American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  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

  fraud. Please note how much it costs

  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

  the mike post-haste we’re tired


  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?