I wanted to put the United States in a small box off to the side somewhere so I could just say “moon,” say “love,” and not flinch. There is a terrible impulse among U.S. poets to offer in our poems the critique that will pay the ransom for our language. There is an equally terrible impulse to pretend that we don’t have to. If there’s a secret third thing, I don’t know it.
I’ve been doing this long enough to trust that the critique, the accusation, the lament, the self-implication will be in the poems, inevitably. Then I read Fady Joudah’s translations of Ghassan Zaqtan in The Silence That Remains. Zaqtan’s poems know that it matters where you stand: inside or outside of empire, inside or outside a claim to land, inside or outside a story and practice of indigeneity, of belonging. The Zionist project triggered Zaqtan’s exile and his itinerant life as a refugee in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Tunisia. Still, his poems rarely turn to face his antagonist. If it matters where you stand, it also matters who you face, to whom you call.
I don’t know who to face. I’m the issue of Syrian, Spanish colonial, and Andean indigenous lineages that never held on to stories, much less to a sense of a people. Displacements, colonization, assimilation, silences are my materials. I don’t know how to stand like some Charles Olson or Denise Levertov in an imagined public square to convene my people by addressing them. Neither can I turn my back on my (external and internalized) oppressor and speak in the
quiet air of my beloveds, though I’d very much like to.
My dislocation isn’t a coin to trade for sympathy or authority. It’s simply a fact, and it both limits and empowers my poems. I believe in the real because poems can’t be made of anything else. I just don’t have a lineage or a people that would cosign my real into something authentic. I think this is why the poetry that finds me rarely settles into a stable demotic mode. My poems shift diction and registers of feeling midstream. Artifice first. One reviewer said this offers readers agency, the poems have room enough for readers to turn and see themselves mirrored on the surface of the poem reading the poem they’re inside of. But I need that room too. That’s why there’s a moment when this poem breaks enough to allow the voice to turn and address itself (“If you have to ask, moon child,/ You’re already glowing”), variations of which happen throughout this new book, each time breaking a poem to admit some voice or dialogue I never could have intended. Maybe this is artifice as a grammar for the real.
I thought that working and reworking the artifice in these poems would help me to feel pleasure, and I wanted to claim my relationship to pleasure in writing, but I was slow to understand pleasure’s stakes. The poets I’m interested in aren’t partisan about poetry, but sometimes we do careen away from one impulse and toward another. I was pushing against the idea that the language best suited to the real would be spare and blunt. Language stripped of its own devices sounds a lot like how a police state would want my body to report for surveillance—naked and urgent. I’d mostly avoided rhyme, for example, because of familiar critiques—it’s only decorative, it lends a hollow authority, it incites passions but not reason, and in place of the real it offers mere imitations. But I couldn’t let go this intuition that rhyme doesn’t so much reconcile a sound in its second instance, clasping two ends of a lock into something shut. It’s more as if the striking of those sounds against each other’s sameness allows the syllables that lay between them to more clearly declare their difference. Rhyming, repetition, near repetition (“sleep/asleep”), the more I played with these the more I saw the permeable edge between sameness and difference, the more that facts found mirrors to proliferate their real names (elsewhere in the book the U.S. Airforce finds these figurations: “a heaven of steel pennants/ a haven of stolen penance”), and the more I wanted to be awake, sensitized in language.
So, I let myself be guided by James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Baldwin wrote of sensuality, and Lorde called it the erotic, but both were careful to distinguish this energy from fantasies of excessive sexuality that police and punish black and brown people, particularly feminine-presenting black and brown people. Lorde: “When I speak of the erotic then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women” 1 and Baldwin: “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself.” 2 Both understood that to cultivate the sensory is to swerve around and under desiccated ghoul costumes “of color” that would drape us in legible forms so we can be counted and managed. Aesthetic tools, like rhyme and (variable) measure, interest me not as decoration nor as a way to vie for a place in someone’s hierarchy of taste but to practice what Fred Moten would call an alternative to the anesthetic. Not quite excitation for its own sake, neither mere emphasis on some semantic unit in the poem, the old tools of song can shape energy into loosely patterned sequences of stricture and release offered as an alternative to the continually impacted, nesting layers of containment imposed by systems of power.
Stricture and release. Lift the edges of the parachute so it billows, take turns running under the fabric, look up to see it moving something like the body of a jellyfish. Don’t you want to move like that? My friend Harmony Holiday talks to me about homeostasis, that continual calibration of the body’s systems, the body answering some change in the air (as I write this L.A.’s either fire or ash) with a change in heart rate, hormone secretion, toxin elimination, etc. It’s not about remaining unbothered, as if we could. Stasis is white people’s business. Stasis is colonialism’s theory of time, cooking up an imagined origin to instantiate and sustain its performance in the now. Stasis requires violence against time and bodies because bodies are instruments of time. But what if time is not a line but a cipher, at once the Arabic zero, the translating code used to encrypt and decrypt data, and the cipher of hip hop that lives and moves in and through the voices that are making it? The body’s resets and regulations, its tendency toward composure is part of a dialogue between inside and out, present and past, sameness and difference that doesn’t stand still. Through the looking glass homeostasis could be translated as heterodynamic (with no love for heterosexual hegemony). Translation isn’t a poor approximation; it’s a doubling with difference. So are mirrors. So is rhyme. And in their pleasure through figuration Romans called jellyfish “halipleumon” or sea lungs. Breathing water might be a death wish, or fanciful description through metaphor, but after artifice is done saying “just kidding,” we’re left with the truth it offered, which in this case is a confession of the desire to work an edge between irreconcilable elements, water and lung. We want to practice transiting through the materials that surround us and are us. How long can ancestral memory hide inside the artifice of language? Through epochs of evolution? Don’t you want to move like that? Remember when you knew how?
And because pleasure traffics in excess, I’ll add what Aditi Machado mentions in an interview: “For Deleuze, the subject and the world constitute each other in a Baroque fold: ‘Forever indissociable from the body, [the fold] discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter.'” 3 And Google’s AI tells me that “In weaving, ‘warp’ refers to the long, vertical threads that are stretched on a loom and remain stationary, while ‘weft’ refers to the horizontal threads that are woven over and under the warp threads to create fabric.” Water, air, jelly, dark matter, word. One formulation for how, exactly, body and language figure or fold into that fabric of creation is in an Alice Notley poem where she writes of “hearing & saying/ at the double edge of body &/ breath.” 4 The body may seem like a container of insides that travels through some outside, its skin a barrier between integral sameness and chaotic difference. But the mobius strip or double edge of body and breath allows words, once spoken, to travel like a needle carrying semantic and sonorous weft through warp and back again.
I’m just another poet with a fanciful revision of Cartesian space, stacking (and folding) dimensions until there’s no such thing as emptiness, but it’s all I’ve got. I linger with these notions against emptiness partly because emptiness is colonial logic’s condition of possibility. Colonists need to imagine a territory as minimally inhabited, underdeveloped, or completely empty to justify incursion. The same goes for sexual predators when it comes to the territory of the body. I don’t know what liberation looks like, I’ve no political or revolutionary tactics to get us there, but I sense if poetry has something to offer, it’s in reimagining where we stand, who we face, what a body is, in short, to revise an entire cosmology.
So, maybe a poem is a way to activate the mobius double edge of body and breath to fold into proximities that are always overwhelming the Western body’s stand against supposed empty space. Atoms already attest to the unaccountable means by which they touch across estranged distances, which is to say across time. That transiting leaves space replete with traces of languages, silences, memories, viruses, and ghosts, their rage and love. Let these proximities imply. It’s not art, only sensate living to be fibers in that fabric. But hearing and saying at the double edge of body and breath can be one technology for working with while remaining of that dense weave, pleating and slacking and pleating again by the shapes of a poem’s measure. Our materials need not be our friends; they’re free to intend our plunder back into us by the ply, and if there’s relief, it comes from not pretending we might stand apart.
I wanted to imagine such “thick” space, folding space, a space replete with us, because I thought I had found a way to stop believing in distance. If emptiness is colonialism’s cosmos, then distance is neo-imperialism’s alibi. Contemporary drone war operates through distance to absolve state violence as targeted, tactical, and necessary whereas proximate violence (think of the beheadings of Western journalists) is supposed to be the sign of barbarism. Who cares if you don’t eat what you kill so long as you never have to smell it? And traced back to its Proto-Indo-European root, the prefix dis-, as in distance, becomes bis-, as in two. Which is the artifice, and which is the real? Two standing apart? Or a single figure mirrored, doubled (repeated the same but different) and standing in place?
I wanted the poems so close to you (respectfully) that we would be two strands of a helix, standing in the same place. Another way to say it is that this cosmos and poetics that I imagine is a fantasy of never being alone, of being “held/ By a word just behind” me in the warp and weft of dark matter when urgency, vigilance, and fear would demand I lean forward. So, I wanted to feel language, to sensitize my body as reparation and as part of a quantum entanglement where we could join forces. That’s why often the work of setting up my scene, the vantage from which I would narrate the poem to you across some distance mostly feels contrived—stagecraft when poetry never asked for a stage. I wanted to do what my friend Phil Pardi says some scholars say about Emily Dickinson: that she wrote intimately, but rarely personally. I wanted to get that close that fast. I linger with these notions against emptiness because of course I could never succeed at boxing up the U.S. I can only avoid flinching before the over-determined and very tired moon, which is to say I could only find some degree of peace being in this world, by imagining us close together, so many of us, in fact, that we might be a people.
But it’s a very small degree of peace. I wanted this work to be accountable, to not settle for easy truisms about ambiguity or a lack of closure being liberatory or even interesting. I wanted, more than I had before, to risk being right or wrong or foolish or earnest or stylized. I don’t know who to face, but in wanting to be accountable the poems call—a bit desperately, really—to readers I can’t yet see. My ambition was to create across each poem and again across the book a complex of feelings, sometimes contradictory feelings, that would get at what’s irreconcilable about the real. And I wanted the artifice of verse to sensitize readers’ attentions so they might stay permeable to that complex of feeling.
I tried as I chased these ambitions to be “held by a word just behind,” to feel peace while folding into the fabric of creation. To do that, I would have to allow myself a life bigger than me. I would have to trust in the cosmos I imagine. But I didn’t know how to not become obsessive in my revisions. I wish I could rest at saying the anodyne thing, that I was curious, that I simply wanted to learn all the possible permutations of the poem each draft could reveal. Instead, I surveilled the poems, imperially. And to do that I had to believe enough in distance to hold them apart from me, walk around them, test their tolerances. In revision I could be phallic, patriarchal, the very energies the poems critique. The more I revised, the more that equally viable versions proliferated, and in that hall of mirrors we had no choice but to suffer each other’s gaze. My empty, unfillable brain kept eating itself. I wanted to find my people. Of course a need so great would conjure an entire cosmos to negate itself and then refuse to believe in anything but itself.
I should have known I was caught in that self-sabotage when the book’s last poem found the title “Crease”—an attempt to make the fold in the fabric of creation stay, to make something available to return, to offer an invitation to a people as if I wasn’t writing in disappearing ink. I’m not sorry I abused myself. I lost sleep, sometimes the poems lost spontaneity, but sometimes they broke open to admit those voices that aren’t quite mine. To travel the arc of the poems I’ve yet to make, domination of myself is as good a fuel as any. May I burn up soon because it can’t be just about the poem and certainly not just about me. It’s the habits of assembly around the poem (the reading, the seminar table, the prize banquet) and us poets that need to be revised. We’re not blank slates, but neither do we have to be lazy inheritors of our various (silent or documented) lineages. Whatever trace an ancestor left to be honored or continued was created in their active collaborations with the “force of life.” The people I’m looking for, my people, are somewhere right now burning whatever fuel is at hand, not for the sake of heroics, but to separate poetry from literature and ourselves from whatever we think we are. May the word, once given to the air, help us fold back to what we’ve always been.
