The Poetic Front (E-Journal)

Schultz, Susan M

THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
 1 
MEMORY CARDS: WOLSAK SERIES 
July, 2010 
 
Susan M. Schultz 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Behold one orphan.  Radhika's blue jacket (pocket sewn inside out), white sleeveless shirt, broken 
sandals.  For every source that says orphans are the end of a sentence sitting alone at the top of a 
column there is another source that calls it a widow.  A couple came out of the plane; she clutched a 
teddy bear and he clutched her.  They sat a while, then wandered toward baggage claim.  She lost her 
stepbrother; the reader lost his place.  Those who fall from mountains leave widows and orphans.  Her 
sister remembers a drowning.  He tries to sell me my unclaimed assets, promises to keep calling, can't 
pronounce my street or town.  “I'm in Philly, and we've got Schuylkill.”  No matter what we call them 
these widowed and orphaned bits of text can make our stories harder to read and our layouts look 
unbalanced.  Given a prompt (snapshot, story), the child remembers something.  A teeter-totter sign 
marks the playground where there are no teeter-totters.  She met a young woman in a village who 
might have been their birth mother.  A For Sale sign sits atop the lava near the burning trees.   
 
      
 
 
 
       --19 July 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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Compassion is largely exile.  Went down to the ships.  Went down to Laupāhoehoe.  She was clearly 
manic, call and self-response a loop: cancer, local, Hawaiian, birth-father, Punahou.  Punalu`u turtles, 
runway of black feathered sand to blue launch. When I drive, I think of pelicans.  All poets feel/are 
disappointed, but most express it obliquely.  A single boat pushes back against the current, cork 
bobbing in a blue liquor never wrought.  It lives inside the word.  Pass.  Ion.  To compare is to lose it.  
She noticed the dead mouse on the road, the nursing foal.  (His photograph was removed for 
inappropriate content.)  Compassion is largely an isle, nursed by ocean.  Its boundaries are liquid.  Too 
big to fail.  They come pushing their carts down Kahekili, stopping by the bridge to drink.  The 
unemployed are too lazy to look for work.  A little boy in orange points away from my window frame.  
It's not a bad climate in which to be homeless.   
 
 
   
 
 
      --July 20, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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Let us finish each other's songs. She chants the Kumulipo in the back seat.  How do you read the 
bumpersticker “Bloodlines”?  You are not my mother!  Sight memory, muscle memory.  My mother has 
forgotten how to walk.  Her throat forgets to swallow.  Parse the word.  For: forward, fortunate, 
fortuitous, not against, but with.  Get: claim, hold, beget.  If my mother forgets me, am I misbegotten?  
Mother is a job, he tells her; it's the person who takes you to school, who makes sure you're safe. At 
day's end, she gets you back.   
 
 
 
 
 
      --July 21, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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“toward my grave I have traveled but two hours”  She died as the priest uttered the word “Christ.”  He 
got the call on his cell phone, the one that made a joyful pulse in our living room.  These sounds will be 
heard as noise.  She turns on music between bird calls, as there's too much space.  (Sorry, John Cage.)  
The plan is in minutes.  We buy them in blocks of 1000, count them down by grocery lists and 
practices.  He wanted to go to the better place, then realized he still had baseball.  Squatters are 
obstacles to resorts.  There ought to be a constitutional right to oblivion.  Those who disappear inside 
their lives are suspect.  Her sense of direction is precisely opposite of true.  Those who die shall not be 
forgotten by the internet.  Walmart moved the bones to refrigeration, then returned to construction.  
This is as true of my daughter as of any politician.  The state shall manage the cultural park, lest its 
residents do something illegal.  Extra ambient sounds, the rustling of your clothes.  Guam keeps 
coming up in conversation: his son a Chamorro activist, the priest teacher to a poet friend's father.  
Repeated complaints about F-18s flying over Kāne`ohe between 12 and 2 a.m.  I wish they flew over 
me; I'd cheer all night and all day.  Feathered black sand, where turtles doze.  If we want people to take 
us seriously, we shouldn't dress in 14th century smocks. 
 
 
 
 
 
       --July 23, 2010 (for Father Rob) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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Is as it is last: Saturday morning call.  What are you doing, mom?  Listening to you.  I hear you fell 
and hurt your elbow.  No, I'm fine.  (She coughs.)  (She coughs again.)  I'm fine (in a high pitched wail, 
this time).  The boy plays old Atari games: I love the classics!.  Simulated on a new machine.   He's 
experiencing his father's nostalgia.  His inner/outer child.  My mother has forgotten her own body's 
hurt.  But it's the same code. I hang up: a familiar sense of blank.  White, a mountain in the Alps.  Too 
much to see, we kept on walking, our heads down.  The aesthetic moves seem unnecessary to the 
content.  I can see the lines break even in prose.  Is last cannot.  Last days, when the elastic trips and 
there is no give except in for-.     
 
 
 
 
 
      --July 24, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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Love hinders death.  There, I found it.  Compass sheathed & knowing.  Lost in the wilderness, he 
builds a fire for cameras, his bandanna still starched.  She's ok, just watching TV.  Yes, she's had the 
cough; they're giving her something for it.  Grief's litmus, an attending to.  Find a distant landmark and 
walk toward it.  Baby turtles put back in the Gulf, despite the oil.  He picked up ritual oils before 
leaving for the hospital.  She punned on “habit,” then declared them “the lowest form of humor.”  Deep 
plumes are linked to this spill (we lack a word for what it is).  He fells a tree, eats the sap, lights a fire: 
no snow to douse it.  It's been more than 40 days in this desert, more than 40 weeks.  Lucidity is not an 
option.  Push 211 for Country Lane, then talk to a voice you fail to recognize.  La plume de ma tante.   
 
 
 
 
 
       --July 25, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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Memory as we have clung to it can be newly conceived.  Since dawn, the clank of bottles-to-be-
recycled.  Duch sentenced to 19 years in prison; “he's the only human, the others are monsters.”  The 
losses are the ones that stick, yes.  He began to carry a photograph in his pocket.  Their first 
conversation was banal.  Not that mass murder isn't also.  Archival urban mastery masks rural 
forgetting.  The photograph a prosthetic.  According to the pegword system, 1 is a bun, 2 is a shoe, 3 is 
a tree.  Did you notice that lefty sites get the spam shoe ads, as if we're all sh*e fetishists?  Her broken 
sandals, his tiny shorts.  How Disney reaches an orphanage in Cambodia.  One simply needs to link 
each item in the sequence to each of the pegwords, by making a particularly evocative and memorable 
association.  In the first photograph his water glass is two-thirds empty.  Someone else trapped them in 
their frames.  In the second he is holding his glasses out.  I think it’s morally irresponsible and 
intellectually lazy if we simply brand people like this as monsters.  The artist chose photographs 
according to their place in her design; those she discarded were doubly done in.  He came in second in 
the country in mathematics.  There are thousands of pairs of eyes at Tuol Sleng.  It was a trial by 
camera.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
      --July 26, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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Who makes / in one location what / is meant for another?  Slash in the wrong place, false enjambment.  
Stand beneath a door jamb during an earthquake.  What / is is such.  Line break, empire.  (He prefers 
the blurry associations of poetry sometimes.)  It may be blank, but it's a fence, not mended by print's 
odd stitch.  Cold pasty or pastiche, dreads or pieds-noir.  Hemistich maneuver, the boys in camouflage 
fire cap guns at 7 a.m.  When the child is called a fucking haole she needs to recognize the long 
historical context of the term.  Self-portraits in a context mirror cannot appease every viewer, even if 
mirrors do run backwards.  A boy was killed seconds from home, seconds / from home.  Beautiful 
fingers of lava grasped the carpenter's house in Kalapana.  God bless America, whatever it is.     
 
 
 
 
 
 
      --July 27, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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We corner language no more than love.  A corner is all lateral moves toward the pivot, shift.  Says “did 
not” for “nevah.”  He took one photograph a day until frame melted into story.  She asked her son if 
he'd opened da stoah.  Kāne`ohe, the Bronx.  From his car seat, he said only dis and dat and deet.  You 
turn the corner using a nutmeg.  Moving from one language to another requires a pony.  The 
donkey/zebra hybrid has stripes on its legs only.  My on-line dictionary always begins from 
“squamous.”  Says “New England” is a synonym for “quiet.”  And in that corner.  One wonders when 
rings developed corners, or when my corner developed an antipathy for yours.  Good times are just.  
She heard Louis Armstrong music in Brighton.  No one's got the corner on that.  But this begs the 
question of the predicate, the sentence's back corner.  Love is a feeling that wikiHow can describe and 
attempt to assist, but be sure to heed their warnings about childhood fantasies and on letting go.   
 
 
 
 
 
       --July 28, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
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Some / depth of mercy.  This is just to say I've not plumbed the mystery.  My daughter eats orange 
food: carrots, melons, tangerines.  Ubiquitous chickens rake leaves with their beaks, scatter.  Matter is 
the issue; matter, the muse.  Mine has only the depth I remember for her.  It's not what they could do, 
but what they still can.  De Kooning's ribbons.  She's forgotten the dream, the one about a river of dead 
construction workers, her mentor lying on an inflatable raft, umbrella drink at hand.  And I can't recall 
Cezanne.  He did not return from his Kāne`ohe walk.  A border or a limit; a coming back.  Typos 
might be the after-lives of words.  Pedetran crossing at Diamond Head (where some thought olivine 
was diamond).  There's a graveyard for hats below the look-out.  She was swimming in that river.  He 
was hit by a car driven by a young woman leaving the Shell station.  On his final syllabus, a directive 
to “Use the Angel Course Management tool.”  Will we cross the tiger stream with laughter? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      --July 30, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT VOL. 4 (2011) 
 11 
 
 
 
Susan M. Schultz has lived in Hawai`i for 21 years.  She teaches poetry & creative writing at the 
University of Hawai`i and edits Tinfish Press (since 1995) out of her home in Kāne`ohe on the island of 
O`ahu.  She is author of several books of poetry and poetic prose, including Memory Cards & Adoption 
Papers (Potes & Poets, 2001) and Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press, 2008).  Her book of essays is A 
Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 
2005). She blogs at http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com Memory Cards: 2010-2011 series is forthcoming 
from Singing Horse. A limited edition of the “Wolsak Series” was published by INK in Metz, France. 
 
Each of these memory cards begins from a sentence or a phrase from Lissa Wolsak's Squeezed Light: 
Collected Poems 1994-2005 (Station Hill, 2010). 


English

WOLSAK SERIES

Doing the Twist: Modern American poetry and vitalis

Donovan, Thom

Doing the Twist: Modern American poetry and vitalism 
Thom Donovan 
 
 
In American English a twist can refer to a “turn of events,” the introduction of a plot 
element that changes the course of a story, or the tightening or stressing of a weave. A 
twister refers to a tornado. To twist someone’s words is to perform an act of sophistry or 
to misrepresent the truth. To refer to someone as twisted paints them with evil intentions. 
One of America’s most cherished rock n’ roll variations is called “The Twist,” and 
Chubbie Checker’s version of the song topped the Billboard charts not only in 1960 and 
again in 1962, but also in the 1980s with accompaniment from the Fat Boys. In the dance, 
the twist, popularized after Checker’s version of the song, the body releases nervous 
tension through a series of pivoting and twisting motions throughout the body. 
 
When one looks at Modern American poetry, twisting is ubiquitous as a metaphor for 
composition. One finds it in Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems, where the poet relates 
the growth of his long poem, and thus his democratic alter ego, Maximus, thru the flower 
nasturtium, whose name derives from the Greek for “twisting”. The etymological origins 
of the flower lie not only in the flower’s twisted appearance, but also in its strong, 
pungent scent, infamous for turning the nose away. In Greek mythology, the nasturtium is 
also a “trophy” flower symbolizing victory over an oppressing force. In Olson’s insistent 
reference to the flower in The Maximus Poems, he pays homage not only to the 
convoluted thought-paths poetry often makes through its line-breaks and syntactical 
patterns, but also the poem’s victory within the realm of the symbolic and imaginary, if 
not also over real forces that the poet would like to combat and defeat. 
 
The ascription of such a power to poetry can also be found in William Carlos Williams’ 
Kora in Hell, where he writes “There is nothing that with a twist of the imagination 
cannot be something else,” acknowledging poetry’s power to potentialize imagination 
and intellect. Yet the twist is perhaps most famously taken up by Williams’ and Olson’s 
contemporary, Louis Zukofsky, who in his text “Mantis, an interpretation” imagines 
contemporary composition as a remedy to what he recognizes as overly formal and 
determined methods of composing. By such methods one does not discover or invent 
forms adequate for the task at hand, so much as apply forms that are already given and so 
staid by prior use. While Zukofsky arrives at an approximation of a classical form 
through the composition of his poem “Mantis,” which he identifies as an “irregular” 
sestina, he claims to have done so only by responding to the necessities of his subject—a 
praying mantis which has “alighted” on his coat in a New York subway, and sparked his 
imagination about the abject conditions of the working-class and poor during his 
moment, Depression era America. Through the winding lines of his irregular sestina, 
Zukofsky attempts to weave related images, sounds, and ideas, achieving their maximum 
effect through recurrence and syntactical compaction. 
 
The twist, it would seem to me, should embody poetry’s power to over-turn. And indeed 
this is also one of the definitions of the “twist”: a “turning” or “over-turning”. How the 
poem twists exactly remains alchemical, intuitive, and often over-determined whenever 
one tries to describe it as a function of verse. Yet, the twist is arguably the thing which 
most applies to poetry as a function of intelligence, and contributes to social life as it is 
lived through the intensities of language. Two other modern poets who take up this 
function are Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens. Though the poets are often pitted 
against each other by canon formations, their formulations about verse in relation to 
vitality mirror one another uncannily when one looks at them together.  
 
Stevens is famous for discussing poetry in terms of its vitality, claiming in his book of 
essays and lectures The Necessary Angel poetry as life’s “great stimulant”. Yet 
throughout his work Stevens repeats one word that I have always taken as a simile of the 
twist. This is the word “flick”. For Stevens, flicking represents an expression of life. That 
which Stevens most considers living, he often describes as having a flick—whether a 
flick of the wrist, or a kind of photographic or cinematic flicker. One of the images of 
flicking that recurs throughout Stevens’ work is that of the French stage-actress Sarah 
Bernhardt playing Ophelia in a performance of Hamlet. Through a simple movement of 
Bernhardt’s hand Stevens believed the actress to convey precisely the emotional 
complexity of one of Shakespeare’s most tragic characters. So it is as if all of life’s 
meaning can be contained through similar gestures, and words do also evince such 
gestural qualities—qualities which contribute in subtle ways to a poem’s atmosphere, and 
the feeling that the poem is acting upon us in certain ways when we read it.  
 
In Stein’s work, the twist does not operate so much paratactically, though Stein would 
also lineate much of her work, as through grammatical and syntactical elements. In place 
of the twisting achieved by lineation, Stein would use what she called a technique of 
“insistence,” which is the quality of repeating words and phrases without those words and 
phrases losing their qualities of expressiveness. So in her “portraits” Stein attempted to 
enact a lively description of a particular object or person not by producing realistic visual 
descriptions with words, but by improvising writing that might associate the object or 
person synaesthetically, kinetically, and through the internal logic of a single portrait’s 
textual elements. In this way, Stein avoided describing her subjects in order to express 
their essences through prosody. 
 
A discourse that Stein, Olson, Stevens, and Zukofsky share that much modern and 
contemporary poetry also share is that of vitalism—the study and belief in “life 
essence”/élan vital which grew up in the 19th century through post-Darwinist biology. 
While I don’t believe the legacy of vitalism has left us, and it may in fact be with us more 
than ever before, I do believe that there are better uses to which vitalism can be put, as 
well as the twisting which may be poetry’s greatest vital sign. Which is to say, while one 
may continue to test poetry by claiming whether it is vital or not—an assumption of 
language’s force (and a counter-force of that force) or a failure to express language as a 
living thing—the ways that vitalisms are reflected by critical-reaction to poetry seem 
crucial to how we take poetry in its appropriate cultural context, and as a product, 
ultimately, of forces that can not be divorced from a socius. 
 
Two great lacuna of modern poetry’s twisting lie in Ezra Pound and Emily Dickinson. As 
Susan Howe, Beverly Dahlen, Susan Cameron and others show, Dickinson’s own vital 
lyric—a lyric often cited for its aphoristic tautness, and nervous condensery—was put 
towards undermining the force of Puritan-American personalization as it lines up with 
social forces that would undermine women and other marginalized people, and that 
would produce the United States as both an unrivalled imperial power, and as a power 
that could expend so many lives in so extravagant a manner through civil war. On the 
other hand, Pound, not unlike the Italian Futurists, ultimately championed poetry’s 
intensities (poetry, for Pound, consisted of what he called “an aristocracy of emotions”) 
in order to serve both a fascist theme, as well as an authoritarian historicist-citational 
practice. Though it is difficult to argue against the vitality of much of Pound’s work, and 
especially his work as a translator, it is possible to show the abuses and contradictions of 
the way he expressed this vitality. (And here I would beg to differ with the editors of N+1 
magazine who in a panel about the “Practical Avant Garde” at MoMA’s P.S.1 museum in 
the spring of 2006 claimed vitalism to be a “good unto itself” for avant garde practice.) 
 
Yet another modern who thought through the question of vitality after Darwin and 
modern physics is of course Frederic Nietzsche. And it is from Nietzsche that Michel 
Foucault derives a question that still has not been adequately answered by poetry: “Who 
is speaking?” If there is any question that poetry should continue to pursue in our day, I 
believe it is still this question of what it means for a particular subject to be speaking. For 
the question who is speaking situates poetry’s vital energies—its power, if you will—
where it perhaps most matters. Two of the places where I think poetry can most matter is 
both in the sphere of cultural production and critique. By asking who is speaking one 
wonders how language positions both its author and reader in terms of forms that are not 
so much invented (even if they seem to appear out of nowhere) as they are coproduced 
and performed. By attending this performance we may better wield what poetry can do. 
The problem of who is speaking (or discourse) is one that goes back to Baruch Spinoza 
insofar as Spinoza is the first modern, to my knowledge, to ask the question of what a 
body can do, that is, how can one determine the body’s potentialities, rather than treat 
bodies as foregone entities.  
 
What if we treated poetry like a body in terms of poetry’s social effect? How can we 
maintain as wide a definition of “social effect” as possible before foreclosing or 
codifying poetry’s meaning to the detriment of what it may be capable of doing—
effecting and performing? These are sincere questions that I believe Filip Marinovich and 
Dorothea Lasky both investigate through their own practices as poets: poetry as 
biopolitical theater; poetry as a baring of the subject and subject formations in 
contemporary life; poetry as a filter for information, and means of expressing cultural 
valuables; poetry as a (counter-) disciplinary machine; poetry as a source of health, 
regimen, “technologies of the self” (Foucault). We are approaching certain discoveries, 
but what do these discoveries mean? Poetry, as one of culture’s most experimental 
modalities for meaning, must continually investigate the stakes of vitalism as both an 
ideology, and as a metaphor for embodied subjectivity. 
 
 
 
Thom Donovan lives in New York City where he edits Wild Horses of Fire weblog 
(whof.blogspot.com) and coedits ON Contemporary Practice. He is a participant in the 
Nonsite Collective and a curator for the SEGUE reading series. His criticism and poetry 
have been published widely in BOMBlog, PAJ: performance + art, Modern Painters, and 
at the Poetry Foundation where he currently blogs. 


Doing the Twist: Modern American poetry and vitalism

“Inquiring into the symbolic dildo I strap on every day”: A Review of Rob Budde’s Declining Americ

Johanson, Reg

“Inquiring into the symbolic dildo I strap on every day”: A Review of 
Rob Budde’s Declining America (Book Thug, 2009) 
By Reg Johanson 
 
The 2010 Winter Olympics is a site – up north we recognize a land management 
issue when we see one – ―Indices‖ 
What the war for the word comes down to is massive transfers of energy that 
haven’t been indexed haven’t sold stocks haven’t been named yet in the consumer 
guidebook – ―My American Movie‖ 
 
The title of Rob Budde‘s Declining America references not only the waning of an empire, 
but also the refusal of its discourses – spectacular, repressive, and spatial. Scenes, 
displacements / prostheses (including writing), traumas, and indices of value are the sites 
of refusal, recombinant and language-centered poetics the method. Straight off, I want to 
say how much I appreciate that Budde‘s analysis is not tainted with the okey-dokey, 
Tragically-Hip sentimental nationalism that often comes out when ―America‖ is 
discussed in Canadian literature. My next book, post-Olympics, will be entitled Declining 
Canada. 
The poem ―My American Movie: After Jean Baudrillard‘s America‖ is a ―screening‖ of 
the discourses of America, filtered (strained?) through Baudrillard‘s America. In a series 
of ―Scenes‖, Budde‘s prose poem reproduces the speed and the slickness (―so smooth, so 
symmetrical‖ [12]) of the simulacra, managed so that ―the veep won‘t discern anything 
wrong […] the sidewalk won‘t digress into any sort of attractive chaos or orgy or 
outlandish protest‖(12). The speed of these representations is an ―inebriation‖(9), an 
unpleasant one that registers the discomfort of knowing that despite assurances to the 
contrary you are, simultaneously, totally out of control and totally inside it. But don‘t 
worry about it, have some more.  
Budde‘s scenes flash by, braiding together the ―narratives‖ and ―myths‖ of America, so 
that we can see the seeing, comprehend the narrative of the narratives of death, ―a 
hyperreality generated electronically to soften the blow (a hero dying)‖(11) and ―how 
unnecessary living is when you have cravings and distraction‖(14). It‘s a woozy, 
nauseating experience. Budde consumes so we don‘t have to, marks what‘s going into the 
social body as it is constituted by the simulacra. It makes us unwell: ―that bratwurst kind 
of satisfaction‖(12), ―orange fanta‖(8), ―unsaturated fats‖(12), ―lemon chicken 
wedges‖(12), ―freedom like a slab of ham‖(18), ―the great diverted overfed‖(18), 
―numbed with opium‖(16). It reminds me of Christmas day, going to the movies at a 
multiplex on Edmonton‘s south side (Millwoods, the ghetto)—diverted, overfed, too 
warm, sitting through a half-hour of commercials before another half-hour of coming 
attractions—to watch a 3-D film about indigenous people defeating the mining 
companies, on another planet. The confinement of the page / the confinement of the 
screen, the frame of the page / the screen, the multiplex.  
But unlike Baudrillard, for whom ―this is all there is the moebius strip of 
representations‖(8), Budde doesn‘t keep himself in the dark about the hard ―technologies 
of power‖, the way discourse ends up on the body. The poems of ―My American Movie‖ 
explore the imaginal, aesthetic rationale for the all-to-real torture routines documented in 
the poem ―Kubark.‖  
Budde tells us that ―in 1997, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation (1963) was 
declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. ‗KUBARK‘ is a found poem that 
manipulates / reveals that CIA text‖(105). Budde‘s rewriting of this text reveals what the 
CIA thinks of us (―us‖: subjects / objects of state (police) power, and as such potential 
victims of torture). How the CIA imagines what will work on us and what won‘t, their 
tactical estimate of our strengths and weaknesses. 
One tactic used by the CIA, it seems, is to induce ―regression‖, a tactic based on the 
presumed ―stature and importance of a parental figure – the basis for guilt reactions‖(77). 
Regression is designed to induce a feeling of dependency and helplessness in the victim, 
which is both produced and relieved by the torturer-as-parent. It‘s useful to know that we 
are vulnerable to torture, according to the experts, to the extent to which we have 
internalized the authority of the state-as-parent
i
, which has the power to shame and 
redeem, to ―discipline and punish.‖  
Budde also brings out the circumstances under which torturers fail: KUBARK repeatedly 
warns against inducing ―a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse [the 
victim]‖(77). Apparently, ― ‗dulled, apathetic, depressed‘ and apathy can be a very 
effective defence for the victim‖(80). Note to self! Also: ―neurotic and psychotic subjects 
are either comparatively unaffected or show decreases in anxiety‖(81). Budde reveals the 
torture-state as a world of inversions, in which conditions that are judged pathological 
(apathy, neurosis, psychosis) protect the victim, while socially-approved characteristics 
(respect for authority) make the victim vulnerable. Budde‘s analysis of KUBARK makes 
me ―love my symptoms‖ again, allows me to read my failures and refusals as a 
―democratic‖ citizen-subject as signs of strength and resistance. The poem ―KUBARK‖ 
is a manual we can use against the manual, when our turn in the torture chamber comes. 
 In ―Software Tracks‖, Budde continues his investigation of pathology-as-resistance by 
decomposing sentences under the following headings: ―Seizure‖, ―anorexia‖, ―lesion‖, 
―bruise‖, ―bodiless‖, ―stitch‖, ―cavity‖, ―coma‖, ―depression‖, ―arrogance‖, ―apathy‖, 
―rash‖, ―nausea‖, ―hiccup‖, ―gag‖, ―tattoo‖, ―scab‖, ―diabetes‖, ―blush‖, ―lung cancer‖, 
―panic‖, ―obesity‖, ―hypochondria‖, ―aphasia‖(50-74). Language (the sentence) is broken 
up in order to see ―all angles at once—the impossible ogle‖(63). But here Budde rejects 
―symptom‖ in favour of ―reaction‖: 
A long time coming the blindness being the reaction not the symptom you thought 
it was a justification but then the realizations tend to be from the visceral versus 
the algebraic formula, though the opposition is less likely than an accident or 
wrong turn in thinking; that‘s it, the map has been forged from birth and now the 
correlation comes clean, shot through with foreboding, and up comes father, there 
all the time, and it is the beginning of sentencelessness this necessary purgation or 
purgation without reservation but always a reaction not the symptom and records 
fail. […] Like tracking without a prey—traces tending to end in the cerebral 
muskeg. Whole nouns burnt up in the aftermath. Anarchy is easy. Campaigning 
for revelation not re-erection. Or a wrong turn. With and out – it‘s that easy. A 
use for and, the sense of something more, the will to spit it out, with witnesses. 
[…] Stand back. Let the subjunctive relieve the pressure […]. (62-3) 
―Reaction‖ suggests a condition brought out by an encounter with toxicity, an acute 
condition, as opposed to ―symptom‖, which has the sense of a manifestation of a more 
chronic illness. A poetics, and a form, of ―purgation‖, ―spit[ting] it out, ―reliev[ing] the 
pressure.‖ 
Declining America finds some practical uses for poetry, some value in poetic practices. 
But the poem ―Indices‖ is a more skeptical measure of ―poetic value‖ against other 
indexes of value, emptying out qualitative and quantitative criteria and discourse. 
Budde acknowledges the futility of poetry: ―poetic value (diagnoses) is repetitive motion 
disorder; the way a habit becomes habit or inhibited / by a turn‖(86); ―Auden: ‗poetry 
makes nothing happen‘‖(86); ―poetic value is the freedom to be ineffectual‖(87); ―poetry 
is not the taking-up of arms; poetry is next to nothing; I would die of poetry‖(95). 
However, in lines which resonate (―poetic value is a resonance energy transfer‖[101]) 
against the ―Kubark‖ poem, Budde does find a meaningful register for poetry‘s value: 
―poetic value is the value of having a name for the source of terror‖ / ―poetic value is 
questioning the name for the source of terror‖(86-7). But this only leads him back to the 
ambiguity of reading itself: ―poetic value is knowing that if my kids can read this, they 
can read the signs that might try to harm them‖(98).  
While Budde questions poetic value at the scale of the political and social, he also looks 
at it in the economy of the literary milieu: ―after the reading we can haggle over the value 
of this book the ‗value‘ will be determined by that brief and awkward exchange‖(89). 
Here Budde precisely registers the saddest and most deflating moment in the circulation 
of poetry. Poetry is not, as we hear so often, a ―gift economy.‖ A true gift economy 
would undermine all the careful rationales of funding that Canadian arts bureaucracies 
have invested so much energy in promoting. The lie of the ―gift economy‖ has recently 
been exposed in the recent round of cuts to arts funding in British Columbia, during 
which we heard a lot from arts bureaucracies about how ―valuable‖ their art was to the 
non-gift, commodity economy. (I leave aside as unrepeatable the moralizing about how 
important art is in ―civilizing‖ and ―citizenship‖). Budde exposes the political economy 
of poetry in a different register by locating Marx‘s analysis of the commodity inside the 
structure of the ―poetry reading‖:  
Once again, at a poetry reading, we have both an opposition and a unity. We have 
an opposition because the relative use value form and the equivalent exchange 
form are exactly the opposite of each other and form two opposed, contradictory 
poles. We have unity because each pole is a partial expression of the simple form 
of exchange-value as a whole. Together they are ‗mutually dependent and 
inseparable‘ but, ultimately, paradoxical. (94) 
The terms ―opposition‖ and ―unity‖ highlight the social relations constituted by the 
poetry reading and the funding apparatus behind it. ―Opposition‖ and ―unity‖, in the 
context of the recent Olympic games in Vancouver, also have a slightly different political 
register: Olympics organizers made Olympics arts funding contingent on an agreement 
that performers would not voice any sort of ―opposition‖ to the games. In this context, 
―unity‖ means collaboration with the corporate-nationalist (ie fascist) agenda. Post-
Olympics, it will be interesting to see how writers respond to the ―paradox‖ of the 
―opposition and unity‖ in literary commodities that revealed itself during the games. Will 
we be able to occupy the space – the exchange – of the ―poetry reading‖ in the same way, 
or has there been a decisive rupture in ―value‖? Will ―oppositional‖ texts be recuperated 
into the ―unity‖, the ―big tent‖, of the poetry-exchange? Thanks to Rob Budde for 
providing one possible frame through which to understand the struggles to come. 
                                                        
i See the Counterpunch article by Dr. Bryant Welch on the complicity of psychologists 
and their professional organization, The American Psychological Association (APA), 
with military torturers: “Military psychologists colluded with the Justice 
Department to help CIA operatives circumvent the legal prohibitions against 
torture. Under the Justice Department definition of torture, if a detainee was sent to 
a psychologist for a mental health evaluation prior to interrogation it was per se 
evidence that the interrogator had no legal intent to torture the detainee because 
the referral “demonstrated concern” for the welfare of the detainee. Most 
remarkably of all, this whole process occurred under a protective “ethical” seal from 
the American Psychological Association (APA), psychologists’ largest national 
organization. The APA governance repeatedly rejected calls from its membership for 
APA to join other health organizations in declaring participation in Bush detention 
center interrogations unethical.” 
(http://www.counterpunch.org/welch06172009.html) 
 
Reg Johanson is the author of Courage, My Love (Line Books 2006), and co-author, 
with Roger Farr and Aaron Vidaver, of N 49 19. 47 - W 123 8.11 (PILLS 2008). He 
teaches writing and literature at Capilano University in North Vancouver BC, Coast 
Salish Territory. 


“Inquiring into the symbolic dildo I strap on every day”: A Review of Rob Budde’s Declining America

Farr, Roger

Postscript: Poetry and Anti-Politicsi 
Roger Farr 
 
 
[P]roletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize 
themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the 
apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel 
thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, 
seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength 
from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil 
constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is 
created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves 
call out: 
 
Hic Rhodus, hic salta! 
 
– Marx, 18
th
 Brumaireii 
 
 
The expression “Hic Rhodus, hic salta” has a tangled history of translation. Its origins are Greek. 
Marx uses the expression in both Capital and the 18
th
 Brumaire, and seems to have adapted it 
from Hegel, who in turn adapted it from Latin sources. It is said originally to have been the 
punch-line to a gag about an athlete who boasts about having witnesses who can confirm he is 
able to make a fantastic jump, to which a bystander remarks that if he can indeed accomplish 
such a feat, he should do it now: Hic Rhodus, hic salta, or “Here is the rod, jump!” In the Preface 
to The Philosophy of Right, Hegel mysteriously translates the line as “Here is the rose. And here 
we must dance!,” which, according to the Encyclopedia of Marxism, refers “to the rose in the 
cross of rosicrucianism, implying that fulfillment should not be postponed to some Utopian 
future.”iii Given its placement in the passage above, where it follows one of the most significant 
utterances in radical thought – “until a situation is created which makes all turning back 
impossible, and the conditions themselves call out” – the expression is often read as illustrative 
of the revolutionary moment itself: that point where the proletariat is compelled to leap. 
The problem, however, is that the logic of necessity ticking away inside this utterance – a 
logic captured syntactically in the form of the conditional sentence (“If the conditions are correct, 
then the people will revolt”) – is either inherently flawed, or has been hijacked by some other 
spook, perhaps that other, better known maxim, cogita ante salis.iv Either way, a huge leap is 
indeed required to get from the “if‟ to the “then.” As Jacques Camatte observes, “All the 
conditions would seem to be ripe; there should be revolution. Why then is there such restraint? 
What is to stop people from transforming all these crises and disasters, which are themselves the 
result of the latest mutation of capital, into a catastrophe for capital itself?”v To which Fredrika 
Bremer might add, “Nothing is more provoking than to waist one‟s time in waiting, nothing 
more useless, more intolerable, nothing that might more easily be remedied were there but the 
determination.”vi 
As for the determinations, much of the revolutionary thought of the twentieth century has 
held fast to Marx‟s thesis that historical and social transformations are determined by the 
emergence of a self-conscious class protagonist, or antagonist, that arrives at its knowledge of 
itself and its historical agency under a set of specific conditions, i.e., at a specific stage of 
capitalist development where productive forces reach their full capacity and create a material 
base for communism. At this moment the class becomes, in Lukacs‟ words, an “identical subject-
object” of history.vii For Marx, and many of his immediate followers, this “historical 
inevitability” could be logically induced from actual material conditions: the economic processes 
and struggles that allowed history to “progress” were seen as inextricably linked to the activity of 
the working class. And perhaps they were. But what happens when, as Camatte, Debord and 
others warned, capital reaches a stage where it emancipates itself from human agency,viii in order 
to achieve the form not merely of universal economy, but rather that of a “mechanistic utopia 
where human beings become simple accessories of an automated system”?ix 
The world is out of control. By which we mean, of course, out of our control. For even 
when we experience them first-hand, the social, political, economic, and ecological crises of our 
time – “the conditions” – appear somewhere else: a distant, hyper-mediated space populated not 
by “the workers,” or even people, but by images, statistics, charts, tables, and the disinterested 
experts who move them around, poke them with sticks, report them, refute them, revise them. 
And the same is true of much of our spurious resistance, it must be said, which, unsurprisingly, 
appears not as an inevitability, as Marx predicted, but as an alternative – another choice to be 
made in the democratic marketplace of ideas, where all ideas are options, and “all options are 
available,” including the total liquidation of the planet and its inhabitants. The once fêted, now 
hackneyed slogan of the anti-globalization movement, “Another world is possible,” illustrates 
precisely the extent to which social transformation has become modalized not as a probability, 
let alone a necessity, but as a possibility, instead of what it truly is – an emergency.x Nowhere is 
this more frustratingly evident than in the current Hopefulness on the Left. Hope, as recent 
events have proven conclusively, has become the second most valuable commodity on the 
planet, just after a safe place to do business. 
 But just as when one empties the trash on one‟s computer, the evacuation of humanity from 
the social world is not simply the erasure of an essence – it is a new source of production and 
reproduction, a site of accumulation in its own right, one which involves the often violent 
overwriting of old subjects with new subjects. In other words, once capital escapes from its host, 
it reinvests a portion of its surplus back into the recalibration of the subjects it hijacked, broke 
down, and set to work, by reconstituting itself as their community. This marks a stage Marx did 
not predict: the anthropomorphization of capital.xi In this “pseudo-world,” as Debord called it,xii 
communication, like the economy it animates, also becomes something alien and autonomous, an 
abstract force – a ghost, a virus, a code – that harnesses “users” to execute its commands. 
Language, which we always knew was “saturated with ideology,”xiii is more precisely at this 
moment “permeated by money.”xiv The language of the news, entertainment, sports, weather, 
statistics, culture: here is the muted call of “the conditions.” Here is “the material.” 
In this light, we might appreciate the prescience of Mayakovsky‟s remark that there are 
certain problems in society for which solutions can only be found in poetic terms.xv As a mode of 
language that is not confined to the trafficking of easily-consumable images and ideas, nor to its 
worn-out role as a conduit for the elaboration of a priestly or panoptic subjectivity (poem-as-
voiceover), poetry can respond to the problems of its historical circumstance by forming a 
provisional “poetic front” – or perhaps a blocxvi  – charged not with the fatigued political work of 
“consciousness raising” or “altering perception” (as one wry commentator has put it, “the very 
fact that we have heard of Roger Daltry proves we cannot develop revolutionary 
consciousness”xvii),  nor with the “appropriation” of a crumbling discursive machinery, but with 
weakening the command of the capitalist information field through the re-presentation of the 
empty volume of its own social facts. A writing that acknowledges its deeply material 
entanglement with exchange by replicating that particular transaction which every capitalist 
seeks to avoid: the return of used, damaged, or stolen, goods for a full refund – or, in this case – 
a full life.xviii A dis-utopian un-writingxix  – one that avoids the old traps of “moral commitment, 
beautiful soul, ideological militancy, etc.”, in favour of “a new realism…the testimony of a 
desperate epoch, constructive punk realism, expressive violence shaking the techniques of 
mystification of communication…[a] hope incarnated by that which we know can no longer 
sustain it.”xx 
Such a task is not “political,” at least not in the conventional sense.  Poets are not 
legislators. Writing does not have to concern itself with the distribution of epiphanies and 
sensibilities, nor with the prepping of a fresh citizenry in time for the next Federal election. It 
does not need to solve the problems that capital needs solved. In short, it does not have to help 
anyone “come to terms” with the world, which is always the first step in legitimizing it. Instead, 
poetry‟s role remains primarily affective: to joyfully render the present even more intolerable 
than it already is, while gesturing toward new forms of affinity, agency, and association. To 
provide accounts without tallies. Events without examples. Means without ends, by whatever 
means necessary. 
 
Hic Rhodus, hic salta! 
 
 
~ 
 
 
                                            
Notes 
 
 
i
 Originally composed as a letter to Letters: An Anti-political Communist Journal in March 2009. 
ii Available at <marxists.org>. 
iii The discussion of this passage in the Encyclopedia draws on an explication at the Isaiah Berlin 
Virtual Library: <http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_by_ib.html>.  
iv “Look before you leap.” 
v “Against Domestication.” This World We Must Leave, and Other Essays. Brooklyn, NY: 
Autonomedia, 1995. 
vi Strife and Peace. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2008. 
vii History and Class Consciousness: A Study in Marxist Dialectics. Boston, MA: MIT, 1972. 
viii As Jeff Derksen notes, in its appropriation and transmogrification of social and aesthetic 
critique, neoliberalism responds to its detractors with its own demands “for the liberation of 
capital itself rather than those whose very labour produce capital in surplus.” Annihilated Time: 
Poetry and Other Politics (Talon, 2010). 
ix Camatte, “The Wandering of Humanity.” This World We Must Leave, and Other Essays. 
Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995. 
x Unless, as Negri suggests, the slogan “implies an exodus that leads to ourselves.” See “Art and 
                                                                                                                                            
Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes.” SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 
2007. 
xi Camatte, ibid. 
xii Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Fredy Perlman. Detroit, Black and Red, 1983.  
xiii Bakhtin, MM. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. C Emerson and M Holquist. Texas: UP, 1981. 
xiv Deleuze, Gilles . “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations. New York: Columbia University 
Press, 1995. 
xv How are Verses Made? Trans. GM Hyde. London: Cape, 1970. See also Louis Cabri “After 
1923: „The Social Command‟” (XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics 14). 
xvi While often used synonymously with “front” – a military term designating both a terrain of 
opposition and a group identity built around a common struggle (usually that of organized 
labour) – a “bloc” has come to refer more to a set of tactics (masked anonymity, barricades, 
graffiti, occupations, and property destruction) embraced by the German autonomen of the 
1980‟s, and later associated with anarchist interventions at large anti-globalization protests 
(“black bloc”). Both terms, however, are tied historically to “insurgent social movements” 
(Denning) and to forms of international solidarity. See Denning, The Cultural Front (1998) and 
Massot & Van Deusen, The Black Bloc Papers (2010), the latter of which is available on-line: 
<http://www.infoshop.org/page/BlackBlocPapers>. 
xvii Monsieur Dupont. Nihilist Communism: Cruelty or the Inclusion of the Distributive Sphere 
<http://salondeverluisant.org/texts/nihilistcommunism.html>. 
xviii For an account of the efficacy of retail fraud from the perspective of capital, see “Many 
Unhappy Returns for Retailers,” BusinessWeek August, 2005. For an account from an anarchist‟s 
perspective, see Evasion. Atlanta, GA: Crimethinc, 2002. 
xix “[D]is-ustopia: the capacity to remain within, to hollow out language from inside and make the 
material desire for transformation emerge.” Negri, ibid. 
xx Negri, qtd. in Stevphen Shukaitis, Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the 
Revolutions of Everyday Life. London & NY: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2009. 
 
 
 
 
 
Roger Farr is the author of SURPLUS. MEANS and IKMQ are forthcoming. Recent critical 
writing on autonomous social movements and the avant-garde appears in Anarchist Studies, 
Dandelion, The Postanarchism Reader, and Social Anarchism. A critical introduction to Alice 
Becker-Ho‟s The Essence of Jargon, on the language of the dangerous classes, is forthcoming 
from Autonomedia. He teaches in the Creative Writing and Culture and Technology Programs 
and edits CUE Books at Capilano University in Vancouver. 
 


Postscript: Poetry and Anti-Politics

Halpern, Rob

from  U S U F R U C T   
 
Rob Halpern 
 
 
 
 
 
• 
 
 
No poems accumulate 
 
What use fusts in us un 
 
- used wealth a hole a 
 
 
Field the so-called free  
 
- farmer‟s plasm buys the 
 
Body back or sells the ba 
 
 
- by for a share what large 
 
Seigniorial domains and 
 
All you want is waste  
 
 
- ed arable earth my fat  
 
Makes up the difference 
 
In cash so ashamed i have  
 
 
   —  used the usufruct for shitting. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
• 
 
 
Hurled on the market  
 
A fosse commune what 
 
Movements hulk away  
 
 
My bowels‟ landed weal 
 
- th a whole decay of 
 
People upon whom  
 
 
Care encroaches ten 
 
- ants singing shit & all  
 
That grows ploughs  
 
 
Depopulates erects 
 
These beautiful lines 
 
Enclosures to enjoy 
 
 
  — a thing is to use it illicitly.  
 
 
 
 
 
• 
 
 
What a common grave or 
 
Blank for this i have so 
 
Been fucked into pasture 
 
 
Pleasures the sovereign  
 
- ‟s length a rent-roll my  
 
Lordship my bondsman  
 
 
For whom i‟d give it all  
 
 
 — his hole can’t justify my longing. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
• 
 
 
Pauper ubique jacet ex 
 
- clama la reina Isabel  
 
Después de recorrer  
 
 
Inglaterra upon seeing  
 
Things limping en masse  
 
To the capital cast off mist 
 
 
- resses of my surplus 
 
Value clings in barely  
 
Living limbs bowels vow 
 
 
Be buried near my hinter 
 
Lands glittering zombies  
 
Appear from the treasury 
 
 
- ‟s crapulous surfaces  
 
Stones now mourn  
 
 
  — this common resource. 
 
• 
 
 
Now to possess what po 
 
- ssesses us a fusting 
 
Possession of every use 
 
 
Glittering in shmaltz be 
 
- coming schmerz feeding 
 
What hungers won‟t 
 
 
Die for forcible means 
 
Employed from sheep 
 
- walks to cities tracing files 
 
 
Crossing pirouettes tra 
 
- verse enclosures forcing 
 
A zero degree an endless 
 
 
Consumption devours 
 
Things already so devou 
 
- red mulched in a pretty 
 
 
Sweet parody of a soldier 
 
- „s mimetic energy  
 
   
  — whoa so inexhaustible. 
 
 
• 
 
 
This identity has no organs it 
 
Can die without any body 
 
Dying an eggshell a skin my 
 
 
Slave morality being landed  
 
Gentry laws of settlement in 
 
- demnify these instated limbs  
 
 
No organs know what to use 
 
 
  — a thing is not to use it. 
 
 
• 
 
 
Say direct seizure haute 
 
Finance arouses the dead 
 
Like my need for credit  
 
 
Contracts a name a multi 
 
- tude of situations a crisis 
 
Seeming communal im 
 
 
- posthume munis in latin  
 
Means gift „immunity‟ be 
 
- ing the gift‟s refusal so  
 
 
We‟ve refused & organized  
 
Our refusal to go down 
 
Amping up the logic what 
 
 
A horror i‟ve become  
 
The nation‟s good taste 
 
For bodies so shorn of 
 
 
Names historically ex 
 
- posed to force no tree  
 
I being every one of them 
 
 
  — things sheep are driven from. 
 
• 
 
 
Feel my thing slipping in 
 
- to unspeakable pleas  
 
- ure this shit equals com 
 
 
- munal leveling practice  
 
Breeding distinction the 
 
Way yr credit hole honors 
 
 
Dishonorable stink holes 
 
Sustaining accumulation  
 
So dispossessing dis 
 
 
- emboweling debou 
 
- ching already drained so 
 
- ldiers can fuck me can‟t 
 
 
Relieve my bowels 
 
Whose body‟s no bound 
 
- aries die of all we are  
 
 
Dying from doing this 
 
Being common waste 
  
 
  — wild beasts the birds.  
 
Rob Halpern is the author of several books of poetry, including Rumored Place (Krupskaya), 
Imaginary Politics (Tap Root Editions), Disaster Suites (Palm Press), and Snow Sensitive Skin 
(co-authored with Taylor Brady). "Usufruct" is part of an ongoing collaboration with Thom 
Donovan. Currently, he‟s co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer together with 
Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the second of which, 
“Commitment or the Crisis of Language,” appears in a recent Review of Contemporary 
Fiction. An active participant in the Nonsite Collective, Rob lives in San Francisco. 


Usufruct

Three Reviews: Tyrone Williams, Lawrence Giffin, and Judith 
Goldman 
Thom Donovan 
 
Call Backs: On Tyrone Williams  
Tyrone Williams‟ poetry, in a tradition of poet-scholars, requires research to understand it 
to its fullest extent, and yet does not require research to enjoy it, and to benefit from its 
meaningful critiques. These critiques are obviously of race, and the legacies of African 
Diaspora; yet, in more complicated fashion, are also of the ways race lines up with 
gender, sexuality, nationalism, and class implicating language in struggles for power. 
Having grown-up on identity politics in the 80s and 90s, I appreciate so much the way 
that Williams‟ work refuses to subsume politics under the name of „identity,‟ and poetry 
under the qualifier „experimental.‟ While Williams‟ critique of identity is practical in 
C.C. (Krupskaya, 2002), and extremely playful (take the poem which opens C.C., 
“Calling Cards,” featuring found language from Google searches of Bob Hope), 
something which grounds it is an extremely productive engagement with Deconstruction, 
and Deconstruction‟s pre-history in Emmanuel Levinas‟ ethical philosophy.  
 
For the past couple months I have been testing the idea of the “killer app.”—an idea 
gleaned from Silicon Valley. In computer cultures, a killer app. (short for killer 
application) is “any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the 
core value of some larger technology” (Wikipedia, “killer application,” 1/26/2009). 
While Derrida‟s notion of the “trace” is endemic to Levinas‟ Jewishness, and the Jewish 
experience of memorializing the Shoah through exegesis and testimony, trace may find 
its larger killer app. through any number of struggles to discover conditions of possibility 
through mourning and memorialization.  
 
Trace is that which is outside time—chronological time, time as it is tracked by official 
historical record—and yet immanent to it as disjointing event. So in Derrida‟s book, 
Specters of Marx, Derrida relates trace through Hamlet‟s declaration: time is out of joint. 
What Williams tracks through his own poetics—a poetics that confuses lyricism and 
illegibility, signifying with academic convention—are the traces embedded in his own 
autobiography: the writing of his life, which is something different than the inscription 
and codification of presumed identity.  
 
To be for tracing vs. identifying (or playing-out an identity politics when the outcome is 
known in advance) is to constantly tease out the place in our social fabric where the citing 
of identity gives way to a larger critique of interpellation (the hailing of the subject as the 
ultimate „call back‟). Likewise, by citing the trace—as Williams literally does through the 
poems of his second book, On Spec (Omnidawn, 2008) in which he juxtaposes a reading 
of Derrida‟s The Gift of Death with short essays on Richard Pryor, Jimmy Webb, and 
Ralph Ellison—Williams situates trace as a condition of possibility for poetry qua 
cultural criticism and discrepant historiography (history that “tells it slant”).  
 
Why am I so moved by this poem that juxtaposes a fairly straightforward, yet concise, 
gloss of Derrida‟s chapters in The Gift of Death with short essayistic fragments on 
African-American cultural-political discourse? Perhaps it is because in being placed 
beside one another these texts should have a dialogue; that, reading the secondary 
literature besides Williams‟ original text, I cannot help thinking Williams is performing 
the operations to which Derrida‟s vigorous theoretical apparatus refers more effectively 
than Derrida himself. The deconstruction of Blackness as presence, logos, plenitude, 
essence; the interruption of Heideggarian metaphysics by Black Particularism. 
 
Williams‟ work also moves me to wonder whether community can be formed out of 
despair, and whether despair, “sublime despair,” shall finally overcome. I wonder this 
after Williams‟ poem “I am Not Proud to be Black,” a poem I feel the importance of that 
much more since the election and inauguration of Obama. “Not called and not called 
back” goes the first line of the poem‟s tenth section: a play, obviously, on not being 
called back by a potential employer, but also, as the epigraph of C.C. goes (Emily 
Dickinson's final letter/epitaph), to the dead, and from the ways the living are 
interpellated inversely through social death—the exclusions and s(l)ightings which define 
one‟s life in the margins. 
 
Can community be born out of shame, ressentiment, melancholy? Can abjection be 
productive, even creative, for struggle? Why shouldn‟t we embrace despair, as that which 
binds communities and singularities; or trauma, which hurtles us back to past 
possibilities, future anteriors and futures perfect? Constellating Williams‟ work with the 
work of Taylor Brady, Rob Halpern, Judith Goldman, kari edwards, Jocelyn Saidenberg, 
and many others, I wonder the fate of „bad feelings‟ as they also found the socius, and the 
extent to which Obama‟s election—bolstered by the slogan “Hope”—does not offer yet 
another false promise for the fate of all identities, and the political pursuit of 
identification‟s eclipse.  
 
What the slogan “Hope” smoothes over, and what the poets I mention here will not stand 
for through their work, is the idea that any social fabric should cease to produce 
antinomy, antagonism, and struggle (i.e., that it should successfully assimilate and 
synthesize difference, or foreclose antinomy as that which motivates and produces the 
social). So the poet descends into negativity—they become “negatively culpable” to 
borrow Stephen Cope‟s witty play on Keats‟ terminology—and what is left over is the 
subject itself—the subject as remnant, as affirming lack.  
 
Williams‟ work, like Halpern‟s or Saidenberg‟s or Goldman‟s or edwards‟ or Brady‟s, 
relates a tenuous community. A community founded less on the recognition that we are 
all „one,‟ or that we „hope‟ collectively, or that we resolve the lacuna of our identifying 
features any time soon, so much as how to produce social action by activating our 
lacks—the very incommensurability of „we,‟ „our,‟ „us.‟ To truly be „called back‟ is this: 
to be interpellated by our shared condition which is language and which is what is lost 
every time we dare to speak or write ourselves into existence. William‟s poetry bears out 
the consequences of the interpellated (therefore implicated) subject through perfectly 
pitched and modulated lyrical address.  
 
Sovereignty and US: Lawrence Giffin’s Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane 
 
Reading Lawrence Giffin‟s Ugly Duckling Presse chapbook, Get the Fuck Back Into That 
Burning Plane, I recall my excitement at first reading Charles Bernstein and Bob 
Perelman, two poets who I now recognize as injecting John Ashbery‟s poetics with a 
politics of the sign. Like Ashbery, Bernstein, and Perelman before him, Giffin offers his 
reader a lyrical navigation of a semiotic matrix, tearing away at our daily mediation 
metonymically, syllogistically and through a dynamic rhetorical delivery. While the book 
is post-apocalyptic, it also maintains that we are still in the grip of Event, and therefore 
the agents of compossible futures. The time-sense of this often reads like a kind of 
dystopian science fiction where the grammar posits a collective subject‟s conditions of 
possibility in alienation: 
 
The memory of owning nice things  
is practiced in the emotional life. 
It distorts the latter in the former 
and puts a face to his profile page,  
not from a lack of understanding 
but of a living that we are now. 
 
All that remains is for the act 
to have been accomplished, 
whose counter will have been 
the duration from lecture to recitation. 
 
It doesn‟t stop being written 
that it stops not being written. 
 
For the 245 whites of Shanksville, PA, 
bombed from eight weeks in the future… 
 
The plane that the title of Giffin's book refers to is that of United Flight 93, the third of 
the three planes hijacked on September 11th, 2001 that went down in Pennsylvania after 
the passengers were able to overtake the hijackers and redirect the flight away from its 
intended target. The voice that intones “get the fuck back into that burning plane” is a 
voice of governmentability, if not sovereignty itself (“A finger prodding you through an 
array / of channels and devices”). Though it also pleads “please, madam, please” it is 
clearly telling, not asking (the qualifier “fucking” only emphasizes imperative). Such is 
our recent national discourse, a discourse as commanding through its ambience as the 
emergency procedures of in-flight crews and other public safety announcements we tend 
to pay only distracted attention to.  
 
I am particularly fond of the ways that Giffin grounds his critique through the bathetic 
and sophistic. Consistently, throughout the chapbook, he proves himself to be as much a 
whip-smart lyricist, as a rigorous dialectician “failing in [his] hegelia”:  
 
When you sang, “Justice 
will be served / And the battle 
will rage / This big dog will fight / 
When you rattle his cage / And 
you‟ll be sorry you messed with  
The U.S. of A.”  
did you really mean to imply  
that America is a cage? 
And when you sang 
“A natural beauty should be /  
Preserved like a monument / 
To nature,” were you seriously  
suggesting that something beautiful 
and naturally occurring  
should be killed 
in order to be preserved 
as a testament to the nature 
that it no longer is? 
 
How do we interrogate the most ordinary terms of empire without allowing our 
performance to become mired in negative critique or parody (the trap of the mimetic)? 
How does the poem become an active inquiry about the ways we read our constant 
mediation and interpellation? I am appreciative of the ways Giffin has used the poem as a 
vehicle for reading our cultural moment, and how his hermeneutics is constantly injected 
with a necessary turbulence. I believe semioticians attribute this turbulence to the 
“arbitrariness of the signifier” as opposed to the vicissitudes of who is in power (… “the 
touché, / the Nacht und Traume, wedlock and / warlock. / Everything‟s flamboyant.”). As 
history becomes a jumble of facts few have the time to get straight let alone narrate 
adequately— “Either way, it has been revised, / the book from which you quoted, / 
rewritten word for word”—Giffin manages to find considerable purchase in an 
increasingly mutable economy of signs. 
  
Judith Goldman’s The Dispossessions: a Via Negativa  
Last spring I received an email in my inbox asking for recipients to draw pornographic 
drawings for the cover of a forthcoming poetry book: 
 
To the nitty gritty: We are looking for super dirty (even middle-school mentality) line-
drawing porn, especially featuring penises and vaginas. Something small, something 
you'd draw on a desk in a coupla minutes. You may want to consult the attached text (of 
the chapbook) for “inspiration.”  
 
The images will appear on the backboard of the book, which will be covered by a dust 
cover using die-cut peep holes.  
 
The book of poems by Judith Goldman, The Dispossessions (Atticus/Finch, 2009), takes 
as its subject the „junk‟ (or, if one prefers, dispossessed) language of the internet. 
Throughout the book, Goldman sculpts language found from internet sources (chatrooms, 
websites, et al) and whittles them down, forming edgy exercises in the vulgate. What is 
remarkable in reading the book is how ickiness can switch to gorgeousness in a split 
second, and the extent to which vulgarity is spiritualized—turned into a spiritual exercise, 
albeit a negative one. What takes shape is a via negativa (paths paved by hell) of the 
virtual age—of the many ways we are mediated, and fantasize one another through this 
mediation. The poetry makes one feel close and then distant again. It flickers with 
impossible proximities. There is a mood about the poems peculiar to our age. The 
language is immediate, and yet prophylactic; hands-on (Goldman‟s method is collagist), 
and yet vaporous. It reminds us that in all relationship is the threat of violence, violation, 
humiliation, harm. 
 
Invites rather, uh, Awkward questions 
Clutching at the first thingLickety uh Do we have no other words to use? 
Seeds wreaking violence 
A negative dialogue between seeds 
Words do not harm each other 
Looking for words [that] don‟t harm each other 
Grammar as window, 
Words as voyeurs 
A word [that] does not give 
Onto anything else 
Voyeurism of one word giving onto another 
No accumulation? 
This horror will not bear my words 
The words are mute 
 
And  
Wait, is it 
Loud in here because 
 
because This silence is very loud 
 
—from The Dispossessions 
 
The internet is both a carnival and a void into which we speak. It is a night of the world—
nothing has been created yet and everything would seem possible. Goldman's language 
evokes sacred discourse through the backdoor—the back entrance and „poop chute.‟ 
Words are muted because there is nothing to hear here. “This silence is very loud.” A 
profound negativity is of the hour. It is a negativity of words accumulating but not saying 
anything; of a world of appearance in which images speak mutely. The aughts are a 
Babylon of nonsense (degraded sensuality). Recent poetry makes present an imagination 
increasingly dependent on unreality. The unreality, say, of the physical distance 
separating those who wage war and those who are victimized by it; or, say, of those who 
slave for consumer values and those who consume recklessly without a thought for 
others/the Other. There is a feeling of dread throughout Goldman‟s book—that things 
cannot end well. Though the language is also beautiful, and titillating, and playful. There 
is likewise a sense in the book that we can all see each other constantly, that as Paul Chan 
says, we suffer from a “tyranny of connectedness,” and that this connectedness only 
complicates our alienation. Constant connectedness does not mean contact. Nor does 
seeing (physical perception) equal disclosure (revelation, understanding, faith). The book 
cites an orgy committed at the expense of the entire world, and worlds yet to come. An 
orgy of perceptions, an orgy of consumptions, the orgy of total warfare perpetrated by the 
United States and its allies within and without its national boundaries.  
 
 
 
Thom Donovan lives in New York City where he edits Wild Horses of Fire weblog 
(whof.blogspot.com) and coedits ON Contemporary Practice. He is a participant in the 
Nonsite Collective and a curator for the SEGUE reading series. His criticism and poetry 
have been published widely in BOMBlog, PAJ: performance + art, Modern Painters, and 
at the Poetry Foundation where he currently blogs. 
 


Three Reviews: Tyrone Williams, Lawrence Giffin, and Judith Goldman

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
From MEANS:  
 
“Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!” 
 
 
Roger Farr 
 
 
1. 
 
If a large telecommunications 
Company fires several employees 
After a larger company takes control 
And the managers of private 
Unregulated pools of capital 
Back a certain candidate in 
The next Federal Election, then 
Canadians who are addicted to 
Technology will feel they need new 
Phones. If a national sports franchise 
Loses more games than it wins 
Despite the media’s repetition 
Of its effective marketing strategy 
While a popular resort tries to shed 
Its out-dated image, then a television 
Show about men in a small town 
Who become full-time care-givers 
After their wives leave for a week 
Will be renewed. If a number of 
Officers are killed near the border 
And hunting whales is a tradition 
That links generations, then the 
State’s attempt to make a large 
Military purchase will be thwarted 
By concerns about espionage. 
If another foot washes ashore 
On the West Coast of North America 
While immigrant labourers seek 
Refuge in places where the law 
Is harder to enforce, then the gay 
Community in Montreal will object 
To the increasing privatization 
Of public space. If a national police 
Force infiltrates the women’s 
Movement and collects intelligence 
About a popular entertainer 
While a union is allowed to appeal 
The closure of a large retail store 
Then a new gene discovery will help 
Researchers detect tumors earlier. 
If morale improves when employees 
At an auto-dealer win the lottery 
And a man is arrested for an internet 
Scam in which people pay thousands 
Of dollars for vintage automobiles 
That never existed, then someone 
Will accidentally spend $999.99 on 
A digital phone application 
That does nothing but display 
A glowing red ruby. If anti-government 
Demonstrators seeking to disrupt high- 
Level government meetings fan out 
Across a large Asian city, and the 
Prime Minister doesn’t include 
A stimulus package for the economy 
Then Santa won’t visit any shops 
On Main Street this year. If a new 
Study shows that low-income 
Individuals are more likely to be 
Hospitalized  for mental illness 
While an aging boy-band tries to 
Cash in on its former fame by 
Releasing a new single, then new 
Research will reveal troubling 
Changes in the Arctic. If police 
In Florida investigate a live 
Streaming video of a teen suicide 
While a student studying the History 
Cf Civilizations in France is charged 
With leading a terrorist organization 
Then a local council will come 
One step closer to passing 
A childcare policy that aims to 
Alleviate conflict between residents and 
Providers. If the Navy tests a remote 
Controlled submarine near a commuter 
Ferry, while a member of the Christian 
Life Assembly mistakes a package 
Containing computer components for 
A bomb, then property taxes will be 
Used to pay for an emergency 
Management plan.  If a 24 unit, 4 story 
24,000 sq. foot condominium project 
Is given the highest level of environmental 
Certification it can receive, and 
The popularity of turtlenecks this Fall 
Is tied to the global economic crisis 
Then a scientist will help to rescue  
The commercial tree industry when he 
Discovers that the Western Conifer Seed 
Bug uses infra-red sensors to help it 
Locate its food. If the Minister of 
Finance declares that the country’s 
Books will remain balanced despite 
The downturn in the economy, and 
A new publisher focusing on avant- 
Garde writing taps into an over- 
Flowing pool of manuscripts, then 
American car manufactures will 
Learn that flooding the market 
With volume is not enough. 
If a politician criticizes China's 
Human rights record on the eve  
Of the Olympic ceremonies, while 
A popular entertainer says she 
Had no idea she was under 
Surveillance in the 1970’s, then 
An international sex symbol will get 
Her first taste of a faux-chicken 
Sandwich after years of campaigning 
Against the fried-chicken chain 
That sells it. If the FBI links letters 
Laced with anthrax to an army 
Bio-weapons scientist, while research 
Conducted in Sweden indicates 
Senior citizens are having a significant 
Amount of sex, then the email of 
A 29 year-old computer designer 
Will reveal his hatred for the West – 
Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!
2. 
 
If an Army provost marshal 
Clashes with a detective 
Over a murder at a military 
Base, while President John F. 
Kennedy and his staff react 
To news of a Soviet missile 
Buildup in Cuba, then a man 
Searching for his long-missing 
Father will return to the deserts 
Of Abu Dahbi.  If a common 
Swordsmith freelances for King 
Arthur to prove himself worthy 
Of the earl’s daughter, while 
A man dressed in black recruits 
Six mercenaries to lead Mexican 
Villagers against an outlaw, then 
A reporter covering a Christmas 
Party in Savannah, Georgia 
Will stay for the host’s murder 
Trial.  If a medieval dragon- 
Slayer teams up with his 
Intelligent prey to rid the land 
Of a tyrant who betrayed them 
While the pilgrims arrive after 
A rough ride on the Mayflower 
Then February 2
nd
 will keep 
Repeating itself for a cynical TV 
Weatherman sent to cover the 
Groundhog in Punxsutawney 
Pennsylvania.  If plane crash 
Survivors race against time 
To rebuild their damaged air- 
Craft after being forced down 
In the desert, while a sniper 
Must stop a terrorist who 
Plans to sell nuclear materials 
Then King Arthur will rule 
With his magic sword amid 
Merlin, Morgana, Lancelot 
And the knights.  If a new 
England missionary and his 
Bride bring Christianity to 
Hawaii in the 1820s, while 
A spunky Wall Street secretary 
Takes her boss’ place with 
A merger specialist, then 
A small-town reporter covering 
The murder trial of a Japanese- 
American will learn that the 
Man’s wife was his childhood 
Sweetheart. If a blind teenager 
Becomes a wrestler, while a 
Sniper hired to kill a suspected 
Terrorist learns his target is 
An old friend, then a teenage 
Figure skater will join the girl’s 
Hockey team in order to obtain 
A scholarship at the school of 
A renowned coach. If aspiring 
Superheroes band together to 
Defeat a villain, while a snake 
Hunter leads a documentary 
Crew into battle with a huge 
Boa constrictor, then an Irish 
Freedom fighter will engineer 
The assassination of British 
Officials following the failed 
Easter Rising of 1916. If a 
Lieutenant colonel and 400 
US troops battle 2,000 
North Vietnamese in 1965 
While a woman falls in love 
With a ranch owner after 
Fleeing from her husband 
And a ring of corrupt 
Lawmen, then a yacht-man’s 
Wife will fall overboard and 
Forget who she is, eventually 
Becoming an Oregon 
Carpenter’s wife. If a former 
San Francisco detective 
Who dreads heights falls 
For a woman he is hired to 
Protect, while a former Marine 
And a Marine on death row 
Work together to assassinate 
An Eastern European rogue 
General, then a commodities 
Trader will have an affair 
With a beautiful co-worker 
Then end the relationship 
In order to save his marriage. 
If an American street racer 
In Japan learns an exciting 
But dangerous new style 
And goes head-to-head with 
With a local champion who 
Has ties to the Yakuza, while 
A female journalist must 
Prevent an evil spirit from 
Taking her son’s soul, then 
A devilish boy will play 
Pranks on the crotchety old 
Fellow who lives next door. 
If a lone Marine sharp-shooter 
Goes on a Panama mission 
With a Washington bureaucrat 
Accustomed to paper targets 
While a young woman in  
Marseille re-meets Marius 
The father of her child 
While her aged father is 
Dying, then quasi-federal 
Agents will hunt a young girl 
Who can start fires by staring – 
Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta! 
 
 
 
Roger Farr is the author of SURPLUS. MEANS and IKMQ are forthcoming. Recent critical 
writing on autonomous social movements and the avant-garde appears in Anarchist Studies, 
Dandelion, The Postanarchism Reader, and Social Anarchism. A critical introduction to Alice 
Becker-Ho’s The Essence of Jargon, on the language of the dangerous classes, is forthcoming 
from Autonomedia. He teaches in the Creative Writing and Culture and Technology Programs 
and edits CUE Books at Capilano University in Vancouver. 
 
 


Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!

The Barricades Project, the Life Long Poem, and the Politics of For

Collis, Stephen

The Barricades Project, the Life Long Poem, and the Politics of Form

Potential Form and Hank Lazer’s Portions 
Stephen Collis 
 
It would seem that Hank Lazer has been busy for some time now trying to exhaust form. Or 
more accurately, forms.  As he himself notes, “For the past twenty or so years, I have been 
(serially) inventing a form and living with that form either for a specified number of poems...or 
for a specified duration of time....[I]nhabiting a form to discover what might be learned through 
and from it” (103). Each form Lazer works with, then—for the duration of the writing of a 
book—is a potentiality—thus rather than exhausting his forms (he spectacularly, and I think 
happily, fails to do this), Lazer proves their inexhaustibility.  
The form in Portions, while discovered more or less by chance in the writing of Lazer‟s previous 
book, The New Spirit, is a rigorously maintained poem of 18 three-word lines (always divided 
into six three-line stanzas). At 54 words a poem, Lazer found the rationale for the form in the 
Torah, where readings on the Sabbath are divided into 54 “portions” in the course of a year.  
Each portion or parashah is named after its first or characteristic word (a practice Lazer also 
follows in his Portions). 
When I mentioned potentiality above I had in mind Giorgio Agamben‟s writings on potentiality. 
Potentiality, Agamben argues, only makes sense if it also contains its opposite—impotentiality, 
powerlessness, the potential to not be or not occur. Something is potential only when it is not 
actualized, when there remains the chance that it will not come to pass. Here is Agamben: 
To be potential means: to be one‟s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. 
Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and 
only in this way do they become potential. The can be because they are in relation to their 
own non-being. (182) 
Lazer seems to comment on such (im)potentiality when he writes “just now   being / here   it of / 
course slips away” (37), or again: “the twin engines // being & nothingness / motor across the / 
still lake” (97). But more than this mere thematizing of the co-implication of doing/undoing, 
what I want to argue is that Lazer works, formally, with (im)potentiality, with the whole project 
working simultaneously towards exhaustion while proving that the simple form it works is in fact 
inexhaustible.  
Returning to Agamben, we find that the philosopher is less interested in abstract, unrealized 
potentiality than in its continued existence in things that have in some way been actualized: 
[I]f a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly 
potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes 
fully into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it 
preserves itself as such in actuality. (183) 
How does something remain potential in the actual? I have in mind here works of art—actualized 
cultural object (books of poems, for instance). What “preserves” potentiality (which includes the 
potential to not-be) in their actualized forms? One answer, when considering the linguistic 
objects, resides in the very slipperiness of the sign, the fact that words are unstable, multiple, 
refractory, shifty. Lazer comments on just this fact when he “cuts” right to the heart of the 
contradictoriness of signification: 
When to cleave                                                                                                                                      
means to cling                                                                                                                                                
to or cut                                                                                                                                                   
Through (17) 
That which means both at once “to cling to” and “to cut through” is a potentiality—because it 
includes its impotentiality (its erasure in its opposite). Poetry, we might note, exploits the 
(im)potentiality of language—the possibility for meaning to slide in multiple and often 
contradictory directions—more or less as its raison d’etre. Lazer is, in this sense, a very canny 
and conscious manipulator of some of poetry‟s “core values.” More though, he works this 
(im)potentiality not just at the level of the individual sign, but also at the level of the line and 
stanza. 
In the Hebrew Bible, Lazer notes, no periods or commas or punctuation of any kind “interrupts 
the flow of words” (Ouaknin qtd. in Portions 105). This leads him to explore “the multiple 
possibilities of line breaks—the way the line break offers both a discontinuity and a space 
through which  one reads to connect” (103). In the following poem I have used slash marks to 
note where I think the syntax hinges, simultaneously marking a break and connection: 
Discipline amounts to                                                                                                                           
staying here / access                                                                                                                                 
strictly in daily                                                                                                                                   
circumstances / same options                                                                                                                        
as electron or                                                                                                                                     
subparticle / acrobatics / when                                                                                                                
syllable / life / music                                                                                                                                           
of light &                                                                                                                                                             
wind / in sobered                                                                                                                                           
palms / shadowed diamond                                                                                                                          
head back lit                                                                                                                                                   
gives way to                                                                                                                                                
complete light / coffee /                                                                                                                         
meditation / reading / writing /                                                                                                                              
altar at dawn /                                                                                                                                                
familiar birth canal /                                                                                                                                      
how quickly birth                                                                                                                                                 
& morning disappear (25)  
Note that (as I read the poem) the ligatures in the first four stanzas all occur mid-line, propelling 
the work onward, causing us to slip quickly across the enjambed line breaks. In the final two 
stanzas, however, the poem slows, and the pauses begin to occur at the ends of lines, bringing us 
up sharp. One thing to note is that form and content are working in lock-step in these meditative 
poems of awareness (this poem is in many ways characteristic of much of the work in Portions). 
I would also suggest that the poem plays, syntactically, with the (im)potentialities of meaning, 
stretching them across line breaks or bringing them up short (“diamond [?].../ head”—ah, we are 
in Hawaii!).  
The meditative poetry in Portions is an example of what Lazer has called “Thinking/singing”: 
“that „meaning‟ and „musicality‟ are inseparable, coincidental, and simultaneous”—“The poem 
is the thinking, is an embodiment, a highly specific incarnation and manifestation of an interval 
of consciousness” (Lyric & Spirit 188). 
The writing hand                                                                                                                                          
will not tell                                                                                                                                                       
at all until                                                                                                                                                          
eyes move slowly                                                                                                                                              
along the chosen                                                                                                                                             
word a rising                                                                                                                                             
symphony of the                                                                                                                                                                 
busy eyes turning                                                                                                                                                  
to this world (26)  
Here physical awareness of the body (“hand”), perception (“eyes”), and cognition (“word”) all 
emerge simultaneously in “a rising / symphony.” The shortness, and insistence, of the lines and 
line breaks stretch this thought out, drawing taught against the poem‟s form, accentuating its 
sound structure (the will tell all until of the first stanza, move slowly chosen word of the second, 
and the symphony busy turning world of the next).  
Portions contains more than poems of daily meditation though, and this brings us back to the 
inexhaustibility of the form the book employs so rigorously—a form in which Lazer exclusively 
wrote for over five years.  There are poems here on daily life, on Judaism, autobiographical 
reflections on the poet‟s father, poems on love and death, poems on contemporary politics (the 
very entertaining “W,” on the Bush presidency) and poems dedicated, and clearly written in 
conscious response to, poets who have shaped Lazer‟s own practice (including Robert Creeley—
those short sharp lines!—Louis Zukofsky—an inveterate word counter—and perhaps most 
importantly, Robert Duncan).  
Duncan makes a number of appearances—in the poem entitled “Robert Duncan,” obviously—
but perhaps also in the poem “Passage,” in which the refrain “i am after / passage” (19) perhaps 
suggests an homage (“after”) Duncan‟s Passages poems (a key example of a “potential” poetry).  
The refrain is an important technique in Portions, another point at which the flexibility, and 
inexhaustibility, of a simple procedure is tested. The refrains are often an aspect of the poems‟ 
meditative insistence on the present, but they can also take on the characteristics of the lament, 
become politicized, as in “Pharaoh”: 
tell old pharaoh                                                                                                                    
but the people                                                                                                                  
don‟t know they 
are in his                                                                                                                      
clutches tell old                                                                                                              
pharaoh but this 
one doesn‟t go                                                                                                                     
by that name                                                                                                                       
tell old pharaoh 
to let but                                                                                                                               
there is no                                                                                                                        
sensible place   no 
podium from which                                                                                                               
to petition him                                                                                                                      
must find a  
way to tell                                                                                                                            
old pharaoh let                                                                                                                    
our people go (47) 
We learn who this one who “doesn‟t go / by that name” is a few pages later in the poem “W,” in 
which then president Bush‟s war on Iraq becomes an almost Biblical struggle to “loot” “ancient 
tablets” (55), although it is in fact about “coveting” “pipelines” (the monetary bottom line 
lurking beneath the ritualized surface). What do we learn? That for the righteousness “the true 
bible / is always ours” (55). Such thinking allows “W” to think 
       maybe in 
a year or                                                                                                                              
two try it                                                                                                                                  
again in iran (54)                                            
I want to close with a brief meditation on constraint. The sort of constraint Lazer employs in 
Portions may have more to do with traditional forms, such as the sonnet, which provided a 
linguistically material resistance to the poet‟s thought and expressivity, than it does with many 
contemporary examples of constraint, which have evolved out of a modern push away from (as 
Olson put it) “the lyrical interference of the individual as ego.” So, from Eliot‟s “impersonality” 
to Williams‟ “machine of words” to Spicer‟s “dictation”—all the way up to Gregory Betts‟ 
“plunderverse” and Kenny Goldsmith‟s “uncreative writing,” we have an attempt to get outside 
of, and receive information from other sources than, the limited personal ego or individual 
subject. Personally (contradiction intentional), I have been thoroughly invested in such practices, 
collaging found material and blurring the lines between reading and writing, the text “I make,” 
and the text “I find,” in almost everything I‟ve written. Nevertheless, the task of completely 
eliminating the “self” and subjectivity from the process of writing (as Goldsmith seems to 
suggest he does) is, I think, fruitless, and more to the point, only capable of reflecting current 
conditions (the instrumentalization of life, complete alienation under late capitalism)—but 
entirely powerless to suggest alternatives, or even embody the struggle against such forces. I 
realize I am calling such poetics “impotent,” and that a sharp reader might sniff out possible 
“preserved” potentiality in that impotentiality. Maybe this is so, and who is to say what 
openendedness may yet lie in a re-typed New York Times. What I find disturbing is the claims 
made as to the avant-garde credentials of such practices. Now, there is no denying that what a 
Goldsmith is doing draws upon practices that have long existed in the avant-garde; the problem I 
have is the more or less complete evacuation of the political from such practices as articulated by 
many of their contemporary practitioners. Thus a Christian Bök can repeatedly claim to be an 
“avant-garde” poet, but just as consistently leave any politics out of this claim, reducing the 
definition of “avant-garde” to, it would seem, “outrageous,” or “shocking” or simply “new.” The 
irony here, I think, is that where once the avant-garde was positioned as a critique of 
consumerism and commodification, Bök appears to reposition its goal as consumption and as a 
commodity (I‟m thinking of his repeated self-celebration of Eunoia‟s remarkable “market” 
success, as, for instance, in his recent “cage match” with Carmine Starnino).  
Bök is, however, an interesting example to raise here. His constraints—in a work such as 
Eunoia, at least—are in fact closer to Lazer‟s, and traditional notions of form, than they are to 
Goldsmith‟s ambits. The constraint provides a material limit the poet (yes, as an at least partially 
autonomous agent) must work with and against. While this opens the door for the poet to 
celebrate his “mastery” of the form, it also reminds us that the material conditions we 
everywhere find ourselves in (which include language and its ideological saturation) are a 
“constraint” we must navigate, negotiate, resist, critique, etc. I suppose, if I were to make the 
comparison, the difference between Bök and Lazer is that the former details the struggle to 
negotiate his constraint outside the poem, while Lazer shows us the struggle inside the poem, 
where it remains an (im)potentiality. 
 
Works Cited 
 
Agamben, Giorgio.  “On Potentiality.”  Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy.  Ed &  
Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 
Lazer, Hank. Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996-2008. Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2008. 
- - - .  Portions.  New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 2009. 
  
 
Stephen Collis is the editor of The Poetic Front. His most recent book is On the Material 
(Talonbooks 2010). 
 


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