24. Wang, Thinking Its Presence, 11; Noel, In Visible Movement, 178, n. 5; Reed, Freedom Time, 8. Martín Espada’s essay “Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination,” in Zapata’s Disciple (Boston: South End Press, 1999; originally 1994), is an earlier example of a poet of color articulating the intersections of aesthetics (what Espada calls “craft”) and cultural concerns (what he calls “commitment”). In other words, Espada attempted to conceptualize a “political” poetry that would be taken seriously as “Poetry.”
25. Craig Santos Perez, Maintenant Series Reading, Poetry Parnassus, London, June 30, 2012. Available online at youtu.be/1hWIkM5E_OY.
26. Johannes Göransson, “Borzutzky,” in Angels of the Americlypse, ed. Chávez and Giménez Smith.
27. Lundy Martin, “The Rules of the Game,” 2–3.
28. Alice Notley, Disobedience (New York: Penguin, 2001). This line of thought was influenced by the roundtable “Disobedient Poetics” at ASAP/7: Arts and the Public, the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) in 2015. Moderated by Evie Shockley, “Disobedient Poetics” included Julia Bloch, Amy De’Ath, Walt Hunter, Andrea Quaid, Lindsay Turner, and Catherine Wagner. For another salient dimension of this concept, see Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture and Society 26.7–8 (2009).
29. Mark Nowak, “Documentary Poetics,” Harriet (blog), Poetry Foundation, April 17, 2010.
30. Joseph Harrington, “Docupoetry and Archive Desire,” Jacket 2, October 27, 2011; Joseph Harrington, “The Politics of Docupoetry,” in The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement, ed. Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Susan Briante, “Defacing the Monument,” Jacket 2, April 21, 2014; Philip Metres, “From Reznikoff to Public Enemy,” Poetry Foundation, November 5, 2007; and David Ray Vance, “Radical Documentary Praxis [Redux],” in The New Poetics.
31. It is also important to distinguish “creative nonpoetry” from Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing.” The former emphasizes the creative negation of poetry as a genre; the latter negates the creative agency of the writer. See Goldsmith’s poetics statement “Being Boring,” in The New Poetics.
32. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; originally 1982); and Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987).
33. Recent studies that address genre include Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Amy Robbins, American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014).
34. Paul Lai, “Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.2 (2011).
35. Documentary poetry differs from “poetry of witness,” but because their tools, techniques, imperatives, and relation both to the lyric and to historical “fact” overlap, they can be difficult to disentangle. See Sandra Beasley, “Flint and Tinder: Understanding the Difference between Poetry of Witness and Documentary Poetics,” Poetry Northwest, August 19, 2015; and Cathy Park Hong, “Against Witness,” Poetry, May 2015. Gray and Keniston rightly say that “engaged poetry tends to be characterized by suspicion and doubt about positions of witness, authority, and omniscience” (4).
36. Brian Blanchfield, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (New York: Nightboat Books, 2016); Carmen Giménez Smith, Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
37. In Garments Against Women (Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015), Anne Boyer addresses the reader: “I am writing to you in a long paragraph so that I will not be pornography” (14).
38. Maria Damon, Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 168. For a sustained exploration of poets as fieldworkers and on-location ethnographers attuned to such processes, see Shaw’s Fieldworks.
39. Wang, Thinking Its Presence, 20, 22.
40. Humanimal can also be read as an example of what Cole Swenson calls “research-based poetry” in Noise That Stays Noise: Essays (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).
41. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). There are limits to the applicability of Glissant’s ideas here. The Francophone and Black Caribbean dimensions of the term “Poetics of Relation” resist portability, especially into US contexts. Even so, many of the poets and critics included here cite Glissant as a key influence.
42. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 35. Glissant’s suggestion that a Poetics of Relation “forms the ethnography of its own subject matter” makes genre fluid in the ways Harrington identifies: “We see a poem by Brathwaite as the equivalent of a novel by Carpentier and an essay by Fanon. We go even farther in not distinguishing between genres when we deny that their divisions are necessary for us or when we create different divisions” (215).
43. Lundy Martin, “The Rules of the Game,” 3.
44. Roberto Tejada, Full Foreground (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 1.
45. See also Douglas Kearney, Mess and Mess and (Las Cruces, NM: Noemi Press, 2015).
46. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2; and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). The aesthetic, theoretical, and political glosses on failure cited here should not be conflated with the sort of failure of concern to Ben Lerner in The Hatred of Poetry (New York: FSG, 2016). Lerner is interested in what he perceives as an unbridgeable gap between the ideal of Poetry and “actual” poems, which, the argument goes, always fail to live up to their promise.
47. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 2.
48. Francisco Aragón, ed., The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007); and Angels of the Americlypse, ed. Chávez and Giménez Smith.
49. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, ed., Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). See the previous note for Giménez Smith’s edited volume of Latino writing.
50. Wang, Thinking Its Presence, 26–27.
51. Born in London to Indian parents, Kapil underscores the porous borders of American poetry, thereby extending the work of Poetics Across North America, which included the Canadian poets Lisa Robertson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Erin Moure.
52. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
53. Fred Moten, Hughson’s Tavern (Providence, RI: Leon Works, 2008), 17.
54. Rodrigo Toscano, “A Poetics of Ghosting: Aaron Beasley Interviews Rodrigo Toscano,” Boston Review, April 12, 2018.
55. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 3.
ROSA ALCALÁ
POEMS
FROM Undocumentaries
Everybody’s Authenticity
Among weeds, among variants of native
crab grasses. One adapts to the kinds
that curl or stand up straight, the bright green
and speckled yellow. I would have to leave this poem
and enter the world to render
a better description. Plants don’t fly north
or south, their migration is passive. But they
assimilate rabidly, into hybrids. The dog
is dismissive, indiscriminate, yet a colonizer,
by way of the paw. What you must have looked like
crouched curbside, at the edge of a shopping
mall, looking for that elixir a Peruvian
woman taught you to boil
into a tea. It’s for the swollen legs, yo
u say,
for the toes like mini chorizos, and it tastes
okay, like nothing at all. Awaiting results,
you call your sister in a town
girdled by the Pyrenees, where crinoline
can be heard rustling through the plaza. On your end,
a blender is a welcome relief: I am sick
of pounding things. It’s no way
to live. You want tradition? Here’s the mortar & pestle.
Believe me, the point’s just to pulverize.
Job #6
How to transcribe tragedy?
Do I use a dictation machine?
Look blankly at the boss
and let fingers for a moment feel
reproach? How can I plan my wedding
as I cross out crutch words? When will I depill
my jacket? When everyone is dead
will the droopy bow of compliance
get caught in the teeth
of inquiry? There is no line of escape,
holidays are finite systems, the rest
a blur of supermarket cake
into rising
rent. The body charged
with documentation has its own shorthand:
now the turncoat gland, now the gut’s
tactlessness. What’s the worry?
The transcript never gets read
for what it is: a stutter relieved
of spare consonants,
the art of rote aversion.
Autobiography
Factory is something not heard
but written in degrees
as breath. It never signs off,
delivering you to you as a finished but minor
product: something copied
and stapled, slipped into your foot
locker. You can’t value it. All you can do is replace it
with an ethnic cuisine
to riddle the ancients. It’s all you can do
to keep from setting your face
on fire. When the cat runs from one side
of the house to another in an effort to find
the childhood friend who died from eating
old blinds, the page is left
to NAFTA. Factory chases the cat
out of the work though local manufacture
is the aim. We should all be ashamed
by the niceness of the working class: All, “Can
I get you something?” Factory gives you
ways to get ahead that are industrious, but
uneven: Sleep with this history. Find yourself
under that Volvo. The office for agents
is the etymology of Factory, what we now call
the conference. It reads properties
for poetries. Factory is both fact
and act, and mere letters away from face
and story.
FROM The Lust of Unsentimental Waters
Rita Hayworth: Double Agent
In the follicles sits a dangerously coiled
and coarse nature, from which the genus
springs. So the body’s genius
zapped with a year’s worth
of electrolysis. She becomes
a G.I.’s dream by moving the border
that frames the face, by deflowering the name
and firing the island extra
who made the dance number
a risk. Still, after ions have cooled,
they invent helpless swine
to be rendered (“Good evening, Mr. Farrell,
you’re looking very beautiful.”)
at the spit. Or place her
at the ticket booth of a Chinese theatre,
speaking perfect Mandarin. So
much of her choreographed
or dubbed, winking at you
through a ruffled excess. But what’s more natural
to a bilingual girl from Brooklyn
than to mouth her country’s script? Or insinuate
herself into its defenses?
She throws her head back, and on a long
black glove slowly tugs: “Mame did a dance
called the kichee-coo. That’s the thing
that slew McGrew.” And though
it’s Gilda we want to bed, we catch a glimpse
of something familiar from behind a curtain
of hair. It’s Margarita Cansino as the song
ends and the striptease continues. We volunteer
to lend a hand when she confesses, “I’m not
very good at zippers.”
Patria
for my father, José Alcalá García
The salute
of this poem
rides open
to a shotgun—
I carry grief
blatant
as propaganda.
My father’s name
lifts
the hammer
bucket
brick
to eye
level
& makes everyone
a bit uneasy
for what’s
to come:
a parched code
a cracked
body
’s final test.
It’s a Dallas
of suspicion
a ramshackle
conspiracy
of origins
that hides
a mother
so central
to the narrative
and fuses
time & again
melancholy to elegy
to bring the madre
patria back
to civil war.
This ditty
holds the beat
every foreigner
can tap his foot to.
But whose feet
will be put to
the fire
for a democratic state?
When lost
in the sway
of our sorrow?
the flag
of our own names?
FROM MyOTHER TONGUE
Paramour
English is dirty. Polyamorous. English
wants me. English rides with girls
and with boys. English keeps an open
tab and never sleeps
alone. English is a smooth talker
who makes me say please. It’s a bit of role-playing
and I like a good tease. We have a safe word
I keep forgetting. English likes
pet names. English
has a little secret, a past,
another family. English is going to leave them
for me. I’ve made English a set
of keys. English brings me flowers
stolen from a grave.
English texts me, slips in
as emojis, attaches selfies
NSFW. English has rules
but accepts dates last minute. English makes
booty-calls. English makes me want it.
When I was younger, my parents said
keep that English out of our
house. If you leave with that miserable,
don’t come back. I said god-willing
in the language of the Inquisition. I climbed out
my window, but always got
caught. English had a hooptie
that was the joint. Now my mother goes gaga
over our cute babies. Together
English and I wrote my father’s
obituary. How many times
have I said it’s over, and English just laughs
and says, c’mon, señorita, let’s go for
Chinese. We always end up
in a fancy hotel where we give
fake names, and as I lay my head
to hear my lover breathe,
I dream of Sam Patch plunging
into water: a poem
English gave m
e
that had been given
to another.
Voice Activation
Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Zettel, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe
This poem, on the other hand, is activated by the sound of my voice, and, luckily, I am a native speaker. Luckily, I have no accent and you can understand perfectly what I am saying to you via this poem. I have been working on this limpid voice, through which you can read each word as if rounded in my mouth, as if my tongue were pushing into my teeth, my lips meeting and jaws flexing, so that even if from birth you’ve been taught to read faces before words and words as faces, you’ll feel not at all confused with what I say on the page. But maybe you’ll see my name and feel a twinge of confusion. Have no doubt, my poem is innocent and transparent. So when I say, I think I’ll make myself a sandwich, the poem does not say, I drink an isle of bad trips. Or if I say, my mother is dying, where is her phone. The poem does not say, try other it spying, spare us ur-foam. One way to ensure the poem and its reader no misunderstanding is to never modulate. I’m done with emotion, I’m done, especially, with that certain weakness called exiting one’s intention. What I mean is Spanish. What a mess that is, fishing for good old American bread, and ending up with a boatload of uncles and their boxes of salt cod, a round of aunts poking for fat in your middle. So you see, Wittgenstein, even the sandwich isn’t always made to my specifications; it’s the poem that does what I demand. Everything else requires a series of steps. I call the nurse’s station and explain to the nurse—her accent thick as thieves—that I’d like to speak to my mother. She calls out to my mother: “it’s your daughter” (really, she says this in Spanish, but for the sake of voice activation and this poem, you understand I can’t go there), and she hands the phone to my mother and my mother, who is not the poem, has trouble understanding me. So I write this poem, which understands me perfectly, and never needs the nurse’s station, and never worries about unintelligible accents or speaking loudly enough or the trouble with dying, which can be understood as a loss of language. If so, the immigrant, my mother, has been misunderstood for so long; this death is from her last interpreter.