American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  FIGURE 1

  FIGURE 2

  One of his most puzzling and most analyzed photographs was created in 1939 when the writer André Breton asked Mr. Alvarez Bravo to take part in a surrealist exhibition at a Mexico City gallery. The photographer obliged him with “The Good Reputation, Sleeping,” a portrait of a nude woman partially wrapped in bandages and lying on a blanket surrounded by cactus buds. The triptych print, which is in the Getty show, has been called confounding and mysterious by curators and art historians.2

  Confounding and mysterious in part for its very deliberate staging, which most of Álvarez Bravo’s images avoid. And yet Tejada selected the serial triptych of this picture for the cover of his catalog for the exhibition, In Focus: Manuel Álvarez Bravo (2001). Unlike other nudes that Álvarez Bravo produced, which commonly have their subject standing and with face obscured by shadow or limb, “The Good Reputation, Sleeping” is of a woman lying on the ground (see figure 2). The wrap stretched around her waist, hips, and thighs leaves exposed her pubic hair, and while one hand is tucked behind her head, the other hand rests on her pelvis, below her navel. She is unmoving, dreamy, somewhere between asleep and aroused, and therein is the heart of the picture’s mysteriousness. The image is quietly erotic; the bandaging of the hips, as well as wrists and ankles, with the rest of her naked, including her pubis, questions the relaxation of the pose. While “The Good Reputation” sleeps, a drive is leaking forth.

  For its mysteriousness, vanguardism, and eroticism, “The Good Reputation, Sleeping” would make a fitting cover for Tejada’s collected poems. In the chapbooks Gift & Verdict (1999) and Amulet Anatomy (2001), and the collections Mirrors for Gold (2006), Exposition Park (2010), and Full Foreground (2012), Tejada’s poetry, too, has a confounding and mysterious quality. His style is surely contemporary and occasionally postmodern or abstract, but more often his syntax, turns of phrase, and pitch are inflected with a Latin American bent: a modernist quality reminiscent perhaps of the New World Baroque of Alejo Carpentier but more compact than ostentatious, and infused with a luxurious decadence of linguistic richness that might make one abandon the idea of the Baroque for the Rococo, with its equal ornateness but divergent asymmetries. Thus it did not surprise me to learn that Tejada wrote his first full collection while living in Mexico City. Of writing Mirrors for Gold, he has said, “I was interested in how the relationship between self and other, in a psychoanalytic sense, can point back to the violent encounter between the conquistador and native American—who’s conquering whom and how are those power differentials established in a palpable historical sense, and what kinds of fear and fantasy prompt subjectivity?”3 In bearing a psychoanalytic inquiry, Tejada usurps the political preoccupation with an interiority of reasoning that shifts and slips from ideas word to word. Across his works, voices emerge that tend toward liminality: not quite magisterial, not quite vulnerable, comforting in their strangely rhapsodic locutions. And while surprise is constantly in play, exploring all sorts of rhizomatic digressions and experimenting with incongruous grafts of diction, Tejada’s poems consistently return from these excursions back to the body, to tactility—and to sex. On the one hand, it might seem like erotics are foregrounded in Tejada’s poems, mainly by punctuating flits of sexualized imagery. But the deference of congruity that pervades his poetry, on multiple scales, relegates desire to a recursive space that animates erotics without etiological insight. The erotics are clues, not reasons, and surely not closures. Like Álvarez Bravo’s “The Good Reputation, Sleeping,” Tejada’s poems do not yield the deeper desire behind the ostensible eroticism. Subjective or emotional investment is avoided. Tejada’s erotics negate cathect by eliding specifics of desire, transmogrifying erotics into features of “libidinal politics”4 and language play, and as they withhold motive from the expression of urges, result in forms I consider marginal erotics.

  Tejada’s first full-length collection, Mirrors for Gold, combines libidinal politics and language play into a specie of libidinal poetics. “Colloquy,” on first glance, does so quite directly:

  It’s the body’s

  dream of this undress

  your chest unyielding

  an eyelash brushed

  against a nipple

  taut

  ripple of your paunch

  […]

  & the room aglow

  with an artless banter5

  The title and the last line bookend the poem with the notion of dialogue, conflating erotic imagery with the activity of language, an idea expressed more integrally in subsequent lines: “so that we scribbled / our bodies free then from this rite of passage / whose substance at last was the animation / of a poem.”6 Indeed, Mirrors for Gold is a book that equates language to sexuality, a proposition somewhat inconsistent with the concept of libidinal politics as formulated by Kaja Silverman, which she proposes as being the result of a wide-scale divergence of the real and the symbolic. Silverman argues that the “historical moment at which the equation of the male sexual organ with the phallus could no longer be sustained” infers “the disjuncture of those two terms to have led to a collective loss of belief in the whole of the dominant fiction” of sexual normalization.7 Tejada’s poetry can be considered a productive gloss to Silverman’s libidinal politics in that he empties real sex and symbolic sex in equal measure; neither stands for the centrism of privilege or power. In “Colloquy,” the “dream of this undress” is not characterized, possessed by an unattributed body, and while the implicit “I” objectifies the explicit “you” through ekphrasis, neither has a gender and neither is dominant, thus “your nakedness” is parallel “against mine.”

  This sense of vague equity is also enabled by disguising the sexual climax. If it happens between the “burn of whiskers” and “whispers,” that would be a feat of understatement. It might still be yet to come, or might not be there at all. The poem’s discretion evens out the erotics, diffused onto a sensual plane, more attuned to an atmosphere of tactility than some endpoint. When diffusing erotic intensity, Tejada’s Mirrors for Gold often plays in sexual tension, as in the out-of-reach orgasm that might or might not be there in “Colloquy.” Ben Hutchinson, in his essay “Modernism and the Erotics of Style,” observes that “the characteristic erotic mode of modernist style is flirtation rather than consummation,” what he terms the “erotics of (im)patience,”8 and the concept extends to Mirrors for Gold. In reading the corollary “erotics of interiority” in modern poetry, Hutchinson explains that “anticipation rather than fulfillment provides the erotic charge. Deferral of meaning, and the patience it implies” unites sexual desire and language into “what one could describe as a syntax of deferral.”9 In “Colloquy,” climax is suspended over the poem, out of view. In “Dyspnea,” excerpted here, a syntax of deferral operates at once on the body and on language, treating both desire and meaning as a tandem equally vulnerable to slippage:

  For days to situate the flesh in whose inadequate precinct

  motionless: a monolith of the often spoken

  of which nothing is

  certain: or abstract of whose gender to the use

  of all acknowledged desire formal

  parlance & pronoun

  […]

  there is a way from yes: the very inside an eternal

  tick of the left eye: a language

  not only illegible as

  the vain translation of a fictive contradictory

  self & its consonant verb to be:10

  In this poem a vocabulary of indeterminacy abounds—“inadequate,” “motionless,” “nothing,” “abstract,” “eternal,” “illegible,” “vain,” “fictive”—in counterpoint to the distinct formal patterns of stanzaic arrangement and measurements meted by ample colons, thus materializing an aesthetic tension. This action parallels a dialectic tension between the semiotic and the sexual; “nothing is / certain” about syllogism’s function to construct meaning, nor the nature of the gaze and the body belonging to “your back,” “har
dened / muscle,” and “shoulders.” The wrought syntax and turns of phrase produce a tension, a confusion and disorientation, a flirting, a teasing, and in a figurative sense, a bondage: a hindrance in layers, as in “the vain translation of a fictive contradictory / self.” The very term dyspnea—labored breathing—is a pivot from which reach the ideas of speaking difficulty and bodily difficulty, collapsed into Tejada’s syntax of deferral.

  Many of the poems in Mirrors for Gold, like “Dyspnea,” constrict the effort to find meaning. At times, short lines achieve this compression, as in “The Element”: “(or liquid // consonants / around each // other’s tongue / into irre- // vocable brush- / strokes // rolled like / rs around the length // of your sex).”11 David Bergman, in The Poetry of Disturbance, notes that “short lines remind us […] the act of writing is bordered on all sides by the blankness of the present,”12 and while this can be said of “The Element”—that the scaffolding of empty space on the page is a signifier in the poem—the larger effect is the poem’s streamlined presentation as a sort of surface. The columnar design of “The Element” allows Tejada to suggest a verbal surface consonant with the tactile conceits in the poem, doubling the opportunity for “thinking through the contradictions of the surface of the body” to arrive at a consideration of how a poem might function as a “textual skin” capable of a “touching spectacle.”13 These concepts draw upon notions of texture and of spectation, and considering them can nuance a reading of how Tejada’s poems so often resist rational comprehension. Syntactic artifice effectively becomes a body; self-referentiality closes off the language circuit and defers meaning per se, folding language onto itself with the effect of establishing it as a discrete entity, more a thing than a process.

  If one considers, as Tejada does, Mirrors for Gold as a book concerned with the dialogue between the psychology of otherness and the violence of conquest, the equation of sex as language/language as sex is predicated on considering the body as a vessel of power, one that can wield touch without consciousness as well as, so to speak, have a mind of its own. Imagery underscores this effect: “You’ve been approached—innumerably—, / Whose parts of speech have been caressed, // Mishandled. This incites the body: / vaguely buoyed stump. This, // Unless reciprocal, is meaningless.”14 In these lines, the body’s extremities are language, subjected to a power (a touch) both benign and negligent. That complexity spurs arousal. Here agency vacillates: the initial force engages the body in passive voice, the touch is equally a caress and a fumbling, and in the end reciprocity is questioned. The exchange, however, has a result, in the “vaguely buoyed stump,” a phallic gesture connoting that touch is much more than skin-deep. It is hard to reconcile “vaguely buoyed stump” as a reference to the body as a whole, as the body has been incited; the phrase feels more like a jump cut to the penis—or at least a part of speech standing in for one, in the spirit of marginal erotics. A pulse of contact allows the flaccid stump to waver, to be buoyed, to start up. A mind of its own indeed. “Stump” is an unsightly choice, and perhaps a reminder of Georges Bataille’s idea that “[h]uman beauty, in the union of bodies, shows the contrast between the purest aspect of mankind and the hideous animal quality of the sexual organs.”15

  Of course, no psychoanalytic project, poetic or otherwise, would be complete without reconciling the phallus. Interestingly, Tejada treats it physically, as an object of spectacle, a thing to be watched. The penultimate section of Mirrors for Gold, eponymously titled, comprises fifteen poems, each numbered and all but one a prose poem. Number 5 is brief: “5. We assembled to regard each other’s erections in the steam bath without touching.”16 Then the next, also on its own page:

  6. In which anger and bleeding are eroticized said the Dreamspeak. There was a woman watched me shower while the water warm between the fissure of my ass from the head of my shaft to catch her gaze at my naked body made me hard she wanted to know she laughed where that had come from and I was embarrassed by such weak description and her name was the origin of all writing.17

  In both poems, the gaze is unrequited by touch. True to Freud, the power of the phallus is vicarious and symbolic, and in these scenes of observing the male body, the sexual power is potential rather than kinetic. In the steam bath and in the shower, arousal occurs through the gaze. There is a space within the gaze that is deceptively and disproportionally quiet: where, in Leo Bersani’s words, “the mobility of fantasy” can play into “its potential for explosive displacements.”18

  Exposition Park has much in common with Mirrors for Gold. The inside jacket cover of Exposition Park likens the book to “a walking tour of stanzas and prose poems” and foretells that the “poetry undertakes a wide range of subjects motivated by artworks from Latin America and the United States covering the colonial period to the present day,” with “first-person atmospheres both premodern and postindustrial.”19 In this regard, the curatorial side of Tejada—an accomplished art critic, historian, and curator—comes forth. The book includes translations (from Luis de Sandoval Zapata, Lope de Vega, and Garcilaso de la Vega); ekphrastic poems (of the Mexican artist Magali Lara); several prose pieces concerned, to varying degrees, with modern art; and an appendix of notes that explains the contexts and motives of seven parts of the collection. The first section of Exposition Park, “Arts & Industry,” is explained in the book’s endnotes as a “tableaux” inspired by the sorts of displays included in world’s fairs that proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century, in which Mexico was a prominent participant.20 By taking the marketplace of culture as its site of poetic excursion, Exposition Park surely shares Mirrors for Gold’s fascination with global-scale contact in relation to the psyche.

  Nevertheless, a parallel though less immediate aspect of Exposition Park is its attention to beauty and how to consider beauty, especially as it has grown vulnerable to our present “postindustrial” moment. The opening poem, through its sequence of exclusively interrogative sentences, implies a doubt-riddled stream of consciousness that combines various “first-person atmospheres,” suggesting immigrant, superstitious, and modern experiences behind mundane concerns at “the Institute.” That said, the first lines read, “Is there a difference between this honey, that rain / water, the volcano a sleeping woman? / Is it north to the meadow and can the river be crossed before sundown?”21 Invested in the psychopolitical register of the poem is the precariousness of beauty, which in this book is vital to a concurrent eroticism. The fourth poem of “Arts & Industry,” derived from Bataille’s Theory of Religion,22 effectively asserts a rhetorical stance that herniates from the titular theme of Exposition Park. A prose poem, it appears here in its entirety, including the quotation marks and the ellipsis:

  “Insofar as he is a spirit, it is man’s misfortune to have the body of an animal and thus to be like a thing, but it is the glory of the human body to be the substratum of a spirit. And the spirit is so closely linked to the body as a thing that the body never ceases to be haunted, is never a thing except virtually, so much so that if death reduces it to the condition of thing, the spirit is more present than ever … In a sense the corpse is the most complete affirmation of the spirit.”23

  The particular sense that justifies understanding the corpse-as-reification of human sanctity is that in Bataille’s philosophy, value increases in direct proportion to its desecration. Throughout Erotism, Bataille explains the dynamic as it pertains to sexuality: “Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism. Humanity implies the taboos, and in eroticism it and they are transgressed. Humanity is transgressed, profaned and besmirched. The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled.” Thus, once “[d]egraded, men are the same as animals, profanation is the same as transgression.”24 Befouling the vessel of the spirit is key to achieving eroticism; much like how the spirit is affirmed by death, erotic pleasure is a manner of rendering human beings into animals.

  In Exposition Park, the juxtaposition of this prose poem
with the poem that immediately precedes it is a move that seems to me to be particularly informed by Bataille’s theory of erotism and that aspect of it which aligns sexuality, violence, and animalism. Tejada explains in the notes that the earlier poem in the sequence is derived from Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker’s The Joy of Cooking,25 but the invisible thread that sutures both poems together is all Bataille:

  Keep the eel alive until ready to skin.

  Kill it with a sharp blow to the head.

  Slip the noose around the eel’s head and hang the other end of the

  cord on a hook, high on the wall.

  Cut the eel skin about 3 inches below the head all around,

  so as not to penetrate the gall bladder, which lies close

  to the head.

  Peel the skin back, pulling down hard—if necessary with a pair of

  pliers—until the whole skin comes off like a glove.

  Clean the fish by slitting the white belly and removing the gut,

  which lies close to the thin belly skin.26

  Deriving this poem from The Joy of Cooking does its part in developing the collection as one grounded in the theme of the global culture business, even adding a sideshow quality that borders on absurdism. At the same time, by lineating what would seem to be the cruelest section of a recipe, the art of cuisine is degraded into brutality: a befouling for the sake of joy, and notably of the most phallic game one could eat. The violence subjects the phallic symbol to barbarism cloaked in propriety, and reading through Exposition Park, one sees the conceit of the animal-as-phallus later revived. In a section titled “Behavioral Science,” the tripartite sequence “Diorama” begins with a page-long prose poem called “Snake” that elaborates on this idea, to the extent that it itself can serve as a reliable gloss: “In the underpinnings and semantic slippage—as totem and taboo, as a figure of movement, as the shorthand for temptation and erotic consequence, as an omen of danger and death, as the simile for writing or as a pattern of abstraction—the snake an endless oscillation of emblem and motif: plasticity itself, in form pliable and by line perverse, in all things deviation, from coiled spiral glyph to ascending fret.”27