Motes is a perfect little book of poetry. “Little” book, not by way of diminution, but as large praise, for Dworkin’s work here is of a piece, and each small piece is prism-pure in its exactitude. And exactitude, as is its way, is a matter both of shattering and of infinitesimal degrees. Proof of the former later; evidence of the latter is manifest and manifold. As an aside, I cannot say of this book as I like to say by way of parenthesis, “In other words,” for in Motes, there are no other words. No other words that matter, certainly, for the materiality of these words are the gears and works of words themselves. In this, Dworkin refutes the misconception that conceptual works need not be read. Some do not necessarily need to be read, but all—by which I mean all good—conceptual work should be read, and some quite closely. For its part, Motes must be read with both ends of the telescope. As in tragedy, the universal is compacted into the individual, and the beam in one’s own eye must be cast out before properly perceiving the mote in the eye of another. In other words, the conceptual gesture here is to shuck the grosser communicative pleasures of language so that purer delights may be discerned. Ergo, Motes = mots. All bons, in all senses, save the common.

Some of these precise pleasures seem bright children’s riddles:

THIRSTY
for four days later

A lisping “Thursday,” the fourth day of the week, also known on college campuses (according to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, as “Thirsty Thursday,” the new start of the weekend), the for/four thus not only serving as a homophonic repetition but also creating a kind of collapsible mirror effect of “Thirsty = Thursday” = “Thirsty Thursday.”

Some bilangue puns, pulled like faces in a lady’s mirror:

A SHIVER
winters itself

“Hiver” = “winter” in French, “s” being the elided reflexive pronoun se, elided as “h” is mute in “hiver.”

QUAIL DAMAGE
how sad for
these birds

Some small unpackings, as with a valise:

Godiva, go.

Die Walküre, die.

Some reconfigurings, like knick-knacks on a mantle:

THE BRONX
I brought the bought wooden box from there.

Some returning détournements:

JEUNE HOMME TRISTE DANS UN TRAIN
in marcel duchamps’ sad young man on a train I am that man

Some lyric assays like asides:

WILTED TULIPS
split little puppet pulpits tilted spilling dew

Some Rauschenberg-like combines:

COCTEAU
l’oiseau chante
avec ses doights

COCTEAU
unfledged crook-spur waterfowl yell
-owing in the shallows’ fallow laps

There is the temptation to keep retyping, and to refuse to decode, as each revisiting reveals more figures hidden in the carpet, more ways that language can and will play, given the slightest illumination. And decoding renders the readings more immanent than one either wants or suspects them to be. All right, one more:

CAUGHT BIRD
four old
eating birds

So that caught = aught (8), = aught (0); aught = (from ought) possession, possessed of; to possess something and to be possessed of it is to consume that thing = eating. “To bird” = to catch birds; “to bird” birds would reduce them to aught. Why “four” ? Caught = quatre. Ergo, “why four?” = whyfore? I am still working on “old,” looking for an etymologic link with “aught,” though am fairly delighted to discover that “auld” = “auld lang syne” = New Year Eve, which was moved at one early Christian moment to the Feast of the Annunciation, a most significant angelic flight and attendant proclamation, as well as by my discerning a discerning connection between “alere” (to feed, nourish) and “old,” which puts a bright red ribbon on the whole string of things.

As noted, the desire to refuse to interpret comes from the fact that any interpretation feels reductive, not in the fine transmutative way, as in a sauce, but in the way of the pruned, the pre-digested. For her part, Marjorie Perloff has cited Motes as an example of the new conceptual lyric, rightly likening some of the poems to Tender Buttons and describing Dworkin as having a “Jamesian aesthetic.” (For her excellent essay, which I refuse to reduce: http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=8438) Which meets in a line from Stein: “And then there is using everything.” T’wit:

CELLO
ellipse

Wherein the figure of a cello can be considered as a collapsed ellipse, wherein a collapsed ellipse is an ellipsis wherein the “c” in cello would be followed by an apostrophe because the “h” in “hello” would be ellipsed…you really should sit for this.

And while Perloff is right to find the lyric impulse here, an impulse that is conservative in the conservationist sense, one that shows its dilations by way of its contractions, Motes reminds me moreover that Dworkin’s work reminds me of Cornell boxes: the same structural fidelity, the same sense of the visibly unpacked, which is related to the visual, but not exhausted by it. Just as many of these must be muttered in order to activate their mutations, thus proving Motes a Joycean verbiovocovisual trove as well as a series of objets retrouvè. The former facing, Janus-like, the Brazilian mid-century poesia concreta, and its shared concerns with Symbolist synaesthesia as well as its devotions to poetic minimalism, the latter the solidly conceptualist dedication to the machine in the ghost, or, in Dworkin’s own prognostic words: “So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.” There is too in this work a literalism that insists on the dumb materiality of language itself, so words work as watchworks, not toward a greater sense of having said something, but toward the sense of saying itself. Such that the need to sound these poems in order to sense them also addresses the problem put by Perloff and Dworkin in their co-edited The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, that the current critical attention to what a poem “says” may be, literally, at the cost of “saying” the poem, of the essential orality of poetry, and, possibly, language.

But if the work can be termed truly conceptual, and if conceptual, as I argue, allegorical, is there an allegorical register to be had? And this is where things take another turn, for Dworkin here appears to be working in a post-conceptual frame in which the object refuses all claims beyond its claim as an aestheticized object. For if conceptual writing tends to eschew the beauty of the literary object in favor of its role as extra-textual signifier, or, in Dworkin’s words, in conceptualism it is the idea of the piece that is paramount, post-conceptualism would change the game: it is only the beauty of language that matters. As matter. Not its signification—there’s no communication each to each, but rather the brute fact of communication itself. So the work registers a dumb materiality, as if the explication was machine-made, the product of John Searle’s Chinese room, in which Chinese ideograms are fed to a language processor and responses fashioned that, while grammatically correct and coded with linguistic sense, have no intentionality (and thus no real intelligibility, i.e., display no real “understanding”) because they do not come from any “one” who comprehends Chinese. So that to the extent language is, language does:

DOVES
dove

And surely this is enough. But let’s broaden our claim. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixious famously included Joyce as a prime example of écriture feminine, of transformative and transmigratory language, language freed from the bounds of linguistic—and thus conceptual—statis. In this spirit, I would like to nominate Craig Dworkin for inclusion in the Wesleyan University Press series of American Women Poets in the 21st Century (eds. Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell), for insofar as the works therein evidence a preoccupation with “interrogation of the boundaries between genres,” with readings that resist situational analysis, and with further resistance of “the binary of ‘the one,’ and ‘the other,’” Dworkin’s work does this and then some—and if there is to be an écriture féministe beyond that which is merely féminine, then surely it is this—

THE GOODS
lesbians every
couple of year

Insofar as language works purely conceptually (or post-conceptually) in Motes, it cleaves sense and non-sense. (Non-sense as that which is legible, just not feasible.) If the mark of the feminist, as opposed to the feminine, is to serve as the mark, not of the Woman (which, as we all know, n’existe pas), but of the mark of the mark—of the moment in which sex becomes symbolic (when it is only symbolic of sex), then a feminist poetics must be a poetics that insists on the stupidity of symbolism attached to signification. The sign signs, or sings, or what have you, but says nothing, lacking understanding or intentionality beyond the fact of its function as sign. For it is this desire for something greater which is the beam to be cast out in order to see the real beauty of the mote.

Action Books recently released a new collection of work by South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi. Titled All the Garbage of the World, Unite! the collection is indeed a cry for us to struggle against—while also dwelling and finding glory in—the minor corridors, abjected detritus, and mundanely overlooked interstices of life. In Kim’s vigorous hands, these spaces are ferocious, strange and gaspingly alive.

I turned to this collection with a highly motivated curiosity. I wanted to see what a contemporary Korean female poet might be interested in, with the assumption that race and immigration—key preoccupations in a lot of contemporary diasporic Korean writing—would not be of central concern for a native author. Perhaps I hoped to see a version of what someone a bit like me might have become had my parents never immigrated. As gratifying as it is to see numerous Korean American poets getting published (Myung Mi Kim, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Lee Herrick, Ishle Park, Cathy Park Hong, Sunyoung Shin, Ed Bok Lee, to name a few) I’ve found that many Korean American writers working today, myself included, have been primarily interested in wrestling with the psychological fallout of inheriting a cultural legacy structured by the Korean War, displacement, and racialization processes at work upon us here in the colonial center. There are exceptions—Brian Kim Stefans, for example, has never written explicitly about such themes. However, regardless of our aesthetic inclinations, I have noticed that Korean American literature generally has been caught in a particular refrain, one in which these wounds are worked over and over. This isn’t to denigrate the writing—if we are trapped in a refrain, it is clearly because we still need to work this out—but I wanted to see what possibilities looked like outside of this structure of being. And though there have been some anthologies of translated Korean poetry, there are few translations devoted to a single author’s work—at the moment, I can only think of Ko Un and a small collection of Yi Sang’s work. The fact that this is the second collection of Kim’s poetry that Choi has translated into English makes Kim’s contribution to US-based audience’s understandings of contemporary Korean writing particularly weighty.

The war is old news in Korea, and the country’s division is simply the uncomfortable mundane reality they must live with. Kim’s poetry is more interested in exploring the psycho-spiritual consequences of daily life when one is madly sensitized to the commotion of Being that surrounds and permeates us. For Kim, simply eating a bowl of strawberries transforms into a drama of suddenly intimate encounters:

A full plate of tongues arrived.

They quivered like the tongues of the choir members
as they sang the hymns.

Your tongue is placed on top of my tongue.

Our tongues are getting goose bumps.

(“Strawberries”)

A running motif in Kim’s poetry is how an unconventional observation quickly transforms into a physical confrontation—the strawberries rub against her, call to her, enter and writhe through her. This is hardly happenstance, and in fact reflects Kim’s resolutely feminist politics: the body is a central agent of the imagination and site of productive, if not always reproductive, mystery.

However, western feminists may have some difficulty making sense of how Kim continually concedes to these violent intrusions. In her poems, though she often complains about these forces and how they work upon her, Kim barely fights them or escapes. For example, in “The Cold,” Kim writes how the act of being gazed upon entraps her in a cold, two-dimensional realm.

We gazed at each other from a different world
It was as though I were in a black and white photo that you were looking at

It is always cold inside your photo
The cough-trees stood coughing along with the river

[...]


There was an avalanche inside my heart, so I trembled for over an hour

As the cough-trees quivered and shook off clumps of snow
the shards of ice bounced out of the exposed valley

I sat on the frozen bench of the wind against my bare face, my lips shivering

I wanted to get of of the photo that you are looking at

I was initially tempted to read Kim’s concessions to these encounters as modeling a violently egalitarian vision of being, one that puts Kim on level with and in communion with the psychic milieu around her. However, I think that such a reading could impose a westernized framework for a recognizably radical feminist response upon her poetry. Furthermore, Kim herself is clearly not comfortable with having to live in these spaces. The poem ends with her stating that she “wanted to get out.” Most Korean American literature might be caught in a refrain, but I see a different refrain at work in Kim’s writing—despite her upset and suffering due to the violence around her, she persistently concedes to it. Her poetry seems bent towards describing a psycho-environmental violence that she internalizes and must live with.

When I wrote earlier that the war is old news for Koreans, I don’t mean to suggest that it is buried or inconsequential. I had to ask myself why Kim’s world appeared so unsettled and strange. For example, in her poem “A Breezy Prison Breezes” commuting by train transforms into a prison;

Just because there is a window, a wind is blowing, and starlight is leaking
I don’t know I’m in prison
After work when I lie down in my sleeping prison
all the prisoners outside of the outside of the prisons run to me
and tie up my body with the redred blood-paths

10-hour-long 10 year-long 100 year-long prison

The easy answer would be to suggest that something about South Korea’s rapid industrialization and digitalization (South Korea has the highest internet speeds in the world and is one of the most wired cultures, globally) has led to isolating and dehumanizing social structures that Kim is especially attuned to. However, her insistence on a particularly physical (read: quasi-organic) experience of this monstrous world belies any simplistic argument for postmodern alienation. Kim also doesn’t write about these experiences as reductively destructive—rather, they are the unsteady space in which she ardently survives. This attitude struck me as a necessary response to the fallout of the radical transformations Korea has undergone in only the past century. The fact that Korea went from Hermit Kingdom to annexed, occupied territory, to active battleground and divided nation without completely being torn apart is astounding. Where the war for Korean Americans is often a lost point of origin in our self understanding, I venture to say that for Kim, the war is one of many traumas that has been swallowed up by the terrain and shudders with deep psychological reverberations that she captures in her work. Her radical feminism therefore emerges in her insistent wholeness—her continuity with this space as experienced through her body. Readers not so familiar with Korea’s history will certainly still recognize these reverberations in pieces like “Tearfarming,” which describes an ice princess caught in an endless cycle of suffering:


As I heard the ice princess for the first time beneath the snow-covered mountain, my mind hazed over. Even if I live for a thousand years, her wretched scream will linger in my heart. After I met her restless and painful expression, even in my waking hours, I stared at the ice princess with the icy tears streaming out of her eyes. I’m becoming so thirsty that I could drink a thousand, ten thousand buckets of ice princess’ tears.

To suggest acceptance as a radical response might seem strange, but that stance depends on one’s cultural framework. The more I sat with All the Garbage of the World, Unite!, the more I felt that there was a deep han in her writing: han, that ineffably Korean cultural trait that is perhaps best described as a Job-ish long-suffering that drowns one in bitterness, anger, and melancholy that condense together into a red glory beyond tears. The closest analogue I could come to in a western context is Spinoza’s sense of “sad passions,” but they are still radically different from each other: han doesn’t act to stupefy or disempower—it’s an intensely physical/spiritual response to being disempowered. I saw han most clearly in Kim’s poem, “To Swallow a Tornado,” which begins

Have you ever swallowed a tornado?
A tornado is supposed to be swallowed through your backbone
My body flips over
my hair becomes as stiff as frozen laundry
and I feel goose bumps down my backbone

With han, one can only open oneself to suffering, take it all in, swallow it down.

Am I wind’s home
or a tornado’s ghost?
When the wind’s path that is as cold as a snake
rises up from the deep place
my arms and legs flutter like the bamboo leaves on the day a typhoon arrives
and when my tears splattersplatter everywhere
a sad song comes up like a whirlwind from the inside of my body
Someone please come and hold my bow-like body
that keeps getting bent back

In the wake of han, the self takes on a new locus for its identity; Kim wonders if she has become “wind’s home.” The body transforms into a hollow that this tornado of emotion works through, registering only its effects and never its origins. Tellingly, there is no possibility of not swallowing a tornado or escaping it. It’s as neat as fate, and one must accept it if one is to survive. All Kim requests is for someone to hold her together while she is bent awry.

As dire and destructive as han may seem from the outside, it is a way of being, which I felt that Kim aptly demonstrated in her final poem, “Manhole Humanity.” In this long poem in series, the hole is offered up as at once a vacuity and fullness, fetid and clinically serene. The hole is as vehemently physical (“My hair holes! / Creases of my stomach / hair-like cilia in my nostrils”) as it is abstracted.

Hole, the heart of all things.
Hole, my country, my matter, my toasty-warm god.
Hole, stay eternal! All things endure a life of nuisance through small uteruses then die for the sake of the eternal life of a big uterus. Dear queen ant’s many uteruses packed inside that high mountain: my eating and breathing has to do with my worship of the hole. This is my lifelong commemorative hole rite.

Kim invites us to recognize our hole-yness, the vast melange that fills and evacuates us, consumes and is consumed by our being. The hole is Kim’s invitation to us to enter into a new mode of han, one in which we dance.

Dance is the sadness called upon by the music of my hole.
Dance is the cry that is called upon by the music rising up through my hole.
I dance like a pair of starved pink shoes that show up after midnight in the street.
I have come out of the hole, but my body is wearing a hole, the hole endlessly proliferates!

Garbage of the world, unite, indeed.

A final element of Kim’s work that I found of great interest was how various spiritual/religious structures came together. South Korea has been an intensely fertile ground for Christian missionaries and more neon crosses line Seoul’s skyscape than mosque turrets in Istanbul. Kim offers up a unique response to her religious tableau: though there are minor Christian references, her poetry generally conjures up a zen carnivalesque. One moment in “Manhole Humanity,” rewrites the biblical Fall and offers instead a vision of a buddhist-like empty fullness, tinged with Kim’s unique vigor.

One side of the apple bursts and gets sucked through the lips of the naked first woman. The original woman’s yellow teeth and smelly tongue begin to grind the apple into small bits. Cold wind, suns, apple blossoms, the gentle strokes of rain on my cheeks all get sucked into a wormhole. The apple doesn’t know where it’s going, but it follows the general theory of relativity and gets swept down a funnel. A legend spreads, that time-travel becomes possible if you go through the funnel. A legend spreads, that if you leave here and arrive in the distant past and kill the lethal snake, I will get to stay in the vast spaciousness, the time of being unborn. In order to digest this hole, an adequate amount of yin mass is needed. Digestive juices are quickly produced inside the hole.

Empty my hole. Amylase enzyme. Vesta digestive aid. The hole secretes digestive juices and mixes them with whatever it sends down. After it ingests the apple, the pitiful hole gulps for more towards the emptiness. It flails about like a snail that has fallen into the sea.

Being nearly illiterate in Korean and a barely-perfunctory speaker of the language, I cannot intelligently address how well Choi’s translation captured Kim’s work, but I was struck by some of Choi’s choices, such as the doubling of certain words—″limplimp” and “splattersplatter”—in mapping a few Korean language tics onto the English language. While initially this doubling was terrifically “noisy” to my eyes, across the work it transformed into a visual means for emphasizing the physical insistence in Kim’s poetry. The only piece in which I felt some working knowledge of Korean might have been helpful was the poem “Double-p How Creepy,” in which the double-p Kim refers to is the appearance of two Korean letters side by side. Without some familiarity of these letters, ᄈ, Kim’s invitation to “squeeze hard and have some honey, a gift from pappa, when I opened the lid of the beehive the wigglewiggling larvae filled each hexagonal cell” loses its visually metaphoric resonance. However, Choi attempts to navigate this divide in translation with phrases like “I even hate soappy laundry because I hate pp.” The extra “p” in soapy stands in for the fact that English readers would never know that “laundry” in Korean contains a double-p. Though the original wordplay is effaced, a new one emerges instead. I did notice that Choi elected the phrase as the primary unit of measure for line breaks. With Choi’s consistently minimal use of punctuation, however, this strategy sometimes broke down when she attempted more fluidity across lines:

You first, my first, firsts that part forever.
I approached you as if
I were meeting you tonight for the first time
and had lost my first.

(“First”)

My impression is that Choi privileged clarity of images and emotions over any rhythmic soundplay in Kim’s work, and given the differences between the two languages, I was impressed by Choi’s phrasing, which I found to be quite earthy and direct.

Though there are incredible transformations in Kim’s poetry, I found it to be nothing like the neo-American-surrealism that is so popular among mainstream-ing contemporary work. And whether we are attuned to it or not, there are terrifically resonant historical sub-terrains in this mode of writing. There are genuine, deeply dire consequences to the transactions Kim describes in her engagements with the world. She is not trying to be trendy—she is trying to live.

One of the great pleasures of editing the Constant Critic is that my fellow critics consistently bother me with what they say in their reviews—providing the good kind of discomfort that causes me to revisit, revise, abandon, or sometimes (admittedly) re-entrench some of my previously held pet convictions. Because I comment on drafts in progress as well as proofread and post to the site, I get quite close to their ideas and so find myself walking around nursing the knots of trouble they’ve given me until I find a way to massage them through my own mental muscles. While this work doesn’t necessarily result in a review, it is a necessary part of any review-writing that I do.

I say all of this in service of bringing the process of reviewing into the review. Which is in larger service of questioning the distinction between poetry and other forms of writing and life-lived. Particular projects like Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day and Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook—or Julie Carr’s 100 Notes on Violence or Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget overtly take the breakdown of this distinction as their subject matter. Works of this kind, we are eager and right to say, manifest a poetry of the daily, a poetry that does not circumscribe itself in a space apart from life. However, isn’t it the case that, at least potentially, poetry that isn’t overtly anchored in representing an accepted register of the quotidian is nevertheless equally part of readers’ and writers’ daily lives? I propose a deeper consideration of text and the role that poetic materials play in the constitution of our daily realities. We are still enormously and ever-more text-based creatures and oughtn’t we take this into consideration when we consider what it is to be? What modes of being does something like Facebook, with its new timeline format organizing our personal histories, open or close for us? What modes of being-daily does a Peter Gizzi poem encourage in us? What modes of textuality act like “a room opening/ next to the head,” (“How I Remember Certain Fields of Inquiry (and ones I only imagine)”)? What modes slam the door shut? What amount of responsibility do you, dear reader, take for your text-based life? What modes of text do you invest in—and how?

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Lately, two sentences of Ray’s recent review won’t leave me alone. Writing about Open Winter he tells us that the book presents a “reasoned and ultimately evocative concession to the treacheries and sweetnesses of what prompts figural language. Just as distrust of rhetoric doesn’t mean you can eliminate it, distrust of selfhood doesn’t make you disappear.” Ever since reading these lines in draft form I have been walking around nagged by the non-disappearing self and, in particular, its relationship to the question of “what prompts figural language.” I have to admit that my gut says that it is, indeed, the treacheries and sweetnesses of this non-disappearing thing that act as catalyst for making and needing the figural. But what does this mean?

The massaging I’ve given this question has, as is often the case, created more, rather than fewer, knots. And so I wonder: what condition(s) of selfhood, of being, necessitate figural language—and not only as an accurate form of conveying information to a reader. What I wonder is more important to me than information-conveyance: for what conditions of being is the figural form of expression—the act of making figural language—itself a state or mode of being. Being as figural form. Figural form as a particular mode of being. And so the question has become not “what experiences does a poet translate into figural language,” but “what form of being does the figural mode—the act of reading or writing or feeling and thinking through figural language—allow us to inhabit?” This kind of question has fall-out not only in terms of the value and conditions of poetry, but the way in which poetry butts up against lived life.

Peter Gizzi’s Threshold Songs has me deep-reading-writing-feeling-thinking in this direction—offering a particularly powerful occasion for mulling through questions of poetry, language and thought. In fact, moments such as this last stanza of the poem “Hypostasis & New Year” overtly position the book in such territory:

I can’t remember now if I made a pact with the devil
when I was young
when I was high
on a sidewalk I hear “buy a sweatshirt?” and think
buy a shirt from the sweat of children
hell
I’m just taking a walk in the sun in a poem
and this sound
caught in the most recent coup

In this passage the heard phrase “buy a sweatshirt?” poses a question and commands a specific answer at the same time. The use-value of this utterance aims at persuasion, at procuring a purchase, for this is the language of commerce where a signifier (“sweatshirt”) stands for a thing you can buy. As such, this form of language-use proposes that what the sweatshirt is (what things are) in essence, is a purchasable object. Gizzi then gives us a contrasting “thought phrase”: “buy a shirt from the sweat of children”—a phrase that uses figurative language in a way that undercuts the purchase-aim of the heard question. Here the figural version of the phrase—a shirt being made from the sweat of children—renders the language of commerce strange, revealing a larger truth about the means of the object’s production. This is an action of language where a thing is not named by its noun, but by its process of making. As such, the figural phrase “buy a shirt from the sweat of children” invites us to perform a shift wherein we view what a thing is not by whether or not we can own it, but by the way it has come to be.

The last three lines of the stanza deepen this consideration of the how of being, applying it to subjectivity itself: “I’m just taking a walk in the sun in a poem/ and this sound/ caught in the most recent coup.” Who the speaker is—what the speaker is, is someone who “is just taking a walk in the sun in a poem and this sound [...]” This expression of being interests me because it admits to its own textuality: what the “I” at this moment is, is a text-based thing (an I in a poem). This is a category of being that most writers, at least, can relate to: there is the I that does the dishes and the I that does the dishes in a poem. And both are me. Is one more-me than the other? Well, this probably depends on where you stand, but I would hazard to say that, at the very least, when one is writing a poem, one is more I-writing than I-dishes washing. Furthermore, might we not say that, by extension, what the reader is, when she is engaged in an act of reading, is also a text-based thing, an I-reading? Yes, also a fleshy breathing itching searching thing, but also a text-based thing who is in the moment of reading defined by the process of reading. And it is this mode of existence, the I-writing, the I-reading—the textual-I—that requires figural language. Without figural language we can afford ourselves no such identity, no such “room opening/ next to the head.”

The contours of such a room are beautifully figured by the concepts of “threshold” and “song” which together of course make up the title of the book, but also serve as a way of considering the textual-I. The book anchors firmly in the lyric traditions of voice-overheard and musicality: “I wonder if/ you hear me/ I mean I talk/ to myself through you” Gizzi writes in the beginning of “The Growing Edge,” the book’s first poem. And it is remarkable to me the way that Gizzi claims investment in lyric voice, by which I mean both investment in the materiality of making voice sound (the passage of air and syllable through the mouth) and investment in a speaking subjectivity—in the textual-I as form of being. As we have seen in the above quotation and in the last stanza from “How I Remember Certain Fields” the book considers voices overheard outside of the body as well as the voices of thought and mind, exposing the extent to which what we are is composed of both. Perhaps even when we are washing the dishes we are more of a “textual-I” than we generally admit.

If we remember the work Gizzi has done editing Jack Spicer’s lectures and poems, the I-as-threshold echoes softly, organically, Spicer’s notion of dictation and the poet as radio transmitting the “invisible world.” In part four of “History Is Made at Night,” a ten-section sequence, Gizzi writes: “Gmail/ invites me to ‘go visible.’/ Is being invisible not enough?/ A kind of vow like poetry/ burning the candle down.” As threshold, this book is full of lullaby and elegy, full of edges, shores, curtains, openings, shifting clouds, fractures, winds—all things that act as a moving-through. Here, the I-writing a poem is a state of being that recognizes that we are necessarily thresholds, places crossed when entering from here to there, past to present, virtual to actual horizon, waking to sleep. While perfectly common, thresholds are also potential states of intensity, modes of relationality that have the capacity take fixed systems (“sweatshirt”) and turn them, deploy them otherwise (“a shirt from the sweat of children”). Far from proposing that such turning is “merely poetic” or “merely figural” or abstracted from the stuff of lived-life, Threshold Songs insists through and through that process and material compose life: “A chromosome has 26 letters, a gene just 4. One is a nation. /The other a poem.” (“Eclogues”)

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I’ve been carrying a hard-back copy of Threshold Songs around with me for about three months—the corners of its sage-green dust jacket are worn to white, a large black ink splotch bleeds along the creamy paper of its bottom edge. It has been a busy three months and I’ve been reading the book in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Budapest, and rural Pennsylvania mulling over Gizzi’s poems on airplanes, in cafes near the Danube, at the beach as someone surfed in a Santa hat, in bed, on the stationary bike at my university’s gym. I read and re-read its phrases, write them out long hand, type them out, say them, memorize them. I text or call friends—poets and non-poets alike—and leave them messages quoting fragments of these poems because it seems important that they have them stored in their phones, important that these phrases speak into their eyes and ears as they walk down the street in western and midwestern and foreign cities and towns. I feel that this figural language, as it speaks into these friends’ eyes and ears, can do what I, in my distance, cannot. But also that I, in transmitting the phrases out loud, am recognizing the extent to which I am a threshold of voice, actively participating in the porous edge. There is great pleasure to be had here, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I take great pleasure, right now, in this very instant, in the action of typing for you—and knowing you will read, right now, these lines from a middle section of one of the most stunning poems of the book, “On Prayer Rugs and a Small History of Portraiture”:

The figure in green blossoms too next to every rotting blade,
every bleating sow, bird de-

caying with an aroma of green, word transmogrophy-
ing green, the mint

in the flame, the heat of
the brain expiring steam, steaming thought

and the piles stacked archival thinking pyre.
This is the drudge of fire.

It’s easy to be silent; it’s hard to be quiet. If you want the former, just don’t say anything. But if you want the latter, you will have to figure out how to control for how we register sound. It isn’t simply a matter of volume. A whisper, for instance, can prove even more distracting than speech pitched at a normal register, just as the whine of a single mosquito or the buzzing of a lone fly can provoke attention where we might successfully drown out a louder but less differentiated racket.

On the page, a poetic analogue to sound is rhetoric. Rhetoric doesn’t get yoked to poetry very often any more; when the term appears at all, it’s so closely in the company of political speech that one now means the other. This isn’t just because politics is persuasion. It’s also because we think of politicians as talkers, and we have ill sentiments about talkers, even when they use the same abbreviated store of words everyone else does. So what, then, is the relationship between our attitudes about talkers and our attitudes about literacy, the literary—especially when we couple literary fluency and eloquence, and eloquence to rhetoric?

Hearing sounds and words and cadences and rhythms is not the same thing as hearing (or performing) the sound of someone talking, especially someone talking deliberately and with intent to persuade, paint, seduce, inspire. And I suspect it just isn’t possible to experience talking without rhetoric, tagging along uninvited, to complicate matters. Much can be made of that complication, of course—arguments with others, arguments with self—but what cannot be done is the reversion of eloquence to its elements without the presence of the eloquent.

In Rae Gouirand’s first collection, Open Winter, about twenty-five of the poems are eight couplets each, with most couplets interrupted by colons. Several other poems experiment with alternative punctuations, or extend the number of couplets, but this basic form comprises approximately one-quarter of the book. These poems look, more or less, like this:

Ask Both

What area is a word if you
ask: for wind you get stones if you

ask: for stones wind: ask both
and stones in wind stones: in wind

wind passes: on its way
to being wind: and walks out the hills

to bend them: it whistles
what is not stone: or wind or fence

the bird: stands midair
a constant line: the stillness of stone

the only thing reminding
of moving I think: back what you said

about cold stones and dirt
holding in your ears and cast: some

tones if you ask: the words
turn so ask: just one word to fold

“Ask Both” cannot be eloquent, because it cannot be easily elocuted; you can say it, but in saying it, you are not speaking, at least not in a fashion that lends itself to rhetoric. If that seems like a sacrifice on Gouirand’s part, consider what she gains. Wind is an ungainly word; locked in discursive syntax, polysemy makes it too easily mistaken for its verb doppelganger. Barring that, even the noun form poses metonymic challenges, because as a thing it only achieves descriptive urgency as an action. Altogether, then, wind doesn’t hold much promise: it’s airy, indefinite, too hearty a symbol, too poetic.

Unless, of course, you conjure a way to include it as a subject while prohibiting the structures that activate the abovementioned risks, which is exactly what “Ask Both” does. In fact, the poem’s replete with words that pose equivalent risks: stones, fence, stillness, cold, dirt, tones. If you warned a judiciously grim reader to expect a sixteen-line poem built from that lexicon, they wouldn’t hold out much hope. All of which simply accents how smart a poem this is, smart in solving a problem and smart in seeing the problem requires solution. By making “Ask Both” an impossible complication of elocution, Gouirand divests the words of their rhetorical familiars and thereby reintroduces them as both simple and strange. That’s an uncommon combination, but it’s also one that seems elemental, of a world of word-as-thing.

The choices she makes in this poem, and this form, are particularly vital for Gouirand, because her capacity for eloquence is as vast as her rhetoric is supple. When she’s working free of the syntactical limits enforced by the form of “Ask Both” she’s capable of things like the following, from her long poem “Sfumato”:

Inside La Specola, a woman’s neck graced
by pearls, comma between face and science.
Entirely wax, aside from that string, as though
A woman sculpted on such a cold table deserves
Something for the borrowing. Hair, also real, kept

In braids, some warrant of care or purpose for this
Surrogate, a sample years passed her one stopped
Utterance for Florence, its students of bodies
& service. The city stands, wax intact,
but I learned my veins from books,

guessing faint hairpin turns in blue
x-ray, and a house where things pulsed
without the rise of sight.

This is, if such a statement can still intelligibly be made, classically eloquent. I prefer rhetoric in chains to rhetoric gloriously unleashed, but I admit that Open Winter would be a weaker book had Gouirand chosen either the liberated or bound form to the exclusion of the other. The advantage here isn’t simply that of variety—variety for its own sake is simply a mess—but the establishment of pinned if polar techniques between which she can weave poems according to the density the subjects demand. That claim, too, is a very traditional presumption, that both the poet and the poem can have a subject, and that the subject can be well—or ill—served by compositional choice or “style”. The problem is that admitting this is a conservative way of talking about a poem often shoves poets into either repudiation of the terms or a reactionary embrace of them. It’s of no consequence to me to which side of the road any given poet chooses to jump, because either way they end up in a ditch. The alternative Open Winter presents isn’t an aesthetic centrism or meaningless “hybridity” so much as it is a reasoned and ultimately evocative concession to the treacheries and sweetnesses of what prompts figural language. Just as distrust of rhetoric doesn’t mean you can eliminate it, distrust of selfhood doesn’t make you disappear. Managing these distrusts, narrating them without making stories of them, is Gouirand’s great strength. She can work the regions between like key changes in chromatic harmonies, each suited to the tone or mood fit for the degree to which the subject is or has potential for rhetorical elaboration. For example, her poem “Finger” uses the rhetorically-exhausted symbol of the moon to remind us that the moon actually exists, literally above and beyond human use—but she does so in a way that avoids reproducing that kind of use.

Finger

Ask once and no response:
can mean no response: ask twice

and the same only points:
like a finger to the moon: silence

indicates: the keeping
of space: as yes it must be known

when unsaid: twice
the telling happens: only when one

is ready: to be alone with
what is told: the work of rope:

a cast a discipline
a letting: I want to desire nothing

more than the state
beyond need: recognize the moon

bow speaking: the word
after the edge after: the felt point

That’s impressively done, but it is at least as impressive that Gouirand saw that it could be done, that someone could try without forswearing any of the options language presents. It’s possible that she has chosen subjects that of necessity force her into invention: she writes about beauty but doesn’t want to write “beautifully” when she does; thus, she can write beautifully when she writes about lust, which she doesn’t write about lustfully, although she does write lustfully when she writes about language, which doesn’t write about as if it were speech but rather matter. Lo, a pattern grows discernable.

Some poems in Open Winter hint at the other ways Gouirand finesses the pattern. In “Adequate Dissemblance” she keeps the full syntax array, trading out punctuation devices for actual letters until the letters become shape, symbol and phoneme, all in the context of the unapologetically—forgive me—lettered.

In the earliest scrawl of human pursuit,
scratched on an antler in a rock house

in Auvergne, the naked hunter, approaching
the ample Urus, who is eating a little grass,

pulls his spear back in the air. This clutch
will become the D, the fist of motive.

An R emerges from the predacious rip
of the open mouth. The creature

will vanish, but the antlers, V.
What of this to I the child, left to

the dining room table long past the clearing
of the dishes, the plate of cold eggs

leaking, m n m m n against the edges
of the vegetables and the quiche,

the serum of barely solid foods.

If in whatever she writes next Gouirand proves that she can build from these occasional deviations poems as focused and considered as those in Open Winter but without reliance on any predetermined technique (which is really just the carapace of ethos) then I believe she’s capable of anything and I look forward to seeing what that anything looks like: you don’t often watch someone pull the rug out from under themselves and remain standing. In any case, Gouirand’s work with words won’t be limited to a theory of how language ought be used but concerns itself with how it is, both within speech and verse and without, sometimes even above and between. Sometimes a label, sometimes a lathe.

One of the things that you don’t know about me (will this make us closer or drive us further apart?) is my love of Dante in translation. But only in translation. I can’t read Italian, so I can’t say that I love Dante, any more than Dante could claim to love Place (we are inert to each other). But I read the translations like a glutton at a buffet—there’s one for each part of the palate: Singleton’s for a narrative stroll, Carson’s coarser Celtic turns for a jeu de maux, the Hollanders for rigor and statelier play, and creaky Ciardi for when I wonder why I was so dour at thirteen. One of the ancillary pleasures of reading translations is the translator’s introduction, in which the translator invariably defends translation as a matter of translation. Translation, in other words, being the hopeless and hopelessly optimistic effort to communicate the thing that may not be communicated. Leaving aside the easy case—there is, for example, no word in English for the sound of the separation of skin from flesh, such as, I am told, there is in Japanese–there is the harder nut, where words seem to mean the same thing, betraying in their seductive and false fungibility, the infra-thin difference between inhabiting the bon and mal mot. (The latter would be a joke in Swedish.) And so, translators are a uniformly fretful bunch, caught in the content-impossibility of their task. Though, like contented sado-masochists, they have perfected the single gesture of expatiation and inculpation. And like lucky voyeurs, we may be witness to this: in the London Review of Books, Julian Barnes recently used Lydia Davis’ translation of Madame Bovary, and her associated public slaggings on prior translations, to perambulate the well-ploughed grounds of translation itself. Oh, it’s a very good read, indeed.

That is to say, full of gossipy pleasures plus the kind of armchair participatory satisfaction usually felt (one imagines) by followers of televised sports. And while my reading French allows me the luxury of whistling and booing the above game, Sawkao Nakayasu-Chika Sagawa’s book both opens and forecloses such flabby participation. For Nakayasu, a poet of our time, has collaborated with Sagawa who has been dead for some time, but was a poet of the modernist period, a time possibly closer to our own than the more recent post-modern past. For although it cannot be said with mathematical precision, it is true as a rule that everybody loves their grandmother. The moderns reveled in the possibly libratory freedoms of free-ranging authority the postmoderns found so disappointing/embarrassing, which we find simply acts as matters of fact. (There is great relief in stasis.) Mouth: Eats Color is a book of poems about a book of poems, its translations and translations of translations turn and detourn and are intercut with new and rehashed information to no end save another stanzic ending. Though I don’t know as I agree with the “anti-” qualifier in the title, as it seems that the concept of a kind of translation which is against-translation, like that expression which is against-expression (see Dworkin & Goldsmith), is very much for translation as such. For, strictly logically speaking, the negation of something is also proof positive of its predicate existence. (For a brilliant poem on/not on/about/not about translation, see Caroline Bergvall’s “Via,” composed of all the first lines from all the translations of Dante’s Inferno in the British Library, by date of publication.) In other words, Nakayasu and Sagawa work here in French, English, and Japanese, revisiting certain pieces with a particular kind of fidelity, spinning off on others with another kind of faithfulness. I say Nakayasu and Sagawa both because that is how the title goes, and as the process used by Nakayasu to establish collaboration is as conceptual as it goes: http://www.sawakonakayasu.net/mouth-eats-color-an-interview-with-thomas-fink/

Now that you are back, one of the things that is very interesting about Nakayasu and Sagawa’s book is how it confounds history: not only relative to the multi-lingual stance taken based on the time Sagawa originally wrote, a time in which Japanese modernists were, like their European counterparts, very hot on the polysemous (this involved signification via various Japanese scripts as well as other languages, an affective register lost to the mealier-mouthed among us), but to the time of this writing, as noted above. So Nakayasu used Google language tools to compose some of the “Promenades” pieces which wend their way through the book, torquing the French and Chinese by feeding them through the internet machine, and deployed what she calls (by way of an email to me) a “keyboard hiccup,” typing while thinking in English on a keyboard set to Japanese, then translating the results into English. (I’ve done the same using symbol fonts, such as Wingnuts, but these results are more transubstantiation than hiccough. This is the third register of medieval materiality, where a thing is transformed—i.e., rendered legible in its other instantiation—only by way of the grace of the Geist.) The techno-melts fold in nicely with the modernist mash, oddly leavening the whole. (Japanese modernists liked to incorporate French, while l’ecriture chinoise was favored by a number of French modernists, such as Claudel, who used it allegorically, in addition to Pound’s ideograms, which worked in the collage as a kind of second space, given that the characters often functioned in a kind of constellatory description versus a strict immediate transcription.) (For Japanese modernism in the 1920’s, see William O. Gardener’s Advertising Tower; for the ideogram, see Marjorie Perloff’s essay, “Refiguring the Poundian Ideogram: From Blanco/Branco to the Galáxias.”
) (I’m not sure why I say oddly, though it opens up another discussion as to the pains and pleasures of reading in translation, wherein happiness is found at that point at which the text is both familiar and foreign enough. Both are matters of cognition and recognition: the translated text should be understandable as a text and understandable as a text that is not entirely at home. In other words, I want something “Italian” left hanging about my Dante.) And it is this sense of leavening which also underscores the possibility of smoothing the lines on translation’s lovely brow. For in this, our conceptualist age, translation is not a matter of difference and repetition, but of simultaneity. The poems in Mouth: Eats Color are all faithful unto themselves. You have doubtless noted that this review has not quoted a single one of the poems in the book. To quote any one of the poems in the book would be to select one as more something something than another, like picking my Dante du jour and forcing it on you. Or to identify the pieces as versions or inversions of some phantom originary work. Alternatively, I could have cited a series of single lines or pieces to illustrate how each moves and mutates through the book, but this would be a show of showing rather than telling. For the larger point is that these are all poems. Not translations. Not variations on a thing or theme. In other words, each work is its own piece in which the fact of translation, however defined, however infidel or true-blue to whatever Platonic notion of communication (there is this thing X which is conceived in language #1 as A and may be rendered in language #2 as B, which is to say, a kind of equivalency, such that x = a = b, where we all kind of know that metaphors, like all language shifts, are matters of addition and subtraction) is not a matter of mutation but metamorphosis. There is this poem. There is another poem. There are similarities between them, arguably no more or less than may be found in any other linked collection. The piling-on here works as a matter of simultaneity, not difference, not repetition. (Where was it said recently that all poetry is a matter of equivalencies? It was a wrongheaded statement, of course, but interesting as betraying a fundamental belief in fungibility, or the numbing aggregate effect of snowflakes.) (Just as my parentheticals in this are not parenthetical, but paratextual asides.) Like a jealous spouse or second-rate deity, translation loves to examine its partners for signs of cheating. Once we embrace the faith of the faithless, however, we are left with the even more optimistic hope of an open communion.

“the locus of agency is always an assemblage”

—Jane Bennett

It’s been 468 years since the publication of Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, and just over 400 years since Galileo first observed that Jupiter had its own moons. These two discoveries not only confirmed the heliocentric make up of the solar system, but also offered the first glimmers into the vast complexity of the physical universe. We have since learned that we live in a cosmos populated by numerous systems and subsystems, each with its own structures and heterarchies. At the time of these discoveries, the known world, with us safely nestled in the center of God’s concern, was suddenly overturned and humanity thrust from the center to its cold peripheries.

Though contemporary industrial and consumerist practices still betray our strong anthropocentric bias in which “our” needs trump other species’, the rising tide of environmentalist discourse inflecting public debate suggests that we are truly beginning to adopt a more equivalent relation to the world around us. The upside of this equivalence has awakened in us a new respect for difference across life forms. In this new configuration, life generally has come to occupy the sacred greatness once solely ascribed to reason and humanity. We’ve exchanged our cosmic centrality for a new version of wonder—one that replaces magnanimity with marvel. That we are one of a plenitude is both strange and beautiful. Anyone who has observed Sir David Attenborough’s documentary series, The Blue Planet, for example, will recognize this phenomenon.

Generally, to ascribe to life (not just human, but all forms), implies a more ethical mode of being. Many people refuse to eat meat out of respect for animal life. Some even strain their drinking water to avoid inadvertently swallowing a bug. This stance claims a higher morality, a grander ethics than a strictly anthropocentric system of values can allow. But can even this frame be expanded upon? Is life the end of our purview?

I say all this by way of introducing what I feel are the pressing considerations underpinning Cara Benson’s newest book, (made). Benson is not a physicist, but her book invites us to reconsider the conceptual frames with which we structure the universe and our relation to it. In (made), Benson’s radical ecopoetics proposes that the values we attribute to life—such as agency and sentience—cannot be affirmed without recognizing their construction within and among a vibrantly active, dense universe. Time, thought, matter, sentiment—all appear with equal consideration in the turning planes of her pages to suggest the world as a gathering, full and ordered according to a logic of burgeoning and decay. Nouns appear like gravitational depressions in psychological fields, concavities around which other feelings and associations collect. And we of that collection, too.

Primarily a gathering of prose pieces, (made) begins with an epigraph from A.R. Ammon’s Garbage: “…within limits the made thing accepts / its revelation and dissolution….” Drawing her inspiration from a text that sought to reclaim linguistic and social refuse as the life force of poetry, Benson offers a renewed take on how the made materials of the world press upon us and populate our psyches as surely as our own thoughts. Rather than looking at waste, however, Benson is also interested in the thingness of a matter, of its being and imprint in the world: “Long pricker fingers stretch their hold on a yard winding through the unwanted growth. Threat, all unexpected grip.” The growing plant (implied), is an active participant in its environment; it shapes the world it also inhabits. The landscape is literally in the plant’s “grip.” By transforming the verb, “prick” into its adjective form, “pricker,” actions become attributes of materials, revealing how object’s conspire with and contribute to their surroundings. Benson insists that landscapes—whether physical, psychological—are made.

In this sense, Benson resonates strongly with philosopher Jane Bennett, who espouses a “vital materialism” that questions the last frontier of western binarist thought: organic/inorganic, subject/thing. What Bennet proposes is not some New Age animism of the world around us, but a radical reconsideration of what constitutes being. Where I feel Benson and Bennett intersect most is in their understanding of the environment. In an interview for GAM, Bennett writes that

a landscape possesses an efficacy of its own, a liveliness intermeshed with human agency. Clearly, the scape of the land is more than a geo-physical surface upon which events play out. Clearly, a particular configuration of plants, buildings, mounds, winds, rocks, moods does not operate simply as a tableau for actions whose impetus comes from elsewhere.

Benson might respond that the universe is made, collaboratively and continuously, and that this making is both dependent upon and oblivious to our contribution: “The cross-country mile. The tea was had roadside while semis and cycles hurt us with their dusty abandonments minute minute minute. An interlocked figurine, infrastructure. We’re just the suit-makers.”

Revelation and dissolution operate like twin parameters for Benson’s collection, whose primary structures depend upon emotional harmonics, the density of the observable world, Benson’s mind’s plea. We can see these poles at work in the tension created by her text’s appearance on the page—the pieces resist normative relationships between “title” and “poem,” with most prose blocks followed by a single word or phrase, printed in super large script. These “titles” (for lack of a better word) press on the prose, casting their own associational, sometimes definitional, shadows over the writing.

Ignition, then.

The spark that starts the going itself gone. Sacrificial combustion. A hot alphabet soup spells over the sun starved night. Usual bull nostril spout, bound muse, gods fill linguistically while townies try their two-doors. Tourists, too. Babies only all of us. What travel will come. What standstill. Such ruckus amok. Such rendering.

Clay

The gestural and initially obscure logic at work between each sentence necessitates my adopting a phenomenological approach. “Clay” floats in the margins of my field of vision while reading the text. Such a humble matter–earthly, inert, shaped by hand and fired into use. Another way of considering it: what remains when “the spark that starts the going itself gone.” Yet another: clay, the material that stops when made. Clay, fire, then something else. “Ignition, then.” This “then” leads into an end, a silence. Perhaps clay’s silence. Revelation leads to dissolution when such strong associational readings lose purchase: “bound muse,” “babies only all of us.”

By inviting such reading strategies, Benson perhaps seeks to enact the sort of dynamic dissolution between self and landscape, object and subject, that an ecopoetics of vital materialism calls us to. Intriguingly, I found that her approach differs from the collaborative meaning-making exercises invited by other “open” texts. Benson’s nouns have a deliberative insistence, much like her “titles” on the page, that reckon with their referential materiality. They are resolutely present. From a conceptual perspective, I found this incredibly engaging. From a readerly perspective, though, I found that there are dangers: when her lists come too quickly or densely, as in a few other sections, the reading experience transformed into a dense array that ejected me from the work. How patient and present was I willing to be? Sometimes more so than others. When it works, though, Benson is aptly mirroring the mystery–the absurdity of human logic–in the dynamic fields of experience and matter.

Here’s a short excerpt from another page. I feel echoes of Stein’s Tender Buttons in Benson’s leaps, the beautiful, human asymmetry in her metaphorical logic.

Fawn, love. Nighttime is for touch. Milk neck. Cotton belly. Ocean, ocean.
Draped lace words, scarlet. Grant light.

Glass

Benson’s imagination isn’t as domesticated as Stein’s, though. As an ecopoetical venture, (made) vaults, pulls “inversion hemisphere to atmosphere to anthill.” Seasons change, even geologic epochs accrue, over the course of the book. I find that Stein’s cubist sensibilities worked for presenting how the mind’s dynamic processes take hold of a static object. However, time, aside from a sense of duration, drops out of Stein’s work. Benson’s insistence, however subtle, on time’s dynamic characteristics, reflects the complexities of our material and perceptual realities. Things change.

Furthermore, Benson is not the sole thinking and feeling agent in the work. Other minds and lives mingle together, casting their own dramas into the sky.

Companions settle themselves in a rosy embrace. A hug off the horizon while her face-mask covers desire too cold to be discovered. What she can’t hold, she’ll havoc. A bathtub of surprise silk waiting.

One pink baby writhing in linen.
One colon working.

In this piece, Benson creates micro-narratives in her intercutting of statements and images. The threat embedded in her use of the word “havoc” manifests more clearly in the images of a baby, “writhing in linen,” followed by “one colon working.” It’s a potentially familial drama, intimate but also rendered abstractly through the lack of any detailed or personal signifiers. Despite this abstraction, human emotions don’t drop out of the frame; Benson’s diction (particularly “havoc” and “writhing”) insists upon the immediacy of feelings.

I recognize that my reading of the abstracted drama above hinges on a potential mis-reading of “one colon working,” which also refers to Ammons’s penchant for using the colon in Garbage. However, the colon, in Ammons’s work, was a way of marking a relation, however arbitrary it seemed. And this might lead us to ask Benson, what holds these ideas in concert? Is the “colon” truly working? I feel that the better question would rather be, not is the colon working, but are we?

Unlike Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, (made) doesn’t offer a promise of regular structures to assist in creating a systematic coherence across the work or to better assist in performing its project. There’s an unruly, arbitrary willfulness in the pages–some of which were blank or had only one word–that refutes any expectations of what ought to follow next. In this unruliness, however, (made) also reads like an intensely personal book, one that collates her notes and personal observations unedited for us, offering perhaps a glimpse into how one mind’s folds casts and recasts the world around it: “Goose Down. Misanthrope in line at the electronics store. Rugged vitamins. Filamentary comment. Aurora borealis of the parking lot.” Importantly, as comforting as it may be to encounter another’s thoughts in a densely packed world, the subjective mind appears simply as another denizen of the spotted universe, given no more weight or credence than what it observes.

I can see how, objectively, (made)’s project could be terrifically deflating regarding the human condition. Such a stance could lead to an absolute nihilism in which all human action is meaningless. We are, and we are among many. What is the meaning in being of a plenitude?

Bobbed sunflower head heavy from the yearning fulfilled. What effort to make love to such a star. Yellow sight, beholden to those who reven in brief, yet luminous day-night. [...]

[...] What to survive. Morning arrives.

The beauty of (made) is that it doesn’t even bother with such questions. If it asks anything, it is to leave questioning aside and to observe, to feel the broad calamity of being around us. The universe is infinitely full, full beyond reckoning. Just look at how we are surrounded, held.

Allegedly, the earliest forms of writing were actuarial: lists, of inventory, accounts, transactions, rules, laws. If so, the lists should be as familiar to us as any form of text could be. And they are, of course, but that doesn’t prohibit them from being strange or even illogical, despite the aridity of the listing act. A list presumes its own justification; all these items belong together because you can list them, but you can list them because they belong together. That belonging is fertile, for between the literal lines springs forth ways of meaning that the listed items themselves permit. In this sense, reading between the lines is the only possible method of reading: the more items on the list, the greater number of lines, and the more lines, the richer and more complex the meaning. Thus, the mathematical specificity of the list can conceal or imply sentiments that themselves cannot be reduced to number or name.

If the first of writing is a list, then the first of books is a ledger. In a long piece of prose that occurs in the middle of Ed Bok Lee’s Whorled, in which he tells the story of his relationship with his father as the latter approaches the end of his life, Lee introduces a word I was unfamiliar with—jokbo—a Korean genealogical print record that features prominently in “Mourning in Altaic”:

One night I searched his bookshelves for something to read in Korean, and came upon the tattered jokbo my mother had presented me when I’d turned sixteen. Four bound volumes of my particular Lee (Yi) clan genealogy. My paternal grandmother had given them to my aunt, to give to my mother, to pass on to me when she deemed the time was right. In the jokbo, as my mother explained, my family’s bloodline was recorded by birth date, hometown, education, titles, and accomplishments, if any— seven centuries back to the Koryo Dynasty.

Reading this description, which places a jokbo squarely in the same function of a ledger (lives added, lives subtracted), summoned memories of my grandmother’s Bible, which served a similar purpose, though in her case executed with far less depth and precision than the Yi family genealogy. But the key, shared feature of both is the fact that even as the text annotates family, it inevitably leaves out more than it can include. Just as there’s no room in my grandmother’s Bible for speculations as to the madness of a possibly syphilitic aunt, the Lee family jokbo cannot accommodate that Lee’s father’s older brother would have turned, as “Mourning in Altaic” tells us, “into a black sheep and drunkard, bearing only one boy out of wedlock, then died shortly after the war under mysterious circumstances.” It is is precisely this kind of information that explicates or enriches the list; without this kind of data (micro-historical in noting the drunkenness, macro-historical in citing war) the listing function is hollow. Yet the more complex the annotations become, the greater grows the gap between the facts and their lived consequence.

When the speaker of “Mourning” seeks to succor his dying father, his list of proffered comforts includes visualization therapy, meditation techniques, and finally a chant in a language the Korean-speaking father cannot recognize. The son, by his own report, lives a life both cluttered and desolate in (of all places) Fargo, North Dakota, where he consorts with “stunted types of single parents, Edgewood trailer kids, mixed-race mongrels, military brats, Bible refugees, drinker replicas, druggies, vandals, thieves” whose recreational activities range from fighting, drinking and flirting to snorting lines of powered sleeping pills to the inconsistent sounds of “Zeppelin, Marley, N.W.A.” Though “Mourning in Altaic” is a singular prose work, with a section all to itself, its methods and concerns color the whole book: the ill-ease created by superficially contradictory or exclusive elements that are, in fact, the closest the speaker can come to a sense of a synthetic whole.

This commonplace multiplicity—the one that is the many—can be a property of nouns and adjectives both: a polymath, polymorphous. So what I’m just going to call the poly-, is now an assumed condition of what we keep identifying as modern life. Its hallmark is the kite trail of necessary listings which yoke together nominally distinct things: hyphenated nationalities, multiple ethnicities, myriad occupations, mixed martial arts, largenesses that contain multitudes. The spirit of Lee’s poetry hovers in the paradoxical space between markers of identification and actual identity. He makes wry and rightly skeptical use of the noun cluster and the adjective train, but does so in service to something elusive, something more precious. It’s as if he glues together shards of glass to make a bottle only to celebrate what that bottle cannot hold.

One of the ways Lee does this is to attend to where his subjects actually are, not in terms of geography or nation but at the more mundane level of discrete physical space. Many of the poems in Whorled occur in bars, hospitals and casinos, the last of which Lee writes about with dizzying fluency and speed, as in “John Henry Tran (a.k.a The Terminator) vs. The System”, which follows the appalling adventures in ill fortune of a one-handed Viet down and out in an Indian casino:

But in ten minutes flat dude dropped
$1200 on a barbed chain of hits,
until homeboy on third finally says
Yo dawg, ain’t no race;Handless Man’s eyes now glassy—
Down 13 grand,
he explained & shook
his head,peeling five more c-notes
from a silver clip with his good hand’s
feral fingertips

Lee frequently returns to scenes like these, perhaps because what casinos, bars and and hospitals have in common is that they at all places that increase the visitor’s odds of seeing the human parade in all its poly- glory. That such places are often depressing sites of confusion, deprivation and bad judgment in both its larval form and as a scarlet-winged butterfly of bloody ruin is no accident; even though any given casino of course exists in a specific place, it more fully represents a sort of superspace. Each casino resembles every other casino far more than it shares an aspect with wherever it is located. Lee, no fan of unchained capital or its imperial master, doesn’t shy away from the cost of global catholicity, but neither is he nostalgic for some pre-lapsarian state. The energy of the poems doesn’t count as an endorsement of the world as is, but it does suggest that there’s life to be extracted from it.

This country
isn’t ready for us, you said,
luxurious, recidivistic; I remember
thinking your dream-yelps
must be your Viet father on fire
But maybe your Hmong mother’s third marriage
equally fixed you for life
TomboyTwo nooses of black braids
all July tempting the entire Metro barGone
Torched one Sunday dawn for the insurance

Every world has its devils
You won’t escape these anymore
than you’ll capture them

Now I see what you meant when you said
we should have another superpower
after invisibility or
absolutely nothing

Blacks & Indians

in this town billeted inside white guilt
We should have pain-love & longing-anger
like ice cubes in warm beerWe should
have women who don’t destroy their men
as if soldiers trained by their jungle-soaked fathers
We should expect no one
will understand this; press our own
sweet confections from the inverse molds
of these stale dark emotions
no American History book will ever reference

This is grim and despairing, but Lee concludes “The Book of Blackouts” with the promise that the speaker will “finally understand / All this sadness / did not eventually drown / our love— “. There’s something post-Romantic about this—Lee writes frequently and without irony about love and friendship—but it is not indulgent or salvific. Even at his mooniest, Lee is more than a Matthew Arnold, a figure who cannot help but take the cacophony of the world as a personal insult.

If the modern world is a problem, it’s a fascinating one, both despite and because of its crimes, both large and small, and Lee does this truth better than justice. I don’t always enjoy every last element of his verse (I think his language is sharpest when he cuts the comic with the tragic, but when he tries the reverse, the results can be too purple for my taste), but I think he’s deadly accurate when it comes to characterizing the difficulties of committing to a single point of view, even when the self under consideration is one’s own. In one of the poems in Whorled that best showcases how attuned Lee is to temptations and flaws of easy, self-satisfying answers, “The Riddles”, the speaker tells the story of how, when he was six years old in Seoul, “Jimmy Riddle, son of an American / businessman, five-fingered / cash from my mother’s purse / while hiding in our closet.” Over the years, the narrator turns over every possible reason for this literally petty larceny:

There had to be
some other impulse, some reason
why
a rich white boy playing in a native’s humbler apartment
would pocket cash
then deny, pretend, blame,
and never once cry—

and in struggling to answer that question, Lee considers all the relevant variables: class dynamics, represented by his mother’s exasperated refusal of Riddle Sr.’s cash remedy, an act equally evidential of racist and nationalist norms. He also wonders if simple familial psychology explains Jimmy’s theft. In short, he makes a list, but also explodes each item on it, which is the inexorable result of examining anything at length. Every interpretation marks a location on a map of possibilities, but spend too long at any one marker and you get lost. As both list-maker and collection of listed attributes, Lee finally asks

Or is this all too easy?
Is the blinding dynamo here my own inner rationale—

Not only for Jimmy Riddle,
and his misplaced, dysfunctional family,
but also my own
small spun soul
Tangled there, with his, somewhere
over that cold, inscrutable ocean?

Note that Lee doesn’t answer his own question. Maybe it is all too easy, the formulation of answers, the compression of complex facts into simple lists. Maybe that isn’t too easy at all, and Jimmy (as can be much of the world) can be explained away with a thorough enough catalogue of impersonal factors. But the more likely case is that Lee is right to answer first and ask questions later. Whorled is not a book of clean lines and sharp corners, a book that’s also a box. It spills and erupts and makes a mess, but its lists expand and grow, as living things do. A ledger is an enumeration, but what it enumerates is transactional and thus a record of exchange, intimacy, the trace evidence of the social. Lee sometimes experiences listing as exasperating (how many adjectives, after all, does it take to adequately describe a noun? How many elements of the world must one name before one can simply call it the world?) but he is also aware of how much more beautiful and vital are the many than the one. It’s this truth to which he is inclined. It’s fitting, because while to list does mean to enumerate, it also means to lean towards. List, which comes from the word we once used to describe what it means to love.

There were a few years in the mid-nineties when it looked like the poets gathering in New York might fuse a thousand disparate styles and beliefs and wishes into a single beam of classical beauty, rude comedy and what can only be called zen clarity (New York School, Beat, and Black Mountain)—the Newer (American) Poetry. If you have a copy of New Mannerist Tricycle lying around the house, I don’t need to persuade you that this is a true statement, and yes I know one third of that chapbook was and is D.C. based—in the mid-nineties D.C. was part of New York.

I was a baby poet and therefore an unreliable witness, but it seemed to me that of all the stoned geniuses circulating in the time before the hanging chads and falling bodies, Bill Luoma gave off this glow most consistently. His chapbook My Trip to New York City (collected in Works and Days) recounted a series of buddy movie misadventures pitched somewhere between Kerouac and South Park (this was before South Park) that like Ted Berrigan’s masterpiece “Tambourine Life” changes suddenly from picaresque to elegy. It beaned me. A few other chapbooks of roughly the same vintage struck me as similarly serious—Katy Lederer’s Music No Staves, Anselm Berrigan’s They Beat Me Over the Head with a Sack, Lisa Jarnot’s Sea Lyrics. Thinking back on them now (without actually getting hold of my copies of them) I imagine what they had in common was a Jules et Jim light-heartedness, with hard-earned awareness of the effects of gravity.

What most of those poets also had in common, at that point anyway, was a devout commitment to incantation, to a more or less regular, hypnotic cadence. Jarnot went for anaphora (or was it epistrophe?), Berrigan seemed to match up the prose rhythms of sentences, and Luoma headed straight into doggerel:

leafy muncher big time lurk
green belt cincher revlon quirk
darkie matter massive dwarf
blasted bright star mr worf

(from “Swoon Rocket”)

If you’re not hearing these words aloud, are only processing the meanings, you’ve probably already decided to spend your time on something else. I happen to find it enjoyable to follow this exposition of latent racism in Star Trek makeup, but probably only because I start feeling like chanting along to these seven-syllable lines as I read.

Poetry has been mistaken so long for an all-or-nothing proposition that it sometimes feels like more of a hierarchy than the A.P. College poll. If a poet isn’t ranked in the top twenty-five, the feeling goes, why read him or her. Maybe I’m imagining it, this consensus-seeking chasing after the current number one with a bullet; maybe it’s real but also only a reflection of the larger culture. Most of the time I remember to forget it. When I do get that itch to compare compare compare, Bill Luoma’s second full-length collection Some Math reminds me not to care:

A waffle doesn’t mind
when the apparatus is moved
from one location to another.
Hulse 2-3 tonight on a pair of singles.
If I arrange my local effects
in shells of equal energy
like a saddle mounted by a rider
whose boots were made for Tony Danza
in the tap dance extravaganza
then I’ll be humming all day
stuck inside the large hardon collider
with one higgs boson whose primary concern
is facetime on the linoleum.

(from “The Concept of Mass”)

There are readers for whom this mix of broadcast-announced baseball, particle physics and popular culture will read like uncompiled code. I also know from experience that it’s possible to pretend to a “negative capability” poetic license for readers, with which it doesn’t much matter what the poet is saying—or even really how the poet is saying it—as much as whether there are plenty of sudden unforeseeable pleasures hidden in the slurry. As the passage quoted above suggests, “The Concept of Mass” may be about that patient, interested seeking; testing for an unaccountable blip that, if found, will verify the Standard Model, whatever that is. Luoma is unlike most poets who wander into the science terminology shop (myself included) in that he doesn’t much strain to convert learning to a design for moral improvement. He seems to just throw it together, then if something happens, he goes with the results. Something usually happens.

Sometimes what happens is nearly untainted by lexical semantics (that incomplete Standard Model again). “Gobi” and “Swoon Rocket” are collections of quatrains, the lines of which vary in length from nine syllables to five. I’ve read them a few dozen times since they first appeared in 1996, and while I hear the undercurrent of sex and inebriation in the phrases (the title “Swoon Rocket,” for example, sounds to me like a riff on the name of the grimy Providence suburb Woonsocket—a romantic, sexual, aeronautic riff), I’m prepared to accept that the point here is to notice the different physical effects on the reader of these variations in line length. Take this passage from “Swoon Rocket”:

tonset factor enter sten
burns in coma cluster bend
segreganset librium
ripon jessup swansea rum

smoothie wafer produce nox
event  radox bap  sinclair
two point seven degrees kevin
tunnel quantum lamb shift hertz

masker furbo visby ort
gas clouds fronton bilda fort
bright blue knotsa lemming furs
faint arm spoker smedvik kurs

I jump at the one line not like the others, which features the signature Luoma trope of the misheard science term, Kevin for Kelvin here, and the profane version of the Large Hadron Collider in the excerpt from “The Concept of Mass” above. (The line with a difference also mentions what I believe to be the temperature closest to absolute zero recorded under laboratory conditions on earth—writing degree zero, you say.) I notice now that the line comes in the middle of one of the few stanzas in the poem not to deploy end rhymes, and that with nox/radox, the internal rhyme seven/kevin also moves me sideways. But since most of “Swoon Rocket” is in sevens, I think what I’m reacting to here is simple variation from a regular pattern. The term for it from both the visual arts and music is caprice.

The variations come more frequently in “Gobi,” which comes close to Amazing Grace’s 8-6-8-6  a few times, then veers off toward measures I’m relatively unused to, for example, 8-8-7-7:

trawl en horta mey first snapple
raleigh winkle voza baffle
wofat shingle drugga skoun
baler frickle mosie mink

This isn’t subverting the expectation of a pattern, it’s just changing the pattern, revealing how the pattern changes when the unstressed syllable at the end of the line is omitted. The effect turns out to be consistent with that produced by Shakespeare’s witches: double trouble.

I hear a lot of names of poets and sport figures flying by (“clark,” “nada,” “blanche… ricky,” “shula”), and the jujube-like quality of the desert name in the title nudges me toward a reading of the poem as latter-day Ram Dass: GO BE indeed. But I keep coming back to the feeling that this poem demands not a reading, but a hearing.

Despite the title’s hint, he doesn’t lead with trochees every time:

big yeska anna billet
clare voler gringa
lunch docket oui blinker ato
cran nowheres un off

It’s easy to hear why this 7-5-8-5 might be a one-off (un off). Luoma leads lines in other stanzas with one-syllable words, but usually to make a trochee, and not, as here, a spondee (e.g. BIG YESka, CLARE VOler). The spondees bring the rhythm a little closer to the traditional four-feet three-feet of ballad meter, but you have to work to hear it (and parse that second line in three languages, maybe), and then when you do work, you have to work again in line three to get any kind of rhythm back—maybe that’s an anapest after LUNCH DOCK?

If you’re still reading, thanks. And if not, well, that’s the risk involved in stretching a phrase out to notate the simplest vector in a poem’s sound, the pulse. Imagine a review that discusses vowel color and length, consonant places of articulation. Go ahead, imagine it. What did you see? A page of logic symbols, a plage on the Riviera, maybe. Luckily, the rest of the poem goes back to more familiar patterns (8-7-8-7, 7-6-7-6, 7-7-7-7) that prepare the ear for their variations.

I have a weakness for three lines the same length, one line a beat (or two) shorter or longer:

hootie pylon flimsey nylon
border patches volvo ken
klute digiorno salvo falg
lost overno opal calm

There are a couple other prosodically engineered works here, 4-3-4-3 “Nogo,” which doesn’t diverge from the pattern, and “Alystyre Julian Certified Orient Minimal Clothing,” which is entertaining but doesn’t upend the truism that alexandrines are better left to the French. I like them, but as I say it may be nostalgia doing the liking.

I haven’t spent as much time with the other pieces in the book: “Dear Filesystem Panic,” “When the Pathogenic Wind Comes,” and “Some Math.” I recognize “Dear Filesystem Panic” as a new instance of the form peculiar to New York in the 90s in which rapidly shifting identifications and profane connections bombard the reader with semi-familiar sounds:

to the closed out kiln of the north bay
to the last invasions of the new cult
to the nat of dayquill calling out the hordes of bar bar
to the pitted bas-relief of jenna and the optional au-jus of barb
to the mighty singing system doing the tuffa twist
in the blue sea of opoyaz
to the yahtzee of
I saw wings.

It’s a fun instance, in which the horrible routines and jargon of work, their repetition itself provides the means of escape, which leads right back to the horror:

I’m calling the destructor on an iroq layer of inodes
by inserting into the sidebodies of the multiplex of molly
a handsfree ipod wired to the hooded electrodes
/* your wires and my electrodes */

About the other long sequences (about a third of the book) I admit I’m less sanguine. When confronted by several lines beginning “the un the un” I start to wonder if I’ve wandered into the wrong book, despite the familiar variables:

the un the un the disposition of Linus
the un the un of that of it given she of infinite UN of branch
of outside of employee of in the house of pain
the un the un explaining a bursty traforo

(from “Some Math”)

As I recall, this was pretty much the reaction I had to “Gobi” and “Swoon Rocket” fifteen years ago. Given how much I hear in those poems now, I’m prepared to believe I’ll find out fifteen years from now exactly what Luoma is doing in these poems. As for what he means in them, maybe it’ll matter and maybe it won’t. We’ll see.

The space where authorial subjectivity and issues of social consciousness collide continues to be fraught—particularly when this space occupies the experimental sector of the poetic landscape. Take two of the strongest contemporary trends, documentary poetics and Conceptual Writing, both of which occupy strong positions on this issue. Documentary poets like Mark Nowak cultivate a form of curatorial subjectivity, back-stepping the author to third-person objectivity. For example, his project Coal Mountain Elementary uses solely the language of its subject matter, mixing miner testimony, newspaper reports, and educational materials. Conceptual Writers, on the other hand, famously express disinterest in authorial subjectivity and issues of social consciousness altogether provoking, with this rejection, conversation about the topic. A deep uneasiness over the representational properties of language underlies both positions, speaking to a post-modern legacy that requires one to wonder if it is ever possible to create an ethical representation of the “other” residing at the heart of most social and political issues. Even if one doesn’t write or read in these particular doc-po/con-po veins, it would be nearly impossible not to feel the pull of this uneasiness. It is our inheritance.

Because I’m not totally satisfied by most attempts to deal with this stressed space I have been particularly taken with Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene (Nightboat) and Cyrus Console’s The Odicy (Omnidawn). Here we have not only strong, engaging experimental texts, but also projects that openly confront subjectivity, writing, and social issues, providing us with two very different models of contending. While the reading experience of each book could not be more dissimilar, both projects ask the same question: in a world of collapsed and collapsing borders, what relation can the individual have to society, and how might a writer ethically—and effectively—render this relationality in language?

Kapil overtly frames her book—which is constituted by eight sequences (or chapters) of narrative poetic prose—as an undertaking driven by social consciousness and personal investment. As her introduction, titled “Passive Notes,” tells us, Schizophrene centers on issues of the self in a sate of extremity brought on by abusive structures of power. The book explores the effects of the partition of South Asia on the individual, addressing “the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence, relational disorders, and so on” (i). While the book contains substantial research, Kapil thoroughly penetrates the text with a first-person sensibility, providing us with a model of authorship that uses the self as experiential and empathetic instrument.

From “Passive Notes” through to the three-page “Acknowledgements and Quick Notes” that conclude the book, she makes no distinction between herself as writer and the “I” of the text, making clear that the author is, herself, one of the displaced. And, as much as the book is about mental illness and domestic violence it is also about the self as “other,” the self as a subjectivity deeply informed by never being “at home in one’s home.” Take, for example, this passage from the seventh sequence “Partition”:

I keep going back to what we ate, what we were fed. It is my way of communicating with you, the other children in your houses. Orbit the house as an adult but right now the spaces at the back of it and to the side are dense with neighbors. There are perhaps eleven faces pressed to the blood-specked window, banging on the glass with their foreheads. Being white, with the delicate skin that accompanies race, they bruise easily. They are looking at the unfolding scene with a boo and a hiss and a You fucking Paki, what do you think you’re doing? This is England, you bleeding animal. Later, they make a low roar when we, the two of us, back away from the table until our spines are pressed against the wallpaper, which is velvet and cream with a bumpy motif of paisley swirls as per the era.

These moments have the authority of first-person experience and work as a bridge to the “other children in your houses,” who are, if the accusers are to be “trusted,” from the “other side of the line” of partition than Kapil who nevertheless identifies with them. Such moments, in virtue of their fracturing trauma, also bridge to the radically Other: the schizophrenic or the victim of domestic abuse, subjects who have been largely undocumented and rendered essentially voiceless by extreme circumstance. This proposes a metonymic logic: the first-person experiences, as articulated in the above passage, allow Kapil to convey this Other-order fracture. Furthermore, these fractures speak to the larger psychosis of partition and displacement: “It is psychotic to draw a line between two places…Psychotic to live in a different country forever…It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever.”

Along with such empathetic movements from first-person experience to Other-order fracture, Kapil weaves the book through with passages about process, thereby bringing to the surface difficulties involved in representation of extreme circumstance. Some of these passages detail her primary research surrounding schizophrenia and domestic violence in London’s South Asian diasporic communities. Kapil tells us of visiting hospitals, interviewing doctors, and following police maps tracking calls of domestic incidents. Interwoven with these fragments of inquiry and search are notes and meditations on the writing process itself. We learn that Kapil initially tried to write the book as an “epic on Partition,” but that when this project failed, she “threw it—in the form of a notebook, a hand-written final draft—into the garden of [her] house in Colorado” (i). Again and again the motif returns: throwing the book into the garden, and later, after the ravaging of seasons, salvaging its fragments into the form of Schizophrene. As such, the book documents the fragmentation of self and society and is itself a fragmented document. This deep stitching of form and process, author and subject, narrative and performativity, not only has informational power, but also creates a compelling ethics of representation.

++

As with Kapil’s Schizophrene, Cyrus Console began The Odicy with the concept of creating a unified text, but abandoned this concept of unity for fragmentation. Consol remarks in an interview that the process of writing The Odicy “began with the goal of writing a coherent narrative poem, a poem that told the story of [a character named] Tony—it was going to deal with sugar and sugar substitutes, pollution, extinction, and Tony’s ‘personal odyssey’ through a collapsing world.” The finished text doesn’t discard all of these concepts: while not a “coherent narrative poem,” the book works more or less as a long poem built of tonally similar six or seven pentameter-line stanzas. This cascade of formal regularity is divided into five sections by prose passages sampled from Arthur Schopenhauer, Jack London, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, E.T. Jaynes, and William Cowper. The book also makes good on Console’s thematic concerns. Various forms of artificiality, pollution, and extinction appear throughout the book along with a consistent character named Tony. However, instead of narrating Tony’s odyssey, Console uses language to enact the texture and veer of collapse and Tony is limited to a motif—one type of proper name among many others. Consider the first four stanzas of the book:

I returned, and saw that the garden
Had not moved from me but that some illness
Of the garden carried it away
From me regardless. I saw its Mountain
Run to dissolution, whose bright garment
Flown from it in shame, whose hillsides lay

Uncovered, sodden. Drawn and beaten irons
Pestering and humbling the soil
Did recreate their brutal education.
All Nevada wept ill-colored water.
From the earth’s midsection, giant engines
Dull compacted slugs of gold removed.

Offering no resistance random night
Come at this odd hour, out of nowhere
One by one the lesser cattle took
Their knees amid contaminated forage
Depressed their breathing, and put out their eyes.
I have this against you, Westerners

Gladly, hurriedly, for sums now seeming
Insignificant (her liability)
To second thought a tiny skeleton
My love for the technician clothed in flesh)
The water component of my blood
I cast from me. Second thought, in fact

In these beginning stanzas we see themes of artificiality, pollution, and extinction. The garden, which of course we cannot help but read as Paradise, has become ill. We find nature and culture confused: Nevada weeps, cattle put out their eyes. And while the first three stanzas set up the scenario of an epic return, the fourth stanza swerves from the garden to develop, in the next stanza, into what seems to be a plasma donation (“This is my plasma, I remember asking / And this the money of which the less spoken”).

Not only do content and theme register collapse, but the work’s form itself also plays a large role in creating fracture. By using capital letters at the beginning of each line we are asked to read lines as discreet units, but rarely do the lines finish coherently. Instead we get fragments such as “Of the garden carried it away” and “Their knees amid contaminated forage”. Furthermore, this fragmentation is not always smoothed away by the sentence’s larger syntax. In moving us, for example, from “One by one the lesser cattle took” to the next line “Their knees amid contaminated forage” Console excises the expected “to,” leaving us with jostling elements that almost—but do not quite—add up.

This alignment of the “almost-but-not-quite,” a consequence of fracture well-known by anyone who has ever broken, and had reset, a bone, becomes a motif that holds the book together. In terms of content, Console works with the “almost-but-not-quite” in his critique of substitutes. For example, he writes of sugar substitutes: “NutraSweet’s another of Monsanto’s / Bright ideas like putting caffeine / Or vanillin in the soft drink Coke.” We also see the “almost-but-not-quite” in the book’s title. The Odicy is almost Theodicy is almost The Odyssey. Further, “The Odyssey Console” produced by Magnavox was the world’s first home video game console (just google The Odicy along with the author’s last name and see what you get). Among other such play in the text, the book’s five sections are similarly titled: “The Opathy” “The Omachy” “The Ophany” “The Oktony” “The Olepsy” and one can perform similar squint-of-the-eye tricks here. And as we break such words into various clusters of sounds, trying them out against possible meanings, we access the texture of breakdown and the attempt to nevertheless construct sense in the very fabric of the book’s language. “The Oktony”: Oak-tone-y, Octane-y, O.K. Tony.

Such language-use hi-lights the artifice of written representation, performing what the poetry articulates in subject matter and style (the tone of “I saw its Mountain / Run to dissolution, whose bright garment / Flown from it in shame” could hardly be more stylized). In the present poetic landscape, which often equates simplicity and the colloquial with the text of social consciousness, this form-content ethics runs the risk of seeming too difficult to do any “real” good. To my mind, however, the willingness to run such a risk speaks to a courage and integrity of thought and artistry that demonstrates the kind of inventiveness our time requires. Reading this text puts us face to face with fracture and it is well worth the thinking readers’ work to spend our time there.

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In a 1996 interview with Kiki Smith in Bomb magazine, visual artist Barbara Bloom discusses, in the context of a serious accident she was recovering from, her “Broken” work, fragile objects she has broken and repaired with gold using kintsugi, a Japanese form of mending that foregrounds, rather than masks, fracture:

Rather than hiding something that’s broken, it aggrandizes it, saying that something that has a history, that is not perfect anymore, is more beautiful and more valuable than something which has no history. It’s the opposite of our culture. When I was in Japan and saw these for the first time, they were so beautiful that they made me cry. And then with this accident that I had recently where I—got so broken. This is the perfect metaphor: to think about objects that are repaired with gold. These objects are stand-ins.

Like any good conceptual work, the description of Panda (KFP) by Chris Alexander can be taken at its website-word:

Two and a half years in the making, this book-length poem assembles thousands of fan responses, brief summaries and descriptions of the title character from DreamWorks Animation’s 2008 movie “Kung Fu Panda,” an exhaustive catalog of product tie-ins and derivative works in the Kung Fu Panda franchise, and technical specs for the AMD Opteron, the microprocessor that powered the animation firm’s computers during the movie’s production.

Multilingual text with appropriated images.

(The sequel, available here ($8.00 for book, download for free), is “The Denovelization of Kung Fu Panda,” in which the DreamWorks/HarperCollins novelization of Kung Fu Panda is textually inverted and a glut of images from KFP1 inserted.)

In the 4th Council of Constantinople (869), it was announced that hereinafter the Image should be venerated equally with the Word, and that the Images of saints and the Blessed Mother were also the proper subject of veneration. This was the birth of allegory. And the aesthetic and ethical antecedent to KFP, which is a chronicle of veneration, a pilgrim’s progress from the account of the Birth to the accounts of the faithful (laity and clerk) to an accounting of relics (properly subdivided by type), culminating in an account of the mysteries of der Heilige Geist (in the machine). Too, the Word as such is represented: “The entire script for Kung Fu Panda online.” (49) Moreover, like the Gospels, the descriptions of KFP serve as Venn diagrams, overlapping, but with differing details—up to the believer, really, to determine what is salient and what is not. Are the father’s noodles a key to the kingdom (le nom du père), or another false prohibition (le non du père)? The believer believes yes and no, represented by various degrees of facebook devotion/identification:

Amanda Tedeschi Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda., oh yea!
November 19 at 11:05 am • Report

Tunahan Sefa Aydin I love you panda and I am panda : ) : ) : )
October 22 at 10:21 am • Report

Lauren McNabb cest le j’m apple panda…aurjordui mecredi hehe
June 17 at 5:36 pm • Report

Lidwina Amanda Wong O love Kungfu, I love Panda, I love it all, so cute, so touching story!!!
June 5 at 9:34 am• Report
Jonathan Bourque likes this (40-42)

Among the catalogue arias are the three varieties of relics: bodily, those items which were once part of KFP, such as the Kung Fu Panda Po’s Dream Early Concept 2 Limited Edition Giclee Print (104); contact, those items which have come into contact with KFP, such as Kung Fu Panda and “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” by Deepak Chopra (100); and transubstantive, those items which share in the body of KFP by virtue of being infused with the Spirit of KFP, such as McDonald’s Happy Meal Kung Fu Panda Figures Set of Four by Kung Fu Panda (102). Note the presence of the signatory in the last—”by Kung Fu Panda”—invoking that apparatus by which the Law casts the Source into being. (This authority is also how I become an author, for I am nothing without my apparatus.) Too, KFP demonstrates the medieval notion of the scala naturae or great chain of being, where culture (“A panda who promotes obesity and eating too much”) is revealed to be the better part of nature (“A panda who is pretty damn cute”), nature culture’s support (“The fact that it’s about a Panda Bear, should have told you this is not a Serious Kung Fu movie” (21)), the divine plan being one of harmony and self-preservation via brand promotion and product-placement:

McDonald’s Kung Fu Panda Feast of Fury. McD’s will also continue to not only try to get kids more active via its Happy Meal promotions, but also make them mini-activists. As part of its Kung Fu Panda promotion, it will partner with Conservation International. (178)

The aforementioned animus behind the animation is revealed to be the many-in-one of the Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron Processor, “the Preferred Processor Provider for DreamWorks Animation.” (206) There are pages of text in Chinese, unreadable to this reader, some of which seemed to be screen credits. There was a dispute among medieval theologians about whether the Holy Word should be accessible to the laity—some thought yes, as the keys to salvation should be hung low. Some thought no, as the divine was, by its nature, not meant to be understood by the common man. KFP trucks with the latter notion, one which popped up later in Mallarmé, for the hermetic text is, like a frozen shipwreck, something that can only be cracked on its own turf. Contrarily and simultaneously, KFP also panders to the former theory, providing pages of images to be venerated as such, as well as the image of the image, an accounting of the offshot videos, games, school supplies, animate and inert plush figures and plastic figurines, and a walk through of the PSP, which cages its coaching in the second-person, present and absent: “Stumble. When you land, immediately start to fight off the bad guys…After you fight them off, you’ll have your first boss encounter, A Worthy Foe.” (141) It is the language of the crusade to the crusader, that damp whisper in the ear that indicates a fight for the right. As such, KFP is the very model of an epic poem, a lengthy work “concerning events of a heroic or important nature to the culture of the time.” (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.)

Put still another way, if we can draw parallels between the gesture of the contemporary erasing (Rauschenberg : de Kooning; Bervin : Shakespeare) or defacing (Duchamp: da Vinci; Place : de Beauvoir) his predecessor, Alexander may be seen as inverting Damien Hirst. Hirst’s famous diamond skull work is mistakenly identified as a 2007 piece consisting of a diamond-encrusted platinum skull, titled “For the Love of God.” But this is not Hirst’s art work, for the work of art here lies in its working, its production and multiplication, the bread and loves trick that Hirst has subsequently performed and continues to perpetuate. The skull itself is virtually unmarketable, and so Hirst has, in the sly manner of many pilgrims, bought and sold the skull himself to himself (as part of an anonymous consortium), for what it’s worth (the sale is likely false). Some thought this was the real art, a media art performance of the sale and subsequent Sotheby’s exhibition/auction of Hirst’s work, prices suitably jacked up. But this seems too small, too postmodern-ironic, missing the real deal. For the real art lies in the art of the real, the distribution of the sensible, so to speak, in the Diamond Skull cufflinks ($9995); keyrings (₤7.70); brooches (₤5.80); miniatures ($24.95); prints (₤10,500); signed prints (₤8,400) posters (₤31), signed posters (₤205-310); t-shirts ($125 ebay—buy instantly); books (“For The Love of God: The Making of the Diamond Skull” by Damian Hirst, $200 hardcover); viewings (€10 adult at the Palazzo Vecchio in 2010)—the relics of the corpus sanctus that continue to be circulated and gazed upon, whose production is not reproduction, but production itself. After all, there were no originary Diamond Skull Christmas ornaments, but why not? The material is thus proved immaterial in equal measure, and all parts of the sacred image (consecration being a matter of some cost, though, as they say, price is no object—not materially) being equally sanctified.

Are these callow comparisons? It rather depends on whether one believes in content or containers. Structural containers, that is, for this is the very scaffold of belief, set in bas-relief. Is it funny? No more so than any fundamentalism. The postmodernist believed that there was no master narrative as imagined by modernism (emancipation oder idealism), just petit histoires from which other grand narratives could be spun (global capitalism), the conceptualist believes that narrativity is as poetry is, that is to say, as such. Here’s the stuff, do what you will. It will change, as will you, for it is your will that will make it whatever it happens to be—to you. Put another way, as Nietzsche noted, science is no more beholden to truth than God. Perhaps less so, as science can turn on a dime, and believes only in itself, whereas God is stubbornly resistant to change and believes in us, as demonstrated by the fact that we hear God. Or we don’t hear God, which is no proof of God’s non-existence, given the order of things and the nature of divinity. In other words, in conceptualism, the interpellation is reversed: it is not the hailing that calls me into being (pace Althusser), but I who cause the hailing that calls the police officer into being as law enforcement as sich. That is to say, truth is for those who can’t handle uncertainty. For the rest of us, there is the catalogue and the story of Kung Fu Panda—”a important message about believing in oneself the power that comes from within.” (amazon.com) Put another way:

Panda was great.

I feel for this panda. (47)