Aditi Machado and Andrea Abi-Karam

If you’re on poetry Twitter at all, you’ve probably seen, in the last week or so, a number of critiques of the Poetry Foundation. I think these critiques are smart and warranted, and while I start to get overly anxious when I spend too much time on Twitter, I find myself particularly interested in how some folks have extended this critique towards a poetic mode that’s enjoyed institutional approval for several decades: the personal, “I”-oriented lyric. I think about this mode quite a bit: the first poets I became really obsessed with as an undergraduate were crusty white dude narrative poets who foregrounded their own subjectivity in relation to their familial, cultural, and personal histories (I’m thinking of Larry Levis, Phil Levine, some of Robert Penn Warren’s stuff, etc.). My own political awareness coincided with my growing interest in working outside of these modes, and in a lot of ways, my first book was an attempt at working through (and attempting to destroy) my own poetic “I.” I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad or reactionary about the personal lyric (there’s plenty work like this that I still love), but I do think it’s important to consider how neoliberal institutions can seize upon the sanctified, individualist poet-speaker; I think it’s also important to consider what a diversity of collectivist formal approaches might entail, because plenty of historic avant-garde approaches have been individualist and reactionary as hell (Pound and Eliot being the most obvious examples within the U.S. modernist poetry canon). This is an ongoing site of inquiry for me, and I see these tensions arising in two of the books I’ve read in the past week, Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017), and Andrea Abi-Karam’s Extratransmission (Kelsey Street Press, 2019).

SOME BEHEADINGS

Machado foregrounds the political valences of the first-person speaker immediately, in the very first poem of the book. Here’s an excerpt from it:

Every day I wake & my life

is private. I see a sun. A coiling

memoir. There is anaphora

in the sun. There is a sun,

it has brightened. A loss in this

unyielding every day I wake –

there is privacy. A mirror

brightens the fascist

in me.

I love this piece, and it sets the tone for a number of the tensions that run through this text: between violence and literary idealization; between canonical tradition and hegemony; between aesthetic abstraction and material reality; between prosody and the breathing subject. It starts, startlingly, in the same way as thousands of confessional lyric poems I’ve read: “Every day I wake.” (I find myself thinking, glibly, of the title of Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early.) The poem takes an immediate sharp turn, however, both foregrounding its own artifice (“There is anaphora/in the sun. There is a sun”), and disclosing the relation between form – learned and inherited – and authorial violence. This book is gorgeous to read – aesthetically pleasing in its lyricism, on a gut level – but continually forces the reader to consider the political stakes of what we call “the lyric” and what we call “beauty.” It occupies the formal space of prosody while critiquing its own impulses (many of these poems circle around a ghostly iambic tetrameter), and in this respect, I’m reminded of another poet I love, Sara Nicholson (if you haven’t read her book What The Lyric Is, from The Song Cave, you’ve really messed up). But what I love most about Aditi’s prosody is that it’s corporeal as fuck; this strikes me as distinct, perhaps, from critical approaches that view prosody in relation to control and the preservation of a stable, rational subjectivity. Some Beheadings gestures towards its somatic prosody, most obviously, in the killer couplet “I SLEEP AND WAKE AND SLEEP AND WAKE AND / THIS IS PROSODY.” Or, here: “There are moments in which the condition of the mind approaches the condition of the body which we call ecstasy which now occur.” This book has a great deal to say about the pastoral – a thematic investment about which I care deeply – and I love its moments where the surface of language collides with the surface of tradition, and there’s some kind of weird sonic roiling beneath both these surfaces. From the poem “Pastural”:

How express

a rustic thought

how when

everywhere

ruminant

lie grazing

& still

clouds

you thought.

This poem’s title gestures, exactly, to a schism between literary idealization and material reality – pastoral versus pastural, as in, relating to the dung-filled pasture. The language here deforms in multiple directions, both abstract and concrete – does the poem refer, for example, to literal clouds we thought about, or to entities that cloud our thoughts? – while still working within a tonal register that feels palpable and affecting. Aditi goes on to nod towards another excellent poem about fake-ass pastures, Robert Duncan’s famous “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”:

singing

I was born

in a barn

were you.

You make

a made place

you were

born in.

I’ve always loved poetry that foregrounds its own materiality, but the risk of this sort of move is the possibility of reaching a dead end – i.e., okay, these are all artificial rhetorical gestures: so what? The meadow isn’t real: who cares? But part of what makes this book so exciting, I think, is its willingness to dwell in the site of abstraction, rather than just disclosing it; reading poetry can, yes, be indeed like returning to a meadow, a place that is both fake and real in the same moment. There’s an exhilarating sense of risk, here. Reading this book – in conjunction with Aditi’s chapbook we published through Garden-Door Press, Prologue | Emporium, I feel very excited to see what her next full-length book looks like, and generally, I feel thankful to be a poet at a time when amazing work like this is being produced.

EXTRATRANSMISSION

I’m surprised to have not heard about Andrea Abi-Karam’s EXTRATRANSMISSION until recently. I first encountered their work via this interview, in which they discuss the influence of punk on their writing. As someone who’s been kinda obsessed with punk since the age of thirteen, I’m always on the lookout for poetry that internalizes this genre and ethos in compelling ways (after all, I think there are numerous parallels between the subcultural spheres of punk and poetry, and that both could learn from each other). When I think about punk, I think about excess, both in its musical aesthetics, but especially in its relationship to performance, inhabiting spaces that don’t legibly signal “venue for musical consumption”: basements, attics, squats, and so on. I think of the circle pit as, at its best, a processing of this excess – a working-through of angst and anger, and an attempt to transfigure this energy into something else. (I don’t think I’ll ever forget the experience of going to my first show as a teen at The Tinderbox in Brattleboro, Vermont, a sweaty, stinky repurposed gallery space / punk house where a milk jug filled with either water or vodka circulated through the audience, and the exhilaration and camaraderie I felt when, getting knocked over in the pit, a bunch of strangers reached down to pull me up. Tho punk, of course, often fails at retaining its own utopian vision – if you haven’t already, read José Esteban Muñoz’s chapter on punk and queer futurity in Cruising Utopia.) Punk and hardcore, to me, implicitly question the limits of rage to effect personal and/or societal change; they’ve never struck me as a form of critique, exactly, but rather, something else I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s not just a genre, but rather, a material culture. It’s a deeply embodied ethos – truly “avant-garde” (lol) in the sense of returning the praxis of art to the praxis of life – a characteristic that I certainly see shining through in Abi-Karam’s strange collection. Their book begins by introducing two competing but intersecting threads: first, war, and the way in which imperialism and trauma occupy and reshape the body; and second, startling but often funny poems that fantasize about violently attacking cops, noise rock bros, punk bros, tech bros, and frat bros:

TO THE TECH BRO WHO NEVER TIPS:

NEXT TIME U COME IN HERE FOR A “NETWORKING” MEETING & ORDER A TRIPLE EXTRA HOT MOCHA & PAY W YR BLACK “SPECIAL” AMEX CARD LEAVING THE TIP LINE EMPTY YR EXTRA HOT BS DRINK IS GOING IN YR FACE RIGHT AT THE THIN LIPS U USE TO “NETWORK” W & YR METAL BLACK AMEX THAT ALWAYS GLITCHES IN OUR REGISTER I WILL USE AS A KNIFE TO SLICE OFF THE FINGERS U USE TO WRITE EMAILS W. WHILE U RUN & SCREAM OUT OF MY CAFE I’LL SLIP THE BLOODY CREDIT CARD IN MY BACK POCKET. THX 4 PAYING OFF MY STUDENT LOANS BRO.

This section of the book, aptly titled “KILL BRO/KILL COP,” creates its own self-generative form, and we come away feeling enabled to write our own “kill bro” poems. (I found myself thinking of CA Conrad’ssomatic poems in this respect.) Like punk, this formal approach feels less invested in sanitized, academic critique (or, for that matter, the MFA-approved personal lyric) and more so in the somatic occupation of rage. It’s a speaker that foregrounds their own corporeal experience, but also resists individualist bullshit. It’s a circle pit poetics, a swelling of bodies and a crossing of boundaries: “THE SLICES FORM STAR PATTERNS ON YR TONGUE. THEY STING & STRETCH WHEN U TRY TO SPEAK. I COULD BE ANY OF U SITTING THERE. READING. REMEMBER THAT.” Later in the text, the speaker becomes a cyborg – a subject shaped by the wired infrastructures of trauma – and the text closes with two poems, my favorites in the book, in which the cyborg-speaker visits an empty building with a fawn. The building – like punk, like poetry, like language itself – becomes a site of temporary occupation; of temporary tenderness; of temporary community:

for me it is a contested space a place where people have gathered as it dissolves… i know that the workers will find the fawn eventually & the fawn will have to leave. this i know – that the fawn cannot stay – that i cannot stay no matter how much i would love to throw a party or a show or a reading on one of the dusty upper levels of the old sears building. but i know they will find me too.

This poet knows, of course, that the temporality of this space – its “contested” nature – is linked, precisely, to its life-giving power.

Up the poets / up the punx,

Marty