
for someone else to …
SWALLOW THESE WORDS with your tongue,
with the ears on the surface of your tongue!
The ears that speak louder than any words could.
I.E., I speak louder than any words could …
I.E.U. – I.E.U.—I.E. I .00. I. AHHHHH.… HOW CAN I. E. YOU…
….IF I CAN’T EVEN HEAR YOU….1
So begins “Swallow These Words,” one of the most memorable poems from Edwin Torres’s 1991 debut, the self-published chapbook I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said. With its playfully embodied vernacular and its performative address, “Swallow These Words” captures the energy of the early 1990s Nuyorican Poets Cafe scene, of which Torres was a standout, but its eccentric synaesthesias (“with the ears on the surface of your tongue!”) and its aural and typographic experiments also epitomize Torres’s playfully shape-shifting verbivocovisual poetics, quite unlike anything in contemporary American poetry. While attuned to the social voice of the Nuyorican tradition (and to the griot, to the speaking in), his poetics recasts the social as process, so that the “us” is as porous as the distinctions between poet and media artist, between a lyric “I” and a field of interlinking bodies.2
In the decade after the publication of I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said, Torres gained renown both on and off the page. On the one hand, he became known as a performer through venues such as the Spoken Word edition of the series MTV Unplugged and through his worldwide tours with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe poets; on the other, his work began to be taken seriously by poets and critics as diverse as Ron Silliman, Maria Damon, and Kenneth Goldsmith, who understood it as a significant contribution to experimental American poetics.
Although it is imperative to consider Torres’s work from the era both “on and off the page,”3 his work complicates a print-performance binary; from the alternatively minimal and jagged soundscapes of the infl
uential CD Holy Kid (1998) to the hybrid e-book Onomalingua: Noise Songs and Poetry (2000), we can think of Torres’s work in terms of a “media ecology.”4 Torres, who has long made his living as a graphic designer, understands the interrelatedness of media alongside the interrelatedness of bodies; even in the immediacy of live performance, his work is animated by a constructivist spirit that engages bodies as socially mediated. In an email to me, Torres described his poem “Slipped Curve,” from The Po-Pedology Of An Ambient Language (2007), using the phrase “language as territory”; accordingly I propose that we read the ambiente (environment, but also scene in Spanish) in Torres’s poetics as a cross-media mapping of linguistic territories.5
There is, to be sure, a conceptual element to Torres’s poetics: the “I.E.” in “Swallow These Words” refers to “I.E. Interactive Eclecticism,” a fictitious art movement that Torres created as a framework for a series of multidisciplinary performances. This I.E. is also behind Torres’s “I.E. Seducer,” a poem famous from its appearance in the 1994 anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.6 Read another way, though, the I.E. points to how Torres’s interactive and eclectic poetics is constantly being rearticulated in other words. Frequently, this otherword-ly poetics involves an othering of English and Spanish into an idiosyncratically embodied lingua that reflects Torres’s Latino and diasporic cultures. “I.E.,” then, is a self-reflexive marker, to the point where, as Torres wrote to me in an email, he would sometimes use it to refer performatively to himself: “I. Edwin.”
Torres was born in the Bronx in 1958, to parents who had migrated from Puerto Rico. When he was young, his father died, and Torres was raised by his mother. He earned a degree in graphic design from the Pratt Institute in 1978, and he arrived at poetry and performance through the graphics of the Futurists and Dadaists.7 Over time, his performance evolved to include monologues and skits, and he eventually made his way to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the early 1990s, at the dawn of the slam era and of a renaissance at the Cafe. He represented the Cafe at regional and national slams, and he eventually began touring internationally. Likely due to this early exposure, Torres is still all too often pigeonholed as a “slam poet,” despite the fact that his work cuts across poetic traditions and communities. In fact, Torres has also long been associated with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, having served on its board of directors, and he has been an associate editor at Rattapallax since 2002. His awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art. He has also taught and lectured widely, including as visiting faculty at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, and as Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.
The affective logic of memory so central to diasporic literatures is perhaps most evident in Torres’s collection Ameriscopia, which features many largely narrative poems whose explorations of childhood, family, and neighborhood fit surprisingly well into the Latino/a poetry canon, often foregrounding an overlooked aspect of his work: its complex and subtle meditation on (Puerto Rican, Latino) masculinity, and especially on father-son relationships.8 In “I Wanted To Say Hello To The Salseros But My Hair Was A Mess,” one of the earliest such poems included in Ameriscopia—it was first published in Long Shot magazine in 1999 and later included in A Companion to Latino Studies (2007)—the self-deprecating speaker confronts his “scrawny calves,” “non-existent upper-body strength,” “disheveled” hair, and “generally non-Puerto Rican look” and compares himself to the imprint of Puerto Rican masculinity he sees in a group of salsa musicians:
Here were traditional Puerto Rican Men,
from 20 years of age to 60—very well groomed
with gold watches and wisecracks.
Here I was, feeling out-of-place as my
very non-Puerto Rican glasses kept slipping …
I was having thoughts of fitting in or not.
If you even have thoughts
of fitting in or not, you don’t.9
Later in the poem, the speaker’s self-deprecating humor gives way to a moving reminiscence of his father, and ultimately to a manifesto-like embrace of his own confusion, of a messy, uneasy belonging symbolized by his unruly hair:
I’m here
as a Puerto Rican Man of New York Soul …
representing my people
by being who I am, confused
and alienated by my own soil—which has now
become my hair.10
The politics of hair has a long history in Puerto Rican culture, typically framed around the racialized distinction between “good” (straight) and “bad” (kinky/nappy) hair. Here, the speaker’s hair is not straight, but it is not defined by a nappy, Afro–Puerto Rican authenticity either; it occupies its own eccentric space, its own confusing soil where a “Puerto Rican Man of New York Soul” performs and works through his identity.
At once protean and historically and politically circumscribed, masculinity as performed in the “Salseros” poem might be described as diasporous, a term that I use to account both for its rootedness in the social experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora and for its defiantly idiosyncratic representational politics. In its bringing together of porous form and diasporic culture, a diasporous poetics would allow for a blending of the nonlinear art of the cross-media poet with the (unabashedly embodied) narrative lyric of the Puerto Rican/Latino poet.11
In fact, this blending of the lyric and the nonlinear is evident in poems such as the Yorkshire reverie “Whiteshirt Overmeadow,” from Torres’s first full-length book, Fractured Humorous (1999); and “Bone Boy,” from The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (2001), a book that would go far toward establishing Torres’s reputation as an innovator in contemporary US poetry.12 “Bone Boy” begins harmlessly enough, with the speaker seeing a “boy with olive skin,” with black hair and “deep black eyes,” who is eating dinner with his family. That Latino-coded tableau soon gives way, however, to an eccentric list by turns comic, sensuous, beautiful, and unsettling. The poem’s apparent free associations lead from the boy’s bone “hairpiece” to a dada-surreal catalog of wildly modified nouns, including swordfish, cuttlefish, squid, piranha, eagle claw, basilica, moon child, fresco, marinara, exchange rate, genitalia, archipelago, and illuminated manuscript. At once ludic and sublime, the energy of the list wanes toward the end, as the poem returns to the pastoral scene of the family making dinner for the boy. In a 1999 reading of the poem at the Kelly Writers House posted on the PennSound website, Torres’s delivery is breathless but carefully articulated; his reading gives the lines a compressed energy, a dramatic unity belied by the nonlinear accretion of images.13
Over the past dozen years, Torres has refined and honed his narrative, lyric, and verbivocovisual strands in books such as the aforementioned PoPedology and 2009’s In The Function Of External Circumstances.14 In the latter book, which is dedicated to Torres’s wife, the nonlinear and the lyric increasingly meet in poems that might be described as love poems, except that their lyric intimacy opens up to a multitude of linguistic and embodied spaces. In these (anti?)pastorals, the locus amoenus or poetic space is defined by the fleeting meeting of bodies. As Rodrigo Toscano argues in his back-cover blurb, Torres eschews the “Surface Emotional, something that’s mainly reactive to people and happenings, something that ego-centered poetries strive to fill out,” positing instead the “Deep Emotional,” which is “built by a more spare, accretive spatialization (in the Oppen sense) of the words’ ‘numerous’ capabilities.”15 Such a Deep Emotional poetics is evident in the stunning closing stanza of “A Most Imperfect Start,” a poem that Torres described to me in an email as “Buddhist process, how to display transformation to end up at the same spot.” Torres writes:
We each have our function-machines set for body salvation
or emotion-bearers, each of us, in what is laid
for most imperfect starts, most unpronounceable hearts.
We are each in the guise of body
when least aware of body.
I am continually at wander with the reach of everyone around me.
This motion will cut most unexpected matters
and when most unexpected, what survives will be laid bare.16
The porous “I” is defined in relationship to the numerous, as the ego gives way to an awareness of the “guise of body,” and identity understood as a function of external circumstances (as in identity politics) is checked by a provisional “I,” one “continually at wander with the reach of everyone around me.” The prosaic line breaks (which are sometimes sentence breaks as well) lend the passage a diaristic air—love as process poetics, perhaps? One might consider the provisional “I” in Torres’s later work as an example of “lyric postmodernism,” to borrow the title of the late Reginald Shepherd’s much-noted 2008 anthology.17 Although Torres does not appear in that anthology, much of his recent work seems of a piece with that of a number of the poets included there, inasmuch as it eschews distinctions between “traditional” lyric and experimental modes. (Elsewhere in In The Function Of External Circumstances, as in the short poem “In Each Look Our Years,” one can read the influence of Robert Creeley, a poet whose work cuts across lyric and experimental traditions while allowing for a socially attuned Deep Emotional poetics.)
Torres’s books have often experimented with the part and the whole, the unit and the series, blurring the line between discrete poem and sequence, between collection of poems and process writing/manifesto/performance text. Yet, in In The Function Of External Circumstances and other recent books, these experiments also echo the text’s blurring of the boundary between self and other, between intimacy and multiplicity. Thus, the aforementioned “A Most Imperfect Start” appears toward the end of the last section of Circumstances, which is also called “A Most Imperfect Start,” and which follows a section pointedly titled “Liminal Skin,” which consists of a text in four movements. The liminal skin is not just that of the lovers, or of the porous “I” defined in its spatiotemporal refractions; it is also the book itself, whose final sections are interspersed with geometric shapes and designs that recall everything from tangrams to cell or plant membranes.