American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  In what follows, I argue that Torres’s porous poetics is inseparable from the embodied experience (especially the sounds) of the city, New York City in particular, and I connect his embodied poetics of the city to his media ecological practice. In “The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language,”18 the long final section of the book of the same name, we get this:

  On one level, this passage stages the tension between the vanguardist page and the Puerto Rican/Latino barrio; at the same time, as Libertad Guerra observes, Torres here recasts the gang imagery of West Side Story (a problematic yet essential New York Puerto Rican reference) through the “inverted logos of the Sharks and Jets as collision/dissolution of crude oppositions.”19 The staged city here allows for an emptying out of binaries, including that between the page and the street. The looping text at the bottom, which roughly translates as “the promize [sic] of a welcome diversion, y’know” feeds off the Spanish diversión, which also means amusement or fun. The deconstructionist/vanguardist city, with its constant disjuncture/deferral/diversion of meaning, is also a welcoming city, a city of promise, an immigrant city.

  In a 2010 interview posted on the Poetry Society of America’s website, Torres emphasizes his poetry’s roots in sound play, heavily influenced by the zaum (or trans-sense) poetry of Russian Futurists such as Velimir Khlebnikov, but he also links his investment in sound to his having grown up in a multilingual household, and he even makes an analogy between the Russian Futurist poets and the New York Puerto Rican diaspora:

  My own tradition was hatched by the zaumists from Russia. While I’ve since opened my eyes to poetry’s orbital complexities, my first inspiration was sound-based. Growing up in a multi-lingual household, my ear was tuned to the space between words … between meaning, interpretation and outcome. The sound of language at its core and the fun of playing with mistranslation. In the pioneering spirit of new beginnings, I felt an affinity between the Russian Futurists of the 20’s and the influx of Puerto Ricans into New York City during the 50’s which would become the Nuyoricans. In each circumstance, meaning and rhythm set root against each other in the guise of language. As I grew into my writing, my mentors began to appear where I needed them … radical beings who believed the universe at their center was worth expanding to others. Eventually settling into a sort of body-politic, a galactic nomad within me, at ease with drifting between territories. Dancers, artists, musicians who molded this American Boricua out of star stuff.20

  I will not elaborate on how Torres’s work fuses Futurist and diasporic sensibilities, since I have done so elsewhere.21 What interests me here is how these vanguardist and diasporic sounds work together in the orchestration of an ambient poetics that foregrounds the city as lived, as a relation between bodies. I am not the first commenter to emphasize the relational aspect of Torres’s city. In a review of PoPedology in the Poetry Project Newsletter, Toscano notes this aspect of the book, while crucially locating Torres’s poetics in a particular class context. I quote in detail from Toscano’s review, since it is relevant to my own reading:

  In this new collection, a sizable array of 20th century avant-garde currents get trip-hopped. Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, Lettrism, Beat, Nuyorican, (post-classical) Black Arts Movement, (post-classical) Language School writing, are not spoken in a naïve, regressive “neo” mode, but rather, their combined utopic girding is momentarily revivified by way of maximizing the proximity of each to each: Dada bass rides Constructivist beats on spacey Nuyorican scratching, etc. Result: flash coloration! This is the dynamic palette that Torres requires to spell out a complex urban reality. That is to say, it is not eliminationist at the level of demographic politics (see trust fund hipsterism for opposite), it is co-convivialist.22

  Toscano distinguishes between the “ventriloquistic” poetics of PoPedology and In The Function Of External Circumstances’ “‘univocal’ (non subject-sliding, intimate, me-to-you mode diction),” but he also distinguishes Torres’s brand of vanguardism, locating its origins in a “post-Robert Moses ‘meat-axed’ Bronx environment (via the Expressway)” that is largely immigrant and working-class.23 Following Toscano, we could argue that differentiating Torres’s immigrant/working-class city (with what I am calling its welcoming diversion) from “trust fund hipsterism” is also a way of distinguishing Torres’s trip-hopping of forms from the trendy but historically and politically thin experimentalism of post-gentrification New York. Toscano’s strategic irony also opens up a crucial question: Given all the recent debates about conceptual poetics and identity politics, what would happen if we were to take (class-conscious, cross-cultural, multilingual) poetics such as Torres’s as points of departure? What would the real estate of contemporary poetry look like if it owned up to its barrios? Welcome to Torres’s surreal estate!24

  In the Poetry Society of America interview, in response to a question about what is distinctly American about his work, Torres resists the reductionist charge of the term: “I do think poets are citizens of language more than nationality. Ours is a shared humanity, our shoulders, our lineage, our language—beyond territory. I am a poet before I am an American poet.” At the same time, though, in describing his influences, Torres notes his experience as a nonacademic: “Growing up in New York City, working as a graphic designer, discovering poetry outside academia … I was always inspired by the poets who had jobs in the workplace.”25 Torres goes on to list an eclectic mix of poets, among whom the name of William Carlos Williams stands out to me, inasmuch as Williams was also a nonacademic, was of Puerto Rican descent, and developed a poetics that often gets reduced to its visual elements (imagism, and so on) but that was in fact significantly influenced by the sounds of language, by the experience of growing up in a non-monolingual household.26 In a sense, then, Torres fits into a diasporic Puerto Rican tradition of innovative poetics that turned the experience of living across languages and cultures into a groundbreaking poetic style.27

  Understanding Torres as both Guerra and Toscano do, as an investigator of language as lived and shared, and as a poet of the embodied city, I want to propose a reading of his work at the intersection of media ecology and urban ecosystem. As Torres’s poetics has matured, the zigzagging between poem as text and poem as score (between the to-be-read and the to-be-performed) has increasingly given way to an integrative poetics where the boundaries between these becomes porous. In PoPedology, this poetics is troped through the titular “ambient language,” an evident nod to Brian Eno’s influential “ambient” music—there are nods to Eno’s work at various points in the “PoPedology” section, and a subsection near the end of the book is called “Taking Tiger Mountain,” a reference to Eno’s 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Torres shares not only Eno’s cross-media approach but also his insistence on art as process; in the notes to the book, Torres explains that the core of the “PoPedology” section “was based on a Poetry & Pedagogy symposium at Bard College, transposed into a lecture for Naropa University, adapted as a radio play for WPSI.org and now appears in these pages in its final incarnation.” One might then read this section of the book as a (“pop”) parody of the academic’s “ologizing” impulse, since, as the title of one of the poems in the book puts it, “The Theorist Has No Samba!” But there is also a way in which “pop” echoes the interruptive logic of the “pop-ups” that take over our computer screens, exposing the vulnerability of our technology but also our own vulnerabilities and insecurities (I am thinking of the products pop-up ads typically sell). In a sense, then, PoPedology is a media ecology; poetry for the age of pop-ups, just as Flarf is poetry for the age of Google.28

  In thinking of Torres’s work as an ecology/ecosystem, I am taking seriously its interplay between noise and silence. A few pages after the “Barrio/Barrier” passage, we get multiple pages consisting of a single couplet of three words or fewer placed at the center of the page. The first of these couplets (“environmental / white noise”) evokes the titular ambient language, while the following one (“cultural
din-seeking / rhythmites”) reinforces the connection between environmental noise and cultural noise.29 Noise is central to digital poetics as theorized by Brian Kim Stefans and others, but it is of course also constitutive of the city.30 What would it mean to understand the city in ecopoetic terms? In Ecology without Nature (2009), Timothy Morton argues that ecological thinking has tended to take for granted the immediacy of nature, and he proposes, among many other things, a renewed attention to how nature is mediated. Morton’s Derridean approach to writing allows him to take seriously seemingly tangential features of a text, such as the relationship between the words on the page and the white space surrounding them. Following Morton, we could read Torres’s couplets ecopoetically both in their content (their harnessing of the noise of the city) and their form (their foregrounding of the silent spaces of the page as integral to an ambient language).31

  As evident from projects such as the )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)) (2010), edited by poet Brenda Iijima, contemporary poets are beginning to interrogate the “eco” from a perspective that values both linguistic innovation and differences in gender, race, class, sexuality, and locality. And yet we are still beginning to map the ecopoetic space of the city, which is ironic given the historic and ongoing clustering of poetry communities in cities (New York School, San Francisco Renaissance) and the radical changes that many American cities have undergone over the past two decades (redevelopment, gentrification, globalization, disinvestment, rezoning, demographic shifts, and invasive policing, to name a few). I am writing this essay in the Bronx, a few blocks from where Torres grew up, yet my Bronx is in many ways far removed from his; as Toscano observes, Torres’s poetics is inseparable from the multiethnic and working-class Bronx of the 1960s and 1970s, the Bronx of Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, but also, I would add, from the (Afro) Puerto Rican (South) Bronx of spontaneous gatherings and improvisatory music and spoken word movingly captured in Henry Chalfant’s 2006 documentary From Mambo to Hip-Hop, the Bronx of the salseros and beyond. To read Torres’s poetics as ecosystem is to read the textual and performative moves, the simultaneous graphic explosiveness and lyric quietude, of the codas to PoPedology and 2010’s Yes Thing No Thing as rooted in the beautiful contingencies of the moving body/street/barrio/city.32

  Toward the end of PoPedology, we are treated to the terms “Ambient Language,” “Ambient Typography,” “Ambient Collaboration,” and “Ambient Leaning,” all in a giant, bold font, and then a few pages later comes the term “Ambient Breath” in an appropriately blurry version of the same font, followed by a short meditation that reads like a utopian manifesto (philosophically not unlike “A Nuyo-Futurist’s Manifestiny,” the concluding section of 2001’s The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker):

  Hysterial fusion.

  Boschian tangents … if we could all breathe

  As One

  This all impossible

  But I appear it on page, so

  Becomes possible on way—through page33

  Here, the page becomes the utopian space where the impossible city happens (where “all breathe / As One”), or, alternatively, where the aphasic “I” writes the page onto the body of the city, a provisional utopia always “on way.”

  A similar interplay between noise and quietude animates Yes Thing No Thing. The book continues and expands on Circumstances’ play with geometric shapes and designs, experimenting with publishing software to create an even richer and more radical verbivocovisual palette. As Matvei Yankelevich observes in his blurb for the book, “Torres’s moves from a new ‘explodity’ into fairy-tale and love-lyric may seem jarring at first, but actually meet the avant-garde’s original challenge to do all kinds of poetry.” Significantly, Yankelevich uses the term “Romantic Constructivism” to describe how Torres “sculpts with hand, ear, and eye, a poetry that grows to encompass more of what was originally outside its (sensory and physical) limits.”34

  Yes Thing concludes with “H onest,” a poem memorable for its mixture of self-revelation and quirky phonetic (faux-netic?) spelling, and one that Torres told me via email was about “how to transcribe listening, how to praise living creatures.” The poem’s lyric revelation makes the human familiar even as its quirky spelling defamiliarizes it:

  I am ahuman

  I take amaccine to air so thski cn see m

  a brd dos not blong there

  whn I am thr35

  The performative spelling, which starts in the first poem of the book and appears intermittently throughout, has a Poundian ring (as in “cn” for “can”), but it also allows for puns (a human / ahuman) that buttress the text’s locating of the human in an uneasy relationship with the machine and the animal.36 The paradox here (a human defined only in relation to the nonhuman) links back to the book’s title, which would appear to replace Williams’s famous dictum “No ideas but in things” with a straight-faced “No things but yes things.” The ideal of an objectivist clarity, of a poetics as framed, runs up against the “I” and its experiential muddle: it is all about things, it is never about things. Identity is typically thought of as what is affirmed, but in Torres’s recent work, affirmation (“I am”) is also negation, as in the poem “Noricua BBQ” (from PoPedology), which performs a “Boricua” (Puerto Rican) identity in the now of the “No.”37 Torres’s work redirects the avant-garde’s textual energy but rejects its penchant for the programmatic dictum, inasmuch as it forecloses transformation, a key term for Torres, and one at the heart of his Romantic Constructivism.

  Torres’s work could never be against expression, as in the title of Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s anthology of conceptual writing.38 In its constant transformations, it can avoid a fossilized or institutionalized expression, and in that way it fits within conceptualist/experimental genealogies, but against-ness, in the programmatic sense, seems to be the one thing Torres’s poetics cannot or will not do (for all its intersubjective riffs, and granted the energies of its embodied polis, his work is not particularly political). In other words, in drawing the map of contemporary US poetry with the expressive on one side and its against on the other, we miss a wide range of poetics that express without taking the expressway, that subway it to the noisy barrio and somehow find their way back to the no is. With its liminal skin and its porous us, Torres’s poetry shows us the (no) way.

  While books such as PoPedology and Yes Thing mine the constructivist side of the Romantic Constructivism described by Yankelevich, over the years, Torres has produced a voluminous work animated by a more conventionally Romantic lyric impulse, as in these closing lines from the short, unpublished poem “Surrender,” where the page as projective field dovetails into understated rhymes, naked emotion, and ballad-like simplicity:

  She is achingly beautiful.

  She is clay to her panic.

  A dark hollow visit from her eyes in listening eros.

  Tendril to the rip of my skin.

  cloak

  me pull

  me down

  with you

  Her gaze, a black comet across the ocean’s tow.

  The haunt of motion slow.

  She is the darkest dark I know,

  and I am in love with her.

  Torres’s poetics is even elastic enough to accommodate the lyric as narrative, as evident in his volume One Night: Poems for the Sleepy (2012), a collection of poems for children.39 Still, these quieter moments do not resolve the relationship between bodies, between self and other; there is no easy epiphany in Torres’s porous poetics. Even a poem like Yes Thing’s “The Boy Made Of Glass,” which reads like a strange yet sweet fairy-tale/bedtime story, concludes with an inscrutable silence. Torres writes, “He would meet the other boys made of glass at the house without walls to sing his new note Every day they would all sing their new note And when they sang that note they sounded like this:” And yet the concluding colon is followed by two blank pages.40

  With its profusion of text boxes and geometric shapes framing a playfully f
ragmented language, Yes Thing No Thing reads like an invitation to the fun-house mirror, akin to the Lacanian imaginary order; as readers, we are returned to the babble of our toddler selves, and to our reflection in the mirror, as perfect as it is unsettling. The poem mirrors the self: both are the thing (Freud’s das ding?) that is and is not there (Freud’s fort-da?), poesy as no-esy and its noisy remainder. One of Yes Thing No Thing’s opening poems, significantly titled “The Name of Things,” begins with the following stanza:

  Tell me a story about a frog named Painting and a bird

  named Painting and how color changes color to see sky

  Tell me about the fire that flies across a cloud called Rain

  talk louder said my ear to my eye41

  The nominalist promise of the title gives way to ekphrasis (a story about color) and synaesthesia (a telling that is seeing). Twenty years later, we are brought back to the groovy yet eerie synaesthesias of “Swallow These Words,” as that poem’s “with the ears on the surface of your tongue!” becomes “talk louder said my ear to my eye.” In 1991, a bravado-filled Torres was wagering on a spoken word that could hear the motion of its spokes (a bold lingua attuned to the hum that is the body’s home); twenty years later, and with a hard-won gravitas, the poet now bows down before the muse, asking it for a simple story. In the first poem, the ear was an extension of the tongue, so the spoken word had to be scored on the page (for example, through noisy fonts); now the ear is wise enough to let the eye speak its strange image-tongue, to let the word be in all its meaningful emptiness. Thus, the bolded text of the lingualist shock worker can now coexist with the griot’s synaesthetic blues. The empty text boxes at the bottom of “The Name of Things” need not be filled; the slam poet’s imperative that we swallow his words is now matched by an awareness of what cannot be put into words. Then, as now, Torres’s verbivocovisual poetics represents a Romantic/constructivist attempt to reembody the real, yet sometimes all it takes is a perceptual shift: “how color changes color to see sky.”