Valdivia. Galo Ghigliotto. Bloomington, IL: co·im·press, 2016.
CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH
POEMS
FROM Odalisque in Pieces
Prepartum
So long I resisted biology, ashamed of its elephantine
and industrial geographies.
Now, swept clean of gamine,
I read pabulum with diagrams of my progress.
In this reductive state,
none of the gilt edge I fancy. If I were
the ocean, I’d be the ocean
receding then cresting at the moon’s whim.
My son, embedded in me like a black pearl,
calls up awe and, in the vise grip
of our contract, secret woe.
I bubble with benign fatalism,
leak as a cell does.
FROM Goodbye, Flicker
Hungry Office
Owl girl always bore shame for mother’s brown
grease uniform. Mother told her
that entire cities really got managed
by cleaning ladies coming in night after night
to correct executive mishap in the moonlight.
Mops set aside for calculators, they formulate commerce.
The only lady to know European markets
writes her equations into contracts, seven-armed
document maker, the bedrock, floor by floor.
It was an ending like she likes: how maids feel
when they elbow through the vacuum dust
to distribute their wealth over miles of cyclone fence,
that their transport will come. All our mothers:
blank faces answering doors in movies.
Hans Hated Girls
On the beach and snapping
my suit free of the sand’s dig,
I’m torch for the kelp,
for seagulls, for the one ancient
with hair who felt my legs
as a favor, he said. I don’t settle
for voiceless. Don’t settle
for legless and dropping
to the bottom like a clam, my soul
a bubble on the water’s surface.
I’ll see your hoax and raise it by five.
Yes, I’ll stab the prince because
legs and voice are the same
things: exile out to in.
FROM Milk & Filth
(Llorona Soliloquy)
The river’s dried up once made of my hair
I’ve left behind rubble but it’s thinking
of all of us that I make a tiny baby funeral
of my tears and they make me a reason
for beatings so I had better find the thing
I left behind since it was precious
like the plaza where I used to throw coins
and wish for someplace else to be like the shimmer
of coins in water that newness not the borne-down
appendage like the body is haven as passageway
to life I make to death because it’s easier
in the long term shadow of this body and its vacuum
(And the Mouth Lies Open)
The wave comes down,
so duck under for its smother,
each is a planet to colonize:
the one with hotels,
the one with plotting old
women in an apocalyptic
debtors’ prison. Classic fiction
is colossal ruse, the site of Ponzi
to be muse: the toll of influence,
cases and cases of Dom Pérignon,
full-body depilation and the most
lavish immortality unguents online.
Clothes that are maybe too young
for me, and the attendant mortification,
fake brunches. I pay for affirmation
from a woman in a white noise office who
guides me through behavior modification
and trauma, yet I’m still only a morsel
of authority: my print is barely detectable
in the camber of the canon for which
I gave my egos and my wits. I’m a nervous
fiasco if only for your sanction.
My alternate reality is a dimension
where a psychiatrist stares dumb
at my bosom while we talk about
drowning in the suds of dish rags.
In this other one, I don’t ever
discover the compulsion
of verbal cunning. I’m a science
fiction movie and electrocution
makes me a Frankenbride
in Technicolor abjection.
FROM Milk & Filth
from “Parts of an Autobiography”
1. My mother was a cater-waiter. She wrote rubber checks that kept our dysfunction afloat. She didn’t cook or do windows.
2. Her life was difficult because she was a brown woman. This was and is indisputable.
3. She taught me to braid a rope of my hair out of the abyss of our class, poems for ascension.
4. She gave me androgyny when I was trying to defy category.
5. Or: the rules were out of my reach.
7. She encouraged me to read scholarly feminist texts, which led me to Simone de Beauvoir. After that I fell in love with Dworkin’s mordant critique of seventies porn and Rich’s takedown of the homosocial. This coterie of muses on my shoulder was as outraged as I was.
9. I saw my cervix during a Pap smear.
12. Eager to expand my newly-minted wisdom, I pored over books of anti-essentialism and feminist separatism to find the answer that would disentangle the question mark/speculum that had formed my path.
13. Feminism tried to accommodate me inside of its confines when I was a polygon.
14. Sometimes feminism seemed a miracle, a cork bobbing up for air in the ocean.
15. Or I was the cork and the ocean was everything else that conspired and conspires to be like a cage.
16. I was young and easily astonished, stunned, insulted. I was often subsumed by the vagaries of my sex, and this remains a source.
17. When I first began writing poetry, first began thinking of poetry, I was certain that I could rely on the I/eye, which turned out to be the most elusive quality.
18. So squeezed, wince you I scream? I love you and hate off with you.
19. Sylvia Plath’s work gave me synaesthetic pleasure. The speaker’s self-mortification perverted the edges of all her lines with sweetish vinegar.
20. Her poetry was pungent when so little poetry is pungent. Poetry of regimented epiphany smelled like fabric softener when I was young.
21. I liked my poetry to smell like I had forgotten my deodorant. You could smell me from across the table. I liked my work to smell of work and fuck.
22. I wanted to make bloody holes in the earth with my body like Ana Mendieta, but with poems.
23. That was when I was young, but it’s still true now.
FROM Be Recorder
three excerpts from “Be Recorder”
*
how shall we remind
the mathematicians
the politicians
and the statisticians
and the tax exempt
megachurch man
and the house flipper
and the executive-garbage
who hiked up the cost
of Daraprim and EpiPen
and the complicit Ponzi
scheme of lobbyists
and the propogandists
and the Democrat-corporate
shills and the patriarchal
misogynist statesmen
how shall we reiterate
that want is drug is conduit
and capital is the rabies
impulse is the mechanism
nationalism the mask
the matrix is us sheeple
and so we should capture
of getting jostled on currents
dismissed by the judges
made into sex object
unwillingly reduced into
effigy or dismembered
on borders and razed
by the American appetite
for Sinaloan meth in teeny
baggies with skulls on them
each skull a human head
tossed to the furrowed canals
edging our border lined
with the bodies of journalists
and mayors a magical realism
not seen in your ethnic literature
will someone listen and if so
how will there be reparation
will it be animal mineral
or vegetable will it have
only symbolic heft and flavor
or will it be forcibly removed
will Nero hear from
his driverless chariots
with seats that lean back
into giant palanquins
shouldered into the sublime
to a condo on Mars
by rows and rows of bodies
not just brown but all our
bodies consumed by mythologies
of difference of disruption
will they listen
with respect with the republic
how will they feel when it’s
explained and it’s not feelgood
ribbon business but our
bodies like chattel in pens
because of the venerated
cannibal factory feeding
infinite and wanton wants
the pliancy of adolescence
bones sugar fecal matter silicone
gristle even cells broken down
into individual patents
the factory releasing
only one xenotype at a time
free with purchase of one
million shiny objects
shall we write our demands in blood
shall they be inscribed in the annals
of art and history
how do we transform their powers
do we break them apart and bury them
set them on the shelf
do we push them out
on the ice floe or take
away their scepters
can we disrupt it
with our word parades
do we extend ourselves
into walls again do we
let them in on the plot
or do we burn them
*
is my lineage apropos
my diction mid-to-high
is this the office where I turn
in my papers where I turn
on the reader did you examine
my permit my creed will I be
scorned or feted or disregarded
or memed or made to confess
and will I have to get christlike
will it be messy because I resisted
will you levee around
that flourish will you tighten
the reins or is this a limping treatise
often I hardly capture I’m doing
harpy that I’m a city’s pestilence
but also the cure I’m under
and down but still tell-all
so do I thank you when you touch
my idiom do I mother or write
serve art or the state do I beg
you to power the engine
construct the proper institution
or is it a collective effort
one in which we feel noble
and broadcast our dignities
in the end do we take
it on singularly or as one bodily
force and is there a syntax
I can appropriate
for my limited parlance
or have I already done so
and no one has told me
because I am not
of their denomination
*
a monolith most don’t see overshadows the
animals in their boxes stacked so corners stick
into corners of others for morale the animals
think about a next life while the monolith smothers
reality with terror instead of sharing the proverbial
bounty so while we worry over twitter there’s
a more necessary revolution awaiting us while
our shoes pinch made south in plastic forms
of animal skin layers of animal cells and the tiny
frays of thread meant to stitch shoes instead stitch
the lungs the fingers the stitches to fractions
of cents the kind of money to transform us all day
into new animals and how I acquired this
ancient onus the two of us twisting into each other
like vines how do I break free of odium
or declare it as my only millstone and what
of the mendacious beast on the other side of the door
and his agenda for me like fill this hole and shut up
and why the performance of competence that feels
like gauntlet because the scheme wasn’t visible
the one from which my hand was molded by
my betters stop thinking in the past because
it’s like shitting on the giant progressive tapestry of us
says the stern voiceover since that really brings us all down
emphasis theirs you should know that’s what they say
they have a straight face when they say it
POETICS STATEMENT
Since I was very young, everything I have ever wanted to say was connected to how my body was formed like my mother’s and her mother’s and some other original mother’s. I wanted to speak for and with all those foremothers and my granddaughters too, my sisters, my frenemies. Because the lyric contains atemporality, enigma, and corporeality, it felt like the most apt vehicle for my work, and this is at the very core of my poetics. However, my most important role as poet is as a citizen in a community that requires active curation and mentorship, and my work as an editor, translator, publisher, and teacher are all pieces of that work.
As a daughter of immigrants, I am acutely aware of the complex of class-based dictions employed as a kind of currency in the United States—the language of the academy, the language of the marketplace, the language of war. As a child I imagined a very specific type of English as a key that would open doors inaccessible to my parents; as a poet I can play with how I inscribe myself in my poems, both integrating and resisting these various registers of language.
Milk & Filth, my recently published collection of poems, tries to integrate several competing discourses—third-wave feminism, Latinidad, the poetics of the avant-garde—into a singular lyric voice, one whose historical backdrop is the confessional poetry of second-wave feminists like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Bernadette Mayer, writers willing to write about how their private lives were shaped under the dominion of patriarchy. In my poetics I approach the recuperation much more directly by giving voice to gray-area feminist icons like Joan Rivers and Malinche in order to interrogate the binaries that are used to define women and their value. I also inscribe different bodies elided by literature: the poor, the brown, the peculiar.
I continually remind myself that my writing rarely achieves its full potential without the inclusion of diablura, without raucous play. The pyrotechnic, the little-bit-too-loud is my affective inscription of US identity. In an essay about playwright Ricardo Bracho, late scholar José Esteban Muñoz aptly describes how Latina irascibility is read: “Latinos and Latinas are stigmatized as performers of excess—the hot and spicy, over-the-top subjects who simply do not know when to quit.”1 I like to imagine my Latinidad consisting in my confrontation with those essentialist notions of my “hot and spicy” trespass into innovative aesthetics, and my future writing will continue to document and play with these confrontations inspired by Asco,
the writers collective; Daniel Borzutzky, translator and poet; Laura Mullen, Mongrel Coalition, Kathy Acker, and Guillermo Gomez Peña.
My current book project, Be Recorder, attempts to distill the lyric to its pith. In the tradition of Edwin Torres or Urayoán Noel, it is an antipoetry that alludes to the politically charged urbanity of the Nuyorican Poets and the Movimiento Poets (remaining all the time aware of the sticky masculinity/machista issues inherent in these traditions). Inspired by Ana Mendieta using her body to redefine inheritance, I attempt to define then wield my peculiar subjectivity in my poems in order to create a Latina counter-narrative of American political identity.
I feel like a dutiful poetics is in flux, constantly interrogating the terms of its contexts and privileges. I like to test the conventions that even I peddle, and I hope to dismantle ideas I’ve long held true. If poetry can’t be that type of dynamic and space, I’m going to get bored and boring.
In this moment, it is essential to be actively engaged in gaining equality for all. That’s the immigrant in me, still in love with the American Dream, a little mix of Kennedy statuettes and lame attempts at entrepreneurship. And that’s probably another layer in my poetics: an active engagement with class and caste.
NOTE
1. José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs),” Theatre Journal 52.1 (2000): 70.
“THE CALL FOR REVERSAL IS NATIVE”
The Paradox of the Mother Tongue in the Work of Carmen Giménez Smith
Joyelle McSweeney
1.
“There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity,” write Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.1 This maxim relocates the womb not as a place of origination or unalienated nativity, nor as a reference point for all subsequent plot lines, nor even an uncontested cultural wellsource as in the umphalos, but as an always already conquered site. The child is born into a history of conquests, immersed in contestation and precedence; the “mother tongue,” rather than natural birthright, communicates conquest and contestation itself. This paradox becomes even more radical for a female poet born into one or more imperial languages, such as English or Spanish. Such a poet might ask herself, What is language? What is this tongue in my mouth? If I accept that even in the womb I was colonized by a dominant power, how can I make art from this dubious, imperial material, my mother tongue? What about my mother’s own power over me, as her infant, child, and adult daughter? How does she embody/depart from the power that dominates her? Is this “mother tongue” a gift or a threat? In the womb, who is conqueror of whom? Can the mother tongue be the site of counter-conquest?