Philip Sorenson

Happy July. There’s things I like and dislike about every season, but I think summer is the time I most identify with as a poet: half of the time I feel ecstatic, energized, ready to read and sit by churning bodies of water (very easy to do in Ithaca), and half of the time I feel a weird misery that approximates an extremely-not-poetic form of emptiness. Probably some of this strangeness is due to being on an academic schedule, and having more free time to luxuriate and spiral than I would during the school year, but I don’t really think it’s that entirely. Between undergrad and my now half-complete PhD, I’ve spent a pretty solid chunk of my life in central New York, and in this place where it’s cloudy most of the year, everyone tends to lose their minds when it gets warm and sunny. In any case, I’ve been trying to impose some structure on my days, drink less, and read and write more.

Earlier this summer I started writing a manuscript of poetry, which, at the time, I planned on titling Trauma Sun; I learned through Twitter that Philip Sorenson has a book called Solar Trauma, which came out last year from Rescue Press. (I’ve since retitled my own manuscript, obviously.) I’m glad I learned this, for a number of reasons, but most significantly, I’m glad it led me to Philip’s book, which, in that serendipitous way that poetry sometimes does, entered my life at precisely the right moment (a time when, of course, I’m thinking about the sun quite a bit). I mean this only half-glibly, but I feel like this book was in my subconscious before I even read it. This has happened to me several times before: reading Charles Burns’ Black Hole for the first time shortly after my first book, Kids of the Black Hole, came out; reading Leonora Carrington’s Down Below a few months back, after finishing a manuscript about digestion and trauma. It’s an uncanny, spiritual feeling. That’s how I felt while reading Solar Trauma.

I’ll say, upfront, that I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like this book before. It’s definitely within the category that we might call “contemporary surrealism,” alongside texts by writers like Kim Hyesoon and Will Alexander, but what stands out to me most is the way that it theorizes and inhabits the body; I haven’t read a book that felt this ecstatically, frighteningly corporeal – that treated the body as formal, political medium – since I first read Aase Berg’s Transfer Fat. It’s (I guess?) a book of poetry, though it crosses into prose frequently; I’m not sure that the descriptor “hybrid writing” means much anymore, but this book feels deeply concerned, in fact, with hybridity – with the violence of categories, as well as with the violence of the undifferentiated, monolithic whole. The book is split into two halves, and at the halfway point, Sorenson provides the reader with a kind of aesthetic statement. I’m quoting from it, here, a fragment that I think does a good job explaining what the text is all about:

“I set out to explore categories and their flaws as they relate to the body and the body’s replications via expression and reproduction: categories as seemingly inescapable, categories as the foundation for the human, categories as the root of whiteness, property, gender, global warming: terminalia… I hope to reject the premise that space is ever empty or divisible. I reject purity and elsewhereness. I want to celebrate the anus. I want un-good goodness. Yet, in exploring my anxiety (my anxiety about my personhood as knowable, my anxiety about knowing, my death, the birth of my daughter) and in writing through my depression, I certainly fucked this all up: this text clenches back its shit.”

I read this part while sitting on a lawn chair in my yard in the sun, drinking a Corona (fittingly named), feeling free for the first time in a while, but also feeling like a piece of shit & wondering what historical violences produced this space that someone like me could call “liberating” or “pleasurable”… trying to find a way to live ethically, whatever this means, but also not miserably. I identify with so much of what Philip writes here: I want a poetry that feels like an exorcism, but I also want to resist purity; I want to inhabit the messiness of the body, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also want to leave it most of the time. How do we overcome this contradiction? Should we? The first section of Solar Trauma is titled “Antarctica,” an eerie sequence of prose fragments that feel strongly reminiscent of John Carpenter’s canonical horror film The Thing; it describes an entity that feels both singular and multiple – that appears to refer to both the characters of the film, and the characters, the letters, of the text itself:

“As they spread out facedown on the silver skin of the wreck, the characters imagined a flowing and heavy pile of velvet: so deep and quiet like the dark porthole – a single pip on a die. At the bottom of the heavy wave, something moving, half-moons and pink and white, first scurrying and then lashing. The characters couldn’t see it, but they felt it: a black-eyed porpoise’s head jutting up through foam and then back again, a wax tree.”

The Thing. What thing? The characters. Which characters? This text inhabits a state of both deformation and reformation. It understands the intoxication – as well as the horror, the violence – of unnamable material, of categories dissolving. I found myself thinking of this passage about Joyce from Julia Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror (a text, which, incidentally, Sorenson quotes in the text’s aesthetic statement): “it is the Word that discloses the abject. But at the same time, the Word alone purifies from the abject… A single catharsis: the rhetoric of the pure signifier, of music in letters – Finnegans Wake” (p. 23). (Music in letters–those characters, again!) I first read this passage maybe five or six years ago, when I was an MFA student, and I remember it blowing my fucking mind – it was the first time I came across academic writing that seemed to explain why I found certain kinds of experimental writing exciting, but the more I’ve re-read this passage over the last half-decade, the more I find it horrifying. Like many other psychoanalytic theorists, Kristeva tries to find agency within an inherently phallocentric, heteronormative, transphobic discourse – one that finds its origins within a clinical, bourgeois European context, and which extrapolated this context to theorize “humanity” in an ugly universalizing model. In Kristeva’s writing, and in Sorenson’s, I see a friction within this system – a grappling with it, an attempt at undoing it. (Tho I’m maybe being too generous towards Kristeva here.)

There’s indeed horror in Sorenson’s text, but there’s also a shitload of beauty (there’s that word beauty, that thing that feels like a violent fiction but also the ecstatic euphoric oblivion-like thing which is why I care about poetry in the first place). Mostly, it really makes me want to write. I loved pretty much every page of this book, but the poems that will stick with me the most are the sparse, compressed ones that find momentum and sonic agency within layered nouns:

a breathing tube

a white sheet

a blown egg

a little letter a

nothing moving inside

perfect isolation

the pull of the sheets between your legs

coffin coffin coffin coffin

pink body and pink body

sore and long and material

a bird

I have no idea how to write poems like this, and I almost don’t want to know, so I can just keep luxuriating in them like a child in the ocean with its eyes closed. They explore the ecstatic as a political entity, in a way that strongly reminds me of Aimé Césaire’s shorter poems:

“people find solace in unification but they shouldn’t they

should throw up everybody

should be throwing up all of the time”

If everyone is throwing up all of the time, though, is that not its own form of unification? This text – self-consciously, gorgeously – does and undoes its own claims, making me ask a lot of questions that are frighteningly rhetorical and beautifully unanswerable. It’s a book that displays its own failure at being either whole or fragmented – “let me split into / a thousand whole parts.” As such, it’s deeply generative, taking you into the dead ends of dark alleys; you have to paint a landscape on the wall that you can fall into, like a cartoon. This is a book I’ll certainly be coming back to.

XOXO
Mart