American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  In another short poem, “Temporality at 5AM,” Torres recasts the lyric into a riff on the dialectics of self and page; a poem succeeds in capturing temporality only inasmuch as it accepts the page as a space of loss, so that writing becomes a wager on a shareable loss:

  Catching every moment, so I have it

  Because what if I lose every bit of my time

  Every thought, in a word, a letter here

  on the page, in front of me

  The receptacle being, managed

  By the output

  What is mine, to lose

  Would be shared, to win42

  Here again, Torres’s poetics is verbivocovisual, not only in its synaesthetic dazzle, but also as a means to redefine perception. From his recent book XoeteoX: the infinite word object, the longer poem “Some Kinda Rip In What I See,” with its bold opening declaration “Into / Elegy without apology,” reads like a primer on Romantic Constructivism, attuned as it is to the “ground opening” and the “eyeball bursting.” What separates this Romanticism from, say, Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” is its insistence on a deferral of meaning, on saying its name in other words:

  I see these things fall apart, all the time

  Calling me to the rip in what I see

  The suckering into wonder

  I dot dot dot but not yet

  In the last line, the “not yet,” the deferred meaning of an elliptical poetics, is not only written out as “dot dot dot,” it is also itself qualified by a “not yet” (the not yet is not yet!) so that meaning is always present and always deferred, as in the paradox captured in the title Yes Thing No Thing.

  One way to approach this paradox is to acknowledge meaning as collaborative, as relational. It may seem insignificant, for instance, that, according to Torres, “Swallow These Words” grew out of an ongoing collaboration with a saxophonist. Of course, we can read the bolds and font variations of that poem as vanguardist experiments of the kind that will appear throughout Torres’s later work, and we can also read them as mere scores for saxophone, but what if we read them in a broader sense, as impossible scores, as words that stand for sounds but that can, inevitably, only render those sounds in other words?

  Torres has collaborated, formally and informally, with countless artists over the years, but especially with musicians; and given his work’s rootedness in, and explorations of, sound art and noise, we can read the page as a necessarily incomplete, inevitably provisional document of his poetics. Thus, it makes sense to locate Torres in and against foundational Nuyorican poetics that also approached the page as a necessarily provisional score, yet his work is also distinctive for its postmedia profusion, for its insistence on deploying multiple print and performance iterations, and on doing so self-reflexively, in an effort to embody identity in other words.

  In an email to me, Torres described a variety of ongoing projects, including a collaboration through the Dia Art Foundation with an installation artist in East Harlem, a book of poems inspired by his experience living in upstate New York, and an anthology of body-centered poetics that will have “essays and poems from poets as well as artists, body workers, hypnotists, therapists, performers.” This latter project grew out of workshops Torres has been teaching for many years, and involves what he characterized as a quest for a “process-oriented poetry” that emerges out of the body and into language, addressing such questions as “Where does the brain meet the tongue to allow poetry the body? How does performance initiate change in the audience (in the world) starting with body language?”

  In describing these projects to me, Torres arrived at what reads like a pithy distillation of his poetics: “I suppose it’s my view of the body as it relates to the space it occupies—that physio-mental-beyonding that runs as a current underneath my incarnations. The continued presence of process informs my identity before my culture does, the interactive was born eclectic but no one ever claimed it.” The complexities of that “physio-mental” process mark the us (the culturalist lingua franca) in Torres’s poetics as defined by the porous, by the interactive and eclectic slippage between self and other, always in other words. It is in and against this relational process that meaning—both personal and social—is made.

  In a literary landscape where both identity (“poor us!”) and its discontents (“stop pouring it on!”) have become boringly familiar moves, Edwin Torres’s poetics performs identity by insisting on a verbivocovisual difference. It is partly a Poro Rican thing, but it is also a no-thing, like the us and its porous chorus.

  NOTES

  1. Edwin Torres, I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said (self-published, 1991), n.p.

  2. I am using the term “verbivocovisual” in the spirit of the Brazilian concrete poets, who, as Irene Small notes, adopted it from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to describe their own synaesthetic poetics. See Irene Small, “Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry,” CiberLetras 17 (2007), available online at www.lehman.edu. For another use of the term, see Marshall McLuhan, Verbi-voco-visual Explorations (New York: Something Else Press, 1967). My reading of Torres’s work in terms of “media ecologies” evidently echoes McLuhan. For a substantive consideration of the latter term, see Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

  3. See Marjorie Perloff, Poetry on and the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998).

  4. Edwin Torres, Holy Kid (CD) (Olympia, WA: Kill Rock Stars, 1998); Torres, Onomalingua: Noise Songs and Poetry (e-book; New York: Rattapallax Press, 2000). For media ecologies, see note 2.

  5. Edwin Torres, The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Berkeley, CA: Atelos Books, 2007).

  6. Edwin Torres, “I.E. Seducer,” in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, ed. Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman (New York: Henry Holt, 1994).

  7. Edwin Torres, interview by Kika Pena. Available online at www.brainlingo.com.

  8. Edwin Torres, Ameriscopia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014).

  9. Edwin Torres, “I Wanted To Say Hello To The Salseros But My Hair Was A Mess,” in A Companion to Latina/o Studies, ed. Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 394.

  10. Ibid., 396.

  11. For more on the term “diasporous,” see my study of Nuyorican poetry, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). The term and its playful permutations also figure prominently in my book of poetry Los días porosos (The Porous Days) (Guatemala City: Catafixia Editorial, 2012), which is in conversation with the work of Torres and other Nuyorican poets.

  12. Edwin Torres, “Whiteshirt Overmeadow,” in Fractured Humorous (Honolulu: Subpress Collective, 1999), 55. Torres, “Bone Boy,” in The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (New York: Roof Books, 2001), 58–59.

  13. Torres, “Bone Boy,” PennSound, writing.upenn.edu.

  14. Edwin Torres, In The Function Of External Circumstances (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2009).

  15. Ibid., back cover.

  16. Ibid., 105.

  17. Reginald Shepherd, ed., Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (Denver, CO: Counterpath, 2008).

  18. Torres, PoPedology, 106.

  19. Libertad Guerra, “Uncommon Commonalities: Aesthetic Politics of Place in the South Bronx,” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 8 (2011). Available online at joaap.org.

  20. Edwin Torres, interview, Poetry Society of America. Available online at www.poetrysociety.org.

  21. Urayoán Noel, “From Spanglish to Glossolalia: Edwin Torres’s Nuyo-Futurist Utopia,” in Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, ed. Barrett Watten and Carrie Noland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 225–42.

  22. Rodrigo Toscano, review of The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language, Poetry Project Newsletter 215 (April-June 2008): 18. Emphasis in the original.

  23. Toscano,
review of PoPedology, 18, 19.

  24. I am thinking, say, of the debates surrounding Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry (New York: Penguin, 2011), and especially of Marjorie Perloff’s Boston Review essay “Poetry on the Brink” and the responses it generated from a variety of poets (see www.bostonreview.net). Torres is surprisingly excluded from Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). Perhaps it is a definitional matter; for, although a fair amount of Torres’s (non-univocal) work certainly seems to me to qualify as conceptual writing, it is most certainly not anti-expressive. In any case, his exclusion seems to me a missed opportunity to interrogate the limits of the conceptual.

  25. Torres, interview, Poetry Society of America.

  26. See Julio Marzán, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).

  27. Also in this tradition would be Victor Hernández Cruz, a key innovator in diasporic Puerto Rican and US Latino/a poetry who has acknowledged Williams as a significant influence and foundational figure. See Carmen Dolores Hernández, Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 71.

  28. In the Poetry Society interview, Torres takes Flarf seriously, inasmuch as it “involves using the resources in front of us (internet, google, blackberry) to synchronize with our personal speed.” Following Toscano’s review, one might think of Torres’s work, with its cross-media humor and its mash-ups, as a forerunner of Flarf. My comments on PoPedology grow out of my own review of the book published in Bomb 103 (Spring 2008): 16.

  29. Torres, PoPedology, 113, 114.

  30. Brian Kim Stefans, Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Berkeley, CA: Atelos Books, 2003).

  31. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Morton’s Derridean riffs are as confounding as they are stimulating, especially as the book moves beyond critique and toward proposing its own eco-moves. Still, his materialist approach to poetics represents a necessary corrective, and an important point of departure. I am grateful to Stuart Cooke for helping complicate and finesse my reading of Morton.

  32. Edwin Torres, Yes Thing No Thing (New York: Roof Books, 2010).

  33. Torres, PoPedology, 174. For “A Nuyo-Futurist’s Manifestiny,” see Torres, The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker, 89–109; and see also my essay “From Spanglish to Glossolalia,” mentioned in note 21.

  34. Torres, Yes Thing, back cover.

  35. Ibid., 124.

  36. The uneasiness of the poem translates to its live performance: in an email to me, Torres mentioned that audiences have interpreted the spellings as “computerized robo-speak,” and have even told him that it felt like watching Siri (the iPhone’s built-in “personal assistant”) recite a poem. Torres emphasized to me that any similarity to Siri was unintentional, and he speculated that these sorts of audience reactions spoke to our “need for familiarity where none exists.” I take Torres’s commitment to the poem’s uneasiness as emphasizing how his poetics can be (must be?) defamiliarizing, even in its live immediacy and its lyric honesty.

  37. Torres, “Noricua BBQ,” in PoPedology, 46–49. Noricua is also the name of a performance project/movement/concept that Torres developed with the Spanic Attack collective during a South Bronx barbecue, the same barbecue alluded to in the poem’s title. I reflect on the Noricua project, on my role in it, and on its relationship to downtown and Nuyorican traditions, in “On Out of Focus Nuyoricans, Noricuas, and Performance Identities,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 10.3–4 (2014).

  38. See note 24.

  39. Edwin Torres, One Night: Poems for the Sleepy (Brooklyn: Red Glass Books, 2012).

  40. Torres, Yes Thing, 39–41.

  41. Ibid., 14.

  42. Torres, Ameriscopia, 14–15.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Works by Edwin Torres

  BOOKS AND COMPACT DISCS

  Holy Kid. CD. Olympia, WA: Kill Rock Stars, 1998.

  Fractured Humorous. Honolulu: Subpress Collective, 1999.

  Onomalingua: Noise Songs And Poetry. E-Book. New York: Rattapallax Press, 2000.

  The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker. New York: Roof Books, 2001.

  Novo. CD. Barcelona: OozeBap Records, 2003.

  Please. CD-ROM. Cambridge, MA: Faux Press, 2003.

  The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language. Berkeley, CA: Atelos Books, 2007.

  In The Function Of External Circumstances. Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2009.

  Yes Thing No Thing. New York: Roof Books, 2010.

  Ameriscopia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014.

  XoeteoX: the infinite word object. Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2018.

  Ed., The Body In Language. Denver, CO: Counterpath Press, 2018.

  CHAPBOOKS

  I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said. Self-published, 1991.

  Lung Poetry. New York: Soncino Press, 1994.

  SandHomméNomadNo. Self-published, 1997.

  Ilusos. Translated by Urayoán Noel. San Juan, PR: Atarraya Cartonera, 2010.

  One Night: Poems for the Sleepy. Brooklyn: Red Glass Books, 2012.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, ROSA ALCALÁ is the author of three books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem 2017). Her poetry also appears in a number of anthologies, including Stephen Burt’s The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard University Press 2016). The recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, her translations are featured in the forthcoming Cecilia Vicuña: New & Selected Poems (Kelsey Street Press), which she edited. Alcalá teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas–El Paso.

  CHADWICK ALLEN is Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Russell F. Stark University Professor in English and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. Author of the books Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts and Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, and coeditor of The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies, in 2013–2014 he served as president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and in 2012–2017 he served as editor for the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures.

  MOLLY BENDALL is the author of Watchful (Omnidawn 2016), Under the Quick (Parlor Press 2009) and Ariadne’s Island (Miami University Press 2002). She also has coauthored with the poet Gail Wronsky Bling & Fringe (What Books 2009). She has received the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, the Lynda Hull Prize from Denver Quarterly, and two Pushcart Prizes. She teaches at the University of Southern California.

  BRIAN BLANCHFIELD is the author of three books of poetry and prose, including Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat Books 2016), winner of a Whiting Award in Nonfiction and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; A Several World (Nightboat Books 2014), recipient of the James Laughlin Award; and Not Even Then (University of California Press 2004). Originally from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Idaho and lives in Moscow, Idaho.

  DANIEL BORZUTZKY is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, recipient of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press 2018); In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat Books 2015); Memories of My Overdevelopment (Kenning Editions 2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat Books 2011). He has translated Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia (Coimpress 2016), winner of ALTA’s National Translation Award; Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (Action Books 2015) and Song for His Disappeared Love (Action Books 2010); and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (Action Books 2008). He lives in Chicago.

  DAVID COLÓN is associate professor of English and director of the Latin
a/o Studies Program at Texas Christian University. He has contributed essays to many books, including The Cambridge History of Latino Literature, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture, and the Critical Insights series. His edited anthology, Between Day and Night: New and Selected Poems, 1946–2010 (2013), by Miguel González-Gerth, was named an outstanding title by the Association of American University Presses.

  JOHN ALBA CUTLER is associate professor of English and Latina/o studies at Northwestern University. He is author of Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford 2015).

  MICHAEL DOWDY is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches poetry and Latinx literature. He is the author of two books of criticism, most recently Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press). His work as a poet includes the chapbook The Coriolis Effect and the book Urbilly, winner of the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. His essays on poetry and poetics have appeared in American Poetry Review, Aztlán, Callaloo, Hispanic Review, Journal of Modern Literature, and MELUS, among other places.

  KRISTIN DYKSTRA is editor and co-translator of Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems, by Álvaro Mutis, for New York Review Books. Her translations of books by Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Angel Escobar, and Marcelo Morales were published by the University of Alabama Press. Her articles appear in Volta, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Jacket 2, Diálogo, New Centennial Review, and elsewhere. Dykstra coedited Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas from 2004 to 2014. She was professor of English at Illinois State University from 2002 to 2014, and is now Distinguished Scholar in Residence at St. Michael’s College.

  BRENT HAYES EDWARDS is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017), and the translator of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa (2017). His current projects include a history of “loft jazz” in downtown New York in the 1970s, and “Black Radicalism and the Archive,” based on his 2015 Du Bois Lectures at Harvard.