Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry: Innovative Identities

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W r i t i ng Plura l Worlds in Cont emp orary U. S. Poetry

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W r i t i ng Plura l Worlds in Cont emp orary U. S. Poetry Innovative Identities

Jim Keller

writing plural worlds in contemporary u.s. poetry Copyright © Jim Keller, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin‘s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61220-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keller, Jim. Writing plural worlds in contemporary U.S. poetry : innovative identities / by Jim Keller. p. cm. ISBN: 978-0-230-61220-4 (alk. paper) 1. American poetry—Minority authors—History and criticism. 2. Experimental poetry, American—History and criticism. 3. Ethnicity in literature. 4. Identity (Psychology) in literature. I. Title. PS153.M56K45 2009 811'.5409920693—dc22 2008054862 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: August 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Betsy and Jim


Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: “Of Being Numerous”

1

1 2 3 4

Plural Worlds and Aztec-Chicano Serial Poetry: An Emergent Protest Literature

23

Alfred Arteaga and Francisco X. Alarcón: Forms of Fire and Time in the Poetic Series

49

Gods at the Crossroads Between the Self and the World: Radical Polytheism in N. J. Loftis

73

Nathaniel Mackey’s Agnostic History and “The Creaking of the Wheel”

107

A Bridge Over Worlds: James Thomas Stevens’s Plural-World Particularism

135

6

“A Bridge Is Simple Movement”

163

7

Fears of a One-World Language

179

5

Notes

197

Works Cited

207

Index

219


Acknowledgments As it has passed through multiple permutations over several years, this manuscript has become hugely indebted to readers, friends, family members, colleagues, and students. And I would like to acknowledge the people who have supported, criticized, clarified, tested, and helped me to revise my ideas. Ira Livingston, Maria Damon, Roman de la Campa, Kelly Oliver, and Paul Armstrong all read earlier drafts of chapters very patiently. In addition, I am grateful to share thoughts and fruitful discussions with colleagues at the Bard College Center Institute for Writing and Thinking—Juliana Spahr, Joan Retallack, Jena Osman, Carley Moore, Matt Longabucco, and Bill Webb—to whom many warm thanks for their friendly encouragement, as well as their creative and critical insights, are due. Before the thinking that led to these chapters even became clear, it was prompted by, and evolved through, conversations with Bruce Bashford, Jolanda Cats, Eric Haralson, Hugh Silverman, Stacey Olster, Fred McGlynn, Dolores Holland, Chris Beach, Jennifer Sue Nelson, Bill Bevis, Natalie Ries, Peter Dale Scott, Alison MacLean Dawson, Matt and Stacey Herman, Bill Baerg, Meredith Gore, Mike Wegan, and David MacLean. Over e-mail and phone conversations, my former teacher Bert Dreyfus at University of California, Berkeley proved amazingly generous in the amount of time and detail that he dedicated to talking through my multiplying questions. The later stages of the manuscript benefited enormously from discussions with Elena Rivera, Celia Bland, Tonya Foster, Miranda and Delia Mellis, Dawn Lundy Martin, Stephanie Hopkins, Stephanie Dunson, Rebecca Chase, Thom Donovan, Andrew McCarron, and Jonathan Skinner. And the inspiration to stick with and to develop the book owes to the lively in-class feedback that I received from students at SUNY Stony Brook, Michigan State, and Bard. In Iowa, Dee Morris made helpful suggestions concerning several chapters that she may only dimly recognize in their current form. Thanks, too, to SUNY Stony Brook for providing a postdoctoral fellowship just as I was discovering in writing what I wanted to say. Ira Livingston and Doug Noverr put me in front of classes that allowed

x

Acknowledgments

students and I to consider what it might mean to “relinquish / Sanity to redeem Fragments,” a la Oppen; and at the MSU Library, Angela Kille and Angela Maycock both steered me toward unique resources. Also, thanks to my anonymous outside reviewer for helpful suggestions. I am grateful to these personal and professional attentions, and all errors are, of course, my own. I was lucky to have the recent opportunity to talk to the family of my now sister-in-law, Presciliana Esparolini, during the celebration of her marriage to my brother Tom in the summer of 2008. Many of her family members had been familiar with the people, the politics, and the art of late 1960s San Francisco, and I learned a striking amount from conversations with my immediate and extended family the last time that I visited my first home. Meanwhile, I am thrilled to have spent time with family abroad, with John Campbell in Michigan and Shirley Fly in North Carolina, who continue to provide substantial intellectual and emotional support. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend said that major discoveries are like “recognizing that one has been dreaming”—and I am thankful for family members who continue to support my curiosity and development even while reminding me of my earlier, “dreamier” selves. My mother and father, and Tom, Holly, their families and I always seem to teach each other something new but familiar. And of course, first, last, and throughout come my greatest thanks of all—to Kim Cohen and Logan Cohen Keller, who made the whole process seem worthwhile and who brought a smile to the prospect of coming home to it. This book would not have been possible without their exquisite kindness and patience.

Introduction

4

“O f Being Nu merou s”

The only obvious escape from paradox is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than as an absolutely unitary fact. Now the gospel of healthy mindedness. . .casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

A

t a recent panel on “Transfrontier” writing, held at the conference for the study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures in the United States (MELUS), audiences were prompted by a compelling question. Put deceptively simply, the question was, “Is it ethnic, or is it poetry?” This admittedly odd choice between identity politics, on the one hand, or aesthetics, on the other—between such seemingly incommensurate categories—nonetheless reveals something important about the study of poetry as the ages of postmodernism and multiculturalism come to a close. The question takes as its point of departure a central tension within contemporary U.S. poetics: the question concerning whether poetry should be primarily conceived as a means for the expression of preexistent identity or as a process of complicating or even reconsituting identity. Poets who take personal identity as a unified and substantive category produce lyric or narrative statements that articulate (join An earlier version of this introduction, minus the title, was presented to the panel on “Ethnicity and Poetry” sponsored by MELUS at the MLA annual conference in Philadelphia, December 2004, as “Form and Social Formation: Innovative Identities in Multiethnic Serial Poetry.” The earlier MELUS conference occurred in April 2004, with the theme of “Transfronterismo,” in San Antonio, Texas.

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry

together) their own experience in the subjective mind’s eye and they articulate (express) that experience to a wider audience. Whether the expression is confessional, formal, or political—a meditation on self, on poetic form, or on political arrangements of society—so-called expressive poetics takes for granted the lyric subject, the givenness of the object of reflection, and the reliability of language. So, for example, the Chicano Movement (1965–75) welcomed Rodolpho “Corky” Gonzales’s long poem, Yo Soy Joaquín/I Am Joaquin in 1967 as an instance of ethnic-nationalist epic that could articulate the practices and values of a dawning social movement. In fact, the poem participated in what since then has come to be seen as the ethnogenesis of the political concept of the Chicano. But during that same year, continental philosophy saw the publication of a series of texts, beginning with Derrida’s Of Grammatology that would soon make conventional (even epic-national) poetry seem dated, naïve to the fact that the category of personal identity involves an imposition of fixity and stability onto the flux of experience, indeterminacy of meaning, linguistic playfulness and a web of significations based on difference. Four years later, a new variant of experimental poetry arose with the 1971 publication of Barrett Watten and Robert Grenier’s literary journal THIS in San Francisco—just a few hours’ drive north of the San Joaquin Valley, where Cesar Chavez’s Union of Farm Workers could hear Gonzales’s poem read aloud at rallies. THIS’s emergent aesthetic, gathered under the aegis of Robert Grenier’s slogan, “I hate speech,” would prescribe some of the practices of what later came to be called the language poetry. The avant-garde associated with the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E foregrounded the materiality of language as well as the role that language plays in constituting the self. In a line of American experimental writing leading back to Gertrude Stein and influenced by a range of intellectual movements—including AngloAmerican, European, and Russian philosophies of language from Marxism and Russian formalism to deconstruction—language writing, and innovative writing more generally, put the entire notion of the stability of the self—as creator or consumer of meaning—into play. If only indirectly recalling for readers that Gertrude Stein was influenced to a good extent by the philosophy of William James—his practice of “automatic writing” in particular—postmodern poetics took the substantive notion of identity and threw it into James’s river of Heraclitean flux. In his highly influential 1890 essay, “The Stream of Thought,” James considers consciousness as complex and continuous rather than substantive and discrete, and, above all, consciousness is constantly changing. Occasionally unified, consciousness, for James,

“Of Being Numerous”

3

remains primarily transitive, alighting on—and, to a limited extent, unifying—a field of objects while itself in motion. What counts most, and what we notice least, is that a plurality of thoughts flow through the mind in always-changing interrelations, and only secondarily does the mind fix on particular ideas. Only on detached reflection does identity seem unified, complete, and singular. The nouns only surface occasionally, that is, out of a wash of connectives and verbs. Innovative, experimental poetries trace a complex lineage through the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century thought. This turn to language as the structuring agent of thought, rather than its transparent medium or conduit—a focus on the fruitful opacity of language—was occasioned by aesthetic formalism and continental philosophy as well as later Wittgenstein’s imbrication of language and “form of life.” And in turning to the linguistic turn, the poetic avant-garde is able to undermine taken-for-granted, commercial, confessional, and oftenexploitive uses of language by requiring its readers to participate in the process of making meaning out of self-consciously “difficult” poetry. Unlike traditional lyric poetry—that Doug Messerli calls “portmanteau poetry” and which Bernstein thinks of as “absorptive” language, that is, poetry that can be “unpacked” for messages or affects—the “language” poetries enter into more complicated, recursive relations with their readers. Within this project, Lyn Hejinian stresses not the representational nature of language but the need to theorize “the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express” (654; emphasis added). This struggle pits incommensurate views of language against each other, and brings readers to appreciate linguistic “performativity”—the fact that language creates, in addition to representing, states of affairs—as well as “self-reflexivity”—the tendency of language to make reference to its own artificiality, in addition to being consumed in its use. In addition to its performativity and self-reflexivity, language is always necessarily collective. The always-different nature of the self (its difference from itself and its others) and its always deferred (never complete) character require that intentionality be improvised at every moment in the context of social relationships. To critics and practitioners of innovative poetries, the vision of the self-standing individual poet who writes a poem by his own lights, in seclusion, or who reveals deep truth to readers through lyric epiphanies, is itself revealed as the self-serving fiction of the conventional (confessional) lone genius. Even where innovative poets may be said to have a “signature” style, it seems doubtful whether their ultimate identifiability is the point. By creating the kind of poetry with which readers must interact, poets

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who rely on technical “difficulty,” punning performativity, funhouse self-reflection and languagely innovation can create and complicate, rather than presuppose, social connections among people. The motivation behind the MELUS panel, therefore, was to gain a stronger sense of the possibilities open to both innovative and identity-based poetry and to examine those moments when they intersect, especially since the dialectic between writing as an experimental innovator and writing as an expressive outsider has perceptibly stalled. At the conference, a friend of mine who, like me, teaches Ethnic American literature courses shared her experiences of bringing poetry into her classrooms. She feared that she had relegated poetry to a decorative or simply instrumental role in the classroom, often using poems like accents throughout her courses. She regretted that “in these [kinds of] classes we cannot really explore poetry in any depth,”2 largely because when teaching the literatures of identity, form most often merely supplements content, rather than extending it, directing it, or generating it. Having made similar use of poetry myself in a course called “The American Racial and Ethnic Experience,” I was quick to agree. I added that the instrumentalization of poetry-as-expression seems especially common in cases where poetry is considered chiefly as the vehicle for content—to assert and consolidate the cultural identity of its personae through epiphanies and meditations. But I also noticed that while students may read poetry as epiphenomenal in a course about cultural identity, they experience little trouble studying formal experimentation (and what Charles Bernstein calls “the difficult poem”) in poetry courses. And when I teach avant-garde poetry, students seem much more at ease with thinking of identitybased expression as one among many other possible forms of writing. But in such classes as these, students tend to ignore the activist element of poetry and to speculate that poetic innovation destabilizes the notion of the speaking subject altogether. For example, reading Harryette Mullen’s series S*PeRM**K*t, which focuses on the way that ordinary consumer language encodes racist values, as occurs in the lines “Brown and Serve,” for example, students notice that Mullen’s reference to “gutters and margins” is cleverly self-reflexive, pointing to the alignment of words on the page. And the emphasis on innovative, self-reflexive performance—on language as the source of ethnic identity—vexes the entire question of what an ethnic avant-garde might mean. Beyond the stalled dialectic between identity politics and formal experimentation, though, a good number of self-identified multiethnic poets writing in longer forms (like Mullen) seem uniquely able


5

to realize both of these possibilities. And their decision to write in longer, serial forms enables a kind of self-fashioning that does not preclude communal concerns, aesthetic value, or traditional models of selfhood, while it does reimagine these concerns, values, and selves. Whereas critical theories since the 1960s have sought to destabilize comprehensive cultural narratives—to emphasize their “artifice and indeterminacy,” to quote the title of Chris Beach’s famous anthology— multiethnic poets since that time have also proposed positive alternatives to a unified account of reality in the form of partial, weakly interacting worlds. As a result, their readers can imagine both flexible identities and abiding social bonds. The increased popularity of the serial, pluralistic, and innovative multiethnic poem in the United States owes, in large part, to the special suitability of this form to the complex needs of marginalized social groups. The poetic series remains engagingly problematic insofar as its localist elements tend to resist broader social and cultural statements, while its recombinations of themes enable temporarily abiding cultural, social, or personal narratives. By using extended poetic forms like the series, which makes networks of texts out of their component poems, poets within the U.S. multiethnic avant-garde have proven uniquely able to depict plural worlds within a single lyric space and to translate fragmented experiences into multiple livable identities. Contemporary poets rely on this plurality of worlds to provide a viable way of drawing a latticework of connections across everyday notions of agency, gender, race, and nation. Their ability to interpose multiple worldviews in their longer work enables experimental serial poets to imagine empowering concepts of identity that remain both self-consciously constructed and traditionally, ethnically rooted. Among the most successful of early multiethnic experimental writers in the United States, the Chicano Movement activist Alurista and more recent Chicano avant-garde writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Alfred Arteaga, and Francisco X. Alarcón use this dynamic interplay of formal and cultural elements to suggest forms of pluralism that prove much more generous than traditional, melting-pot assimilationism, and much less fragmentary than postmodern “code-shifting.” Like Rodolfo Gonzales’s epic Joaquín, Alurista’s 1971 series, Florícanto en Aztlán, and Alfred Arteaga’s 1990 Cantos dedicate their energies to expressing abiding cultural identities, but, unlike Gonzales, these poets also reconfigure current practices and values and, to a good extent, invent additional sources of social affiliation. These poets juxtapose contradictory traditions to shake the foundations of universal global narratives and to break the singular ranking of values into more

6


modest, pluralist arrangements of social practices. Deep pluralist poetics, then, is a project aligned with decolonization. But while critical and cultural theories destabilize unified accounts of self and reality, multiethnic experimental poets also propose positive alternatives to such accounts.

Wh at’s i n a Wo r ld? Toward the beginning of the semester in my classes on experimental poetry, which I have renamed “Cultural Studies and Creative Practice,”3 I often challenge students to place a provocative quote that I provide. The class is made up of upper-division English majors who know quite a good deal about literary theory, and the quote that I provide them does not strike them as unfamiliar in its general import. The quote comes from a French writer, I note, and it runs along the following lines: we are misled by our ideas of self, and so we “end by personifying” the procession of transitory, largely impersonal ideas through our minds. Although students volunteer Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault as sources of the quote, along with Roland Barthes, suggested most often is Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl, to wit that the self-certainty of intentionality is based on a series of differences and deferrals rather than on the self-presence of intention or the positivity of the signifier.4 The surprise comes when I show the class that this “French theory” is quoted in William James’s “The Stream of Thought,” which I have taken from his 1909 writings on philosophical psychology. James’s citation of the quote indicates that, “a French writer,” speaking of the flow of ideas that challenges the substantive nature of mind, “says it somewhere, in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement” (James 172). The quote arises at the start of the twentieth century, roughly sixty years before philosophers would explicitly thematize indeterminacy and chance, and a focus on the fluidity of selves, words, and things would set the standard for intellectual critique in the humanities. James indicates that the feeling of “mine-ness” or the “own-ness” of experience comes from feelings of “familiarity” that accompany thoughts, while contemporary thinkers consider that a sense of self arises at least in part from the Western social construction of the subject.5 James’s French theorist, like the late Jacques Derrida, would bridle at the notion of a presubjectivized notion of the self. But for James and for contemporary pluralists, to admit a temporarily abiding sense of at-homeness across a number or different orderings of experience does not amount to indulging in spiritualistic hallucination or lyric sentimentalism.


7

As G. H. Bird notes, James’s statements on pluralism have led philosophers “to assimilate [James] to a tradition of twentieth century postmodern continental philosophy. Richard Rorty’s enthusiastic approval of both Jamesian pragmatism and postmodern philosophers, such as Derrida, is an example of such an assimilation” (xxi). But pluralism in the Jamesian tradition does not amount simply to destabilizing identity; rather, it fixes identity within more than one system. Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin accommodate plural values and conflicting knowledges by localizing perceived reality itself into plural noncomprehensive worlds: “Conflicting statements, if true, are true in different worlds. A world in which the earth is in motion is not one in which the earth is at rest. Moreover, such worlds are heavily dependent on our accounts. A frame of reference or some other representational system is mandatory for representing anything. And a variety of systems can be constructed” (“Interpretation and Identity” 565). And bridging the Anglo-American philosophy of Wittgenstein, Davidson, Searle, and Austin with continental thinkers like MerleauPonty, Foucault, Derrida, and Heidegger, Dreyfus and Spinosa provide a thoroughgoing account of what they call “plural worlds,” and they assert that such worlds are organized by language, specifically poetry. The pluralist focus on the localness and partiality (the worldedness) of experience has begun to provide a new framework for thinking about identity and difference in poetry. Dreyfus and Spinosa readily acknowledge that the strong subject of the Western philosophical heritage is an aberration. Based on what Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant calls a “logic of sameness,” the conventional, confessional Western self is privileged as a self-standing essence, given in advance of any material, social, or worldly relations and essentially grounded in a comprehensive set of “types”—a singular, noncontradictory order of the essences of words, things, and people that is considered universal. But Dreyfus and Spinosa go on to point out that to replace “the subject” with “language” still amounts to revealing one singular horizon, or one comprehensive theory of meaning, a new web of relations in place of the old (“Two Kinds”). This second option—linguistic play for its own sake, also known as “pantextualism”—amounts to throwing out the baby of personal empowerment with the bathwater of colonial ideals of self-mastery. James himself provides little more help than postmodern theorists in elucidating what it is that makes my thought mine, for lack of any fundamentally rooted, enduring “I” form. If poetry adjusts its focus to fall on the transitive nature of thought, as opposed to its substantive elements, this focus is not self-limiting. No particular experience

8


(even of the constancy of an object or the unity of the perceiver) ever repeats itself (because the brain itself always changes) and—failing the unifying activity of the mind, which is itself in constant flux— plurality proliferates and the self disappears. As Bird points out, “to locate a person’s identity at some point in the stream of consciousness seems to fail to do justice to the continuing identity throughout that stream” (xxxii). The stream should presumably wash all sense of self away, that is. Bird’s account seems similar to Derridean accounts of meaningful experience as essentially belated, since the mind can only impose coherent meaning, in retrospect, upon the slippage involved in signification.6 James’s solution is to emphasize the poetic-sounding “feeling of connectedness” that links past, present, and future-directed thought and to posit an at least fleeting, rather than a grounded, self. Strangely, what James offers as an example of fleetingness could just as well provide a sufficient source of identity. James gives the examples of “organic moods” to show just how different each of our “sensibilities” can seem. But moods actually work as a way of taking up, gathering, focusing, and orienting fleeting thoughts. In “The Stream of Thought,” James notes that moods create “sensibilities,” but it remains unclear why they should provide examples of change and fleeting stability rather than abiding and resonant meaning (178). The point here is not to denigrate the substantial insights of linguistic postmodernism by unveiling its nineteenth-century precursors (which has already been done in any number of analyses of Nietzsche), and even less is the goal to elevate William James to the position of misunderstood prophet of postmodernism. Rather, what is most revealing in James’s response to his French writer is that James illuminates a path toward literary analysis not taken before or since but still available to politically engaged poets and readers. A mood, a stage of life, a profession: all of these provide examples of “worlds,” understood neither as physical space in the universe nor as private, subjective states (as in “a world of her own”). To take poetry as the process of forming new moods, sensibilities, and styles of sense making is to suggest new modes of organizing experience and interpersonal relations: new worlds. The epithet “plural-world,” then, referring to the poetry that I explore in this book, is, in one respect, redundant, since new styles of making sense, coordinating practices, and ranking values are revealed through the poetic process itself. For Dreyfus and Spinosa, moods in their pervasiveness—and insofar as people feel bound by them—can gather various experiences into a temporary unity. In more practical terms, a world is “any organized set of practices for dealing with oneself, other people, and things that


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produces a relatively self-contained web of meanings” (Disclosing 17). For Dreyfus and Spinosa, “by means of our coordinated practices we human beings open coherent, distinct contexts or worlds in which we perceive, feel, act and think” (Romanticism 265). “Worlds can interact,” they advise, “and where several worlds interact without presupposing a common world we speak of local worlds.”7A world is coordinated poetically by articulating, reconfiguring, or even creating ways of coordinating thoughts, practices, and language. And worlds must be plural in order for them to feel local, while they must coordinate identity in order to hold any meaningful sway over us. Among Dreyfus and Spinosa’s examples of local worlds appear (presumably, preconquest) Native American tribal nations who have “close ties to other tribal nations” but who, in interacting with those nations, remain open to the ethical norms of those other worlds. Dreyfus and Spinosa’s tribal nations represent groups who, to their understanding, share sets of values without hierarchizing those values. Worlds, then, considered as local webs of practices and meanings, presuppose no objective standard of ethical behavior or ultimate epistemological truth outside of them.8 Focusing on local worlds keeps Dreyfus and Spinosa from offering Cartesian notions of what human beings are, leading them instead to ask “how people, in fact, deal with ourselves and things in our everyday coping” (Disclosing 17; emphasis in the original). These worlds are essentially plural and not founded on extraworldly truth, but they are nonetheless meaningful. In fact, to the extent that they admit innovation on received notions of selfhood, local, self-limiting worlds prove both exhilarating and authoritative. By way of an example of how one might draw reflection on the topic of plural worlds from a class about poetry, as a teacher, I try to show students the possibilities for establishing local, short-term worlds within a writing class that both studies the play of language and tries to creates social connections among students. Without assuming any knowledge of the philosophical theory behind the kinds of pluralism available to contemporary poetries, I occasionally have my composition students begin the semester by introducing themselves in writing. Students create a verbal self-portrait; more specifically, they write a verbal description of themselves in the act of writing, and this writing is usually personal. Left off here, of course, such a practice would be doomed to failure, since few teachers would imagine that students would feel comfortable enough with each other early on in the semester to present themselves as an object for public scrutiny. But I inform students that these writings will not be made public until after they are run through a series of procedures.

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What happens next to some extent changes the mood of the room. Taking turns, students read aloud short excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s word portraits, most often “Matisse.” And students are reliably stunned by its automatic-writerly approach. Next, I invite students to write a “shadow poem,” a poem in imitation, integrating their own self-portrait into a copy of Stein’s poem so that they assume the “voice” of Stein as they create a new verbal portrait of themselves. Afterward, students are free to share their new, Steinian self-portraits. And almost everyone does choose to share, for several reasons. First, naturally, the invitation to share “non-sense” amid an institutional academic setting is understandably enjoyable. But mainly, students have playfully depersonalized their identity and relinquished accountability for their utterances—and have been moved away from any confessional style of poetic selfhood. And yet they still reconfigure the community of the classroom. When students read, new patterns and resonances form between their writing and the writing of others, apparently by accident. This brings up an important point concerning the role of writing in the formation of social selves. As David Schlosberg says, “pluralist solidarities are, importantly, partial. The making of connections is not total, but based on areas of partial overlap. As the first generation of pluralists discovered, it is that partiality that makes the construction of localized solidarity possible” (Schlosberg 598). The complex new identity of the classroom and the new affiliations among students are perceived to have formed out of the stream of innovation rather than as a result of solitary creation. Identity feels innovative rather than given. As the complexity of its images, sounds, diction, and allusions increases, the capacity for the poem to represent material conditions and social relations does not necessarily diminish. Poems that examine the surface texture of language and experience need not dissolve into nonreferential arrays of words. Generally framed in terms of an antinomy between social identity and complex meaning systems, the debate between what Susan Schultz calls “The Two Postmodernisms” attains much greater nuance when analyzed in terms of local worlds as the source of personal commitments. And these worlds are always poetic in a double sense: they get articulated by innovative speech and writing, for one thing; for another, there is a more profoundly poetic activity involved in the gathering of new worlds.


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Wh at in the Wo r ld Is Poes i s ? Worlds are woven out of words, practices, styles, moods, social affiliations, traditions, epistemological reference systems, and values, all of which claim and situate us before identity even becomes a question. For Dreyfus and Spinosa, worlds are “complete, coherent, and consistent” networks of practices that define—in advance of any subjective decision—the commitments and localities that matter to our everyday “coping” (“Two Kinds”). Where single, monist worldviews lead to either prosaic, dogmatic behavior or to the passive acceptance of an easy consumer relativism, plural-world participation arises from committed relativism, grounded in a set of always-political encounters. According to Dreyfus and Spinosa’s study of social forms, worlds in the plural are traditionally preserved and celebrated, deliberatively consolidated and shared, and innovatively reconfigured by the process of poesis, a term only approximated by the nebulous, even misleading translation of the Greek Poiesis into English as “to make.”9 As a structural component of “world disclosing,” poesis is an ongoing process that enables, focuses, and innovates on our everyday notions of the self and relationships among the things around it. Poesis refers to a mode of language that activates commitments, reconfigures networks of signification, and brings worlds into their own. Poetry that aligns and explores plural worlds, then, necessarily stages activist interventions in every status quo and practices what Tere Vadén and Mika Hannula call “the politics of slowing things down” (Rock the Boat 143). Poesis slows things down by destabilizing everyday associations and the comprehensive worldviews that they express. At the same time, poetic sense making brings into sharper focus the unique elements of the local worlds we inhabit, and, by structural necessity (i.e., by virtue of its plural commitments), poetic plurality becomes able to stage localist disruptions of globalizing systems. Being aware that one way of living “is only one of many. . .but at the same time one that I support by living it” disrupts what Vadén and Hannula think of as “the machinery of global culture,” to wit: “homogenization.” Deftly eliding the philosophical concept of universalism and the political philosophy of top-down globalization allows Vadén and Hannula to pose the philosophical notion of value pluralism (what Isaiah Berlin would call “liberal pluralism”) as a viable solution to economic globalism’s “leveling of indigenous and global cultures” (41). To the extent that irreducible worlds, focal practices, and local commitments have authority and provide a sense of “experiential nearness” (Vadén and Hannula 12)—what Hans Georg Gadamer

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called “the broadening and enrichment of our own experience of the world”—no one world can become comprehensive. As powerful as it may prove in consolidating all experience, a singular-world global understanding of reality (including multiculturalism, “hybridity” theories, and humanism) necessarily “washes out” the plural and more meaningful, if incommensurate, intensities of local practices, things, and styles. By way of an example, the spread of global capitalism shows that, if the removal of hindrances to global trade and finance produce huge gains for some, “locality is left unsaid in the annual report” (Vadén and Hannula 43). In terms of proletarianization, ecological devastation, deterritorialization and the marginalization of meaningful practices, those who gain also tend “to turn their backs on [if not to cause] the problems” (135). These problems get translated to the margins and appear at local levels, while the hegemonic force of neoliberalism consolidates itself. But “for all of its apparent power,” in his 1993 book, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said admonishes, “this new overall pattern of domination. . .is unstable” (326). There remains an instability inherent in the project of unifying and holding together incommensurate ways of being-in-the-world. Taking advantage of this instability, localized, situated forms of dissent (e.g., Said’s “crowdactivated sites”) rely on numerous worlds—local, traditional, ancient, modern, nationalist, ethnic-national, global-technological, realist, mythic—to vitiate globalism’s definitive “principle of confinement” (Said 327). Less obviously, “universalism” and unified, prosaic notions of a one-world system, are not unique to large-scale, cosmopolitan “core/ periphery” formations. Singular, comprehensive sets of types and hierarchies of value also take place on communal levels, leading to essentialized notions of race, self, gender, and nation. Essentialized politics appears in the periphery as well as the core, in the developing world as well as in the metropolis. And strong identitarian “voice” arises in the cultural production of protest literature as well as in the ideologies of reaction. The homogenizing impulses behind globalization and neoliberal agendas and the ethnic nationalism or multiculturalism of resistance (as well as the personal relativism of those who think that they can choose between them) all appeal to a comprehensive, singular alignment of practices. “Authentic,” “pure,” and “original” experience, no less than massmediated, televisual reality, tourism, and Hardt and Negri’s “empire” of service industrialization, all participate in the structure of practices and uses of language that tend toward a single, comprehensive


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understanding of reality or principle of containment. To ignore as impure, useless or unclear any traces of cross-world conflict, to espouse monism, tends to arrange commitments “vertically” and to rank practical concerns along a single axis. This kind of power move violently flattens the uniqueness of local encounters to the extent that it perceives and acts before appreciating a plurality of worlds. To the extent that, according to Thomas Friedman, the world is more or less conveniently flat—an equi-formed world civilization—Nietzsche’s warning still echoes across it: “the wasteland grows.” In his own essay on poetic language, “What Is Dwelling?” which doubles as a contemporary defense of poetry, Julian Young notes that only in rare, derivative cases does poetry refer to the act of making, and it is unusual for language to act prosaically or unambiguously, or to function administratively as a conduit for communication. Since these rare instances are also the most salient, however, they have become the norm for thinking about language. In the richest instances, though, language serves both to preserve local self-understandings and to innovate upon them by aligning practices from one world with those of another, thus “disclosing new worlds” (the title of Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Spinosa, and Fernando Flores’s 1997 book on this same subject). In Young, the name for the process of bringing things and people into their own—by locating them securely in a preserved local context or by reconfiguring context—is poesis. Since poesis refers to the process of coordinating practices and goals within local worlds, and aligning worlds with respect to one another, the right kind of inquiry into nested but hidden pluralities and the most effective form of the cultural study of totalizing cultural claims is poetry. Despite the focus that has fallen upon questions of plurality in the U.S. avant-garde (often oversimplified by the term “difference”), it is primarily within the avant-garde of marginalized social groups that plural-world poetry has arisen and thrived. If, for poetic innovators, a self-conscious focus on form, constraint, procedure, materiality, seriality, and chance characterizes experimentalism, this focus still remains trained on the constitutive nature of language rather than on building abiding self-interpretations. On the other hand, poets from marginalized social groups who adopt a politics directly—rather than by way of a focus on language—most often refer to an idealized identity outside of the mainstream. But beyond the postmodern goal of “capturing incessantly changing, fluid, and contiguous phenomena as they occur” (Conte 19) and a more expressivist concern with “discovering immanent form and unity in creation” (Conte 15), multiethnic poets using innovative forms are able to realize limited forms of both

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of these possibilities. In fact, Tere Vadén and Mika Hannula’s recent postglobalist bid for a “localized ethics, situated self, and particularist art” had already been made by civil rights activists—through their use of the experimental poetic series—in the late 1960s. An imaginative historical revisionism has emerged over the last forty years that investigates alternate possibilities for national, racial, gender, and ethnic expressive possibilities. Searching past practices, rituals, modes of production, and forms of expression, plural-world poets find conceptions of the self that seem considerably different than the social roles offered to them. Recovering these rituals, marginalized groups have—at least since “the rebellion against colonialism in the Third World and the struggle for civil rights in the United States” (Moramarco and Sullivan 246)—staged for themselves new, empowering interpretations of what it means to belong to a group. And the poets in this book manifest multiple conceptual worlds within the field of their extended lyric series. Representing the complex interaction of worlds, deep-pluralist poetry both names and transforms the subjects it is said to represent, by offering its readers not one contemporary identity but multiple, overlapping, resonant sources of identification. This poetry can remain both representative and epistemologically complicated. Often, critics misapply the category of “ethnic-nationalism” to historical pluralist poetry, owing to its strong political charge, but Alurista’s complex rendering of the mythic homeland of the Aztec— called Aztlán—offers a much richer poetic source of ethnicity and partial identity, rootedness and flexibility (and in Steven Greenblatt’s terms, “resonance and wonder”) than does properly ethnic-nationalist poetry. Chicano activists Alurista, Arteaga, Alarcón, and writers who experiment with the concept of a “New World,” such as Elena Rivera and Gloria Anzaldúa, each translate fragmented experiences and partial involvements in plural worlds into communal bonds by depicting plural worlds within a single lyric space. In suggesting forms of pluralism that prove much more generous than traditional, “melting pot” assimilationism, the Chicano avant-garde’s ethno-poetics remains dedicated to the expression of abiding ethnic cultural identities and to the poetic invention of additional sources of affiliation. The first chapter of this book treats an emergent protest literature and explores several ways that, in the shadow of U.S. civil rights movements, modernist myth-poetic series like William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Ezra Pound’s Cantos get reshaped in response to the complex types of agency that poets from marginalized groups need. Although earlier twentieth-century series remain multilingual


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and explore multiple arrangements of social reality, such series ultimately use multiple languages and cultural myths to capture the exact character (and universality) of certain exalted expressions. Ezra Pound sought “a bridge over worlds” in his series, for example, and the overall ambition of the Cantos remained that of telling “the tale of the tribe.” Oriented toward a different goal, however, Alurista uses broken English and native Mexican and Spanish languages to make the act of translation “stutter,” to illustrate the partiality of individual identity as it intersects with the communal categories of local history, mythic ritual, and even polytheism. This chapter argues that contemporary multiethnic innovators become absorbed by life in each language and by the complex pulls and possibilities that exist between languages, rather than by vision through language. Although historians such as Rodolfo Acuña and artists ranging from Richard Rodriguez to Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and even Cheech and Chong, have bridled at, downplayed, or parodied the revived Aztec mythology that arose during the Chicano Movement, these myths played a valuable role both in the service of political activism and as a vast image repertoire, drawing from which poet activists could rename themselves and consolidate their causes. Gloria Anzaldúa’s historical mythopoeia, for example, provides both a source of cultural identity and a space for continuous self-invention— for “innovative identity.” And Anzaldúa as well as Alurista and Alfred Arteaga all trace complex ways through the seeming contradiction between ethnic nationalism and freeplayful mestizaje. These poets give up the notion of one comprehensive history and instead adopt multiple, incomplete histories in order to appreciate nonessentialist, but stable, identities. Beginning with Alurista’s 1971 serial poem, Florícanto en Aztlán, and moving on to discuss Alfred Arteaga’s 1991 Cantos and Francisco X. Alarcón’s Snake Poems (1992) in the second chapter, I show how these poets conceive of and depict a plurality of worlds based on a codex-like model that translates temporal events into spatial constellations. In their poetic constructions of Aztlán, the mythic northern homeland of the Aztec, there emerges an awareness of the need to think of worlds in parallel with each other, as well as serially distinct, and to think of identity as weakly abiding rather than as substantive. Thinking of essence as an imaginative, social act (of collective, poetic “essencing”), and also as the ground for a viable politics of recognition, these serial-poetic histories enable socially marginalized subjects to construct innovative and resonant and local worlds. These poets’ crossed, or “X-ing,” histories (Arteaga) model rich subjectivity and

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collective creativity for contemporary Chicano writers and activists. This chapter shows how strategic pluralism articulates a “third way”— between nostalgic longing for a preconquest past and deconstructive play in the present—to envision politically liberatory identity through myth-based poetry. Arteaga and Alarcón show that the Inca, Taino, and Nahua peoples perceived a plurality of different styles within European colonists’ practices, and these tribes pointed out this plurality in order to challenge European demands that native Mesoamericans abandon their worldviews. Similarly, Arteaga’s poetry and criticism, and both his and Alarcón’s plural-world poetics, suggest a possibility for conceiving and depicting a plurality of worlds within the internal colony of the contemporary United States. Chapter 2 demonstrates that, through their pluralization techniques, these poets evoke a countermemory to models of English-only, unidirectional cultural assimilation, offering new mappings of time and language. In their proposed worlds, avantgarde literary complexity prevents clear identity politics and poetics, while their historical erudition reveals previously unknown lines of affiliation for the communities from which they write. Historical pluralist poetics remains faithful to Antonio Gramsci’s claim that “what is called the ‘question of language’ has always been an aspect of the political struggle” (187). Poetic language remains in the service of, or epi-phenomenal to, historical or cultural forces in Gramsci, but political struggles for hegemony rely on plurality as the condition of their possibility. Chapter 3 demonstrates that serial poetry provides a unique imaginative economy for opening history in multiple new directions, specifically by invoking cross-cultural, transhistorical practices of polytheism. This chapter explores serial poems that pluralize myths of cultural origin. The poets in this chapter use polytheism to meet contemporary, political activist ends. Beginning with a discussion of M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 serial poem Zong! about the eighteenth-century murder of 150 Africans aboard a British slave ship, Chapter 3 investigates Philip’s use of experimental langue to challenge universal concepts of law and language. Looking at cultural criticism by Franz Fanon, the chapter moves on to study Black Arts Movement poet N. J. Loftis and his poetic revision (or better, reconstellation) of the histories of Old and New World Africans, which he enacts in his 1973 lyric series, Black Anima. This section situates Loftis’s modernist, activist poetics within a series of historical recoveries that turn historical fragmentation into a partial allegory of African American regeneration. Loftis gestures toward a fluid, pluralist notion of subjectivity with the


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goal of bringing poetry into his activism, although he arguably recovers a universalist notion of identity as well. Loftis encounters the same problem that every poet runs up against in trying to compose what Paul Naylor calls the “world-poem.” If poesis, as a form of gathering, is the most basic way that things, practices, language, style, and mood get coordinated into a world, then which comes first: the gathering tendency or language? In one way, this question relocates the earlier question concerning innovation and expression. If language somehow derives from and responds to the tendency for local worlds to coordinate themselves, then language itself might appear as merely decorative and would seem to lack the power to inhibit the continuing formation of worlds into an ultimate, hierarchical unity. But if, on the other hand, language provides the condition of possibility for increasing resonances, then linguistic acts of cultural dominance can be undone, resisted, and even overcome by poetic rearticulation. Where Loftis stands on this question remains uncertain, as Black Anima seems both to realize a singular, universal vision and to continually reinscribe his visionary moments within a more linguistically complicated idiom. Chapter 4 looks at Nathaniel Mackey’s attempts to write the worldpoem with a jazz twist. The world in question is that of a mythic Dogon protohumanity, a group called the Andoumboulou, who serve as the “rough draft of human beings.” In his serial poem called The Song of the Andoumboulou, which spreads across three separate volumes of poetry, Mackey’s language forms resonances at multiple levels, from repeated phonemes to sustained images, to alternative ethnopoetic accounts of history; but these languages resist each other and grate against universal developmental (Western) history in a series of “discrepant engagements” or “noisiness” that can be appreciated by a trained ear. And Mackey’s work amounts to training his readers’ ears to perceive the play of plural worlds as an intricate weave of disparate sources. In his 1999 book, Singing the Holes in History, which treats Nathaniel Mackey among other poets, Paul Naylor reads experimental poetry as countermemory—as a tactical insertion of the real into simulated, consumerist history. And while I agree with Naylor to an extent, I ultimately claim that Mackey’s experimentalism reveals all worlds (“fake” history as well as “real” history) as equally local—that is, woven out of a plurality of weakly incommensurate views of reality, none more real than another. The threat of forgetting the materiality of language and historical experience comes from a Western cultural tendency toward singular reality, I believe, contra Naylor, for whom the threat

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to concrete experience comes from mass-mediatized, official, or simulated versions of history. As a Baudrillardian, Naylor implies a unified, singular category of “the real” that lies behind appearance. And for Naylor, within “the real,” the logics of representation, sovereignty, and identitarian interest seem ultimately achievable. Following Laclau more closely than Baudrillard, I try to conceive of history, the state, and identity (in addition to modes of repression) as plural and, for this reason, ultimately inassimilable into any singular vision (cf. Laclau, “Identity” 75). It is little coincidence, I suggest, that Loftis, Mackey, Cecilia Vicuña, Francisco X. Alarcón, and a number of other experimental poets use the metaphorics of weaving to talk about the role of poetry in overcoming hegemony. As Cecilia Vicuña says in her poem, “Arte Precario,” If art is the form of perception a way of seeing and hearing, perhaps consciousness, to join and to cut, the double movement of the weaver is the art, el con de la continuidad, the togetherness of union, allqa.

In Mackey, the “creaking of the word” shakes the foundations of established categories, but “creaking” does not serve a merely negative function. The “creaking” also involves weaving—the formation of temporarily abiding patterns out of the flow of experience—a kind of self-limited patterning belonging to poesis. In addition to conveying truth, “language,” for Mackey, must be understood more broadly to include music, rasping whispers, chants, ritual invocations, and, most pervasively, the sound of weaving on a creaking loom. This languageas-weaving metaphoric reveals that reality “grounds out” at the level of patterned plurality, and there can be no more fundamental pattern to which experience, ethics, or truth correspond. In my fifth and sixth chapters, I compare modernist methods for writing “the poem that contains history” with more recent kinds of imaginative recontact narratives between native American and European worlds. Unlike early modern contact narratives, pluralist recontacts require multiple beginnings and numerous possible futures in order to make sense of the past. Akwesasne Mohawk poet James


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Thomas Stevens’s series, Tokinish, which appears in his 2001 collection, Combing the Snakes from His Hair as well as his collection of shorter series, A Bridge Dead in the Water (2007), offer an emergent literary form that might be characterized as the “restaged historical contact narrative.” Stevens’s engagement with Roger Williams’s 1643 contact account of the Narragansett, A Key into the Languages of America, offers both a literature of resistance and the creation of a world literature, offering several connective people’s histories that turn the field of transnational studies into an arena in which different ideologies engage each other through interactions among texts that span historical epochs. Bridge provides a model for world literature by linking local worlds without assuming an ultimate, cosmopolitan ordering of values. Stevens instead provides an example of the poetic, localist pluralization of globalism, writing in what Juliana Spahr has aptly called a “cosmopolitan vernacular.” My final chapter situates plural-world poetry in the context of transnational or global studies. I believe that what literary comparativists and transnational theorists most often get right in “going global” is their rejection of the “container model” of the nation-state, according to which nationhood remains the background against which locality and migration appear as an anomaly. This “folk understanding” of national interest as the ultimate criteria for ranking values has given way to a realization that networks of people, languages, and goods “have always, regularly spanned the boundaries of the state, leading transnational migration to consistently recur” (Waldinger and Fitzgerald 1178). Bridging worlds, bringing local practices into their own by gathering practices from other locales, and giving these composite practices a limited unity of style—this seems the condition of possibility for derivative nationalist (and nativist) models of containment. Like James Thomas Stevens, Myung Mi Kim exposes the rhetoric of negative, top-down globalism as it is circulated in the language of the mass media as well as in the cultural prioritization of clear language, the well-behaved kind that can be used as a means to an end. Both of these poets experiment with the English-language primer as a found document—a dangerous one, to be sure, but not beyond rhetorical and historical analysis and poetic reconfiguration. And their poetic innovations on the primer open up a plurality of resonances, many of which demand truth and reconciliation, but others of which gesture toward a version of bottom-up globalization—suggested in the gradually emerging openness to encounter, dialogue, and engagement among local worlds.

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All of the poems that I treat in this book fall within the category of the serial poem, which is itself an increasingly popular form. The poetic series poses a challenge to lyric poetry, which, as a genre, resists singular narrative closure. The resistance to narrative, the tensions between narrative unity and the poem’s artifice—the tangents, fragments, and possible recombinations that characterize the series—all enable the poet to complicate cultural identity even while realizing multiple, deeply abiding social bonds. The series gives up the notion of one comprehensive, narrative view of cultural reality in favor of constructing coherent accounts of locality by recombining selves and worlds. Discrete poems arranged within series unexpectedly combine and tentatively resonate, related by what might best be considered “family resemblances.” Local worlds, too, remain recombinatory, and the process of linguistic innovation by way of rupture and intertranslation requires a long, paratactic, and accumulative form. This book is not a philosophical review of American pluralism at the start and end of the twentieth century, although the recent recovery of pluralism, what David Schlosberg calls “Resurrecting the Pluralist Universe,” provides a background to the analysis that I offer in the following chapters. Schlosberg’s article proves helpful as it not only surveys the field of contemporary pluralism but also draws parallels between current practices and those of the “first generation” of pluralist thinkers, beginning with William James. Included among postmodern theorists would be Nelson Goodman, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, Donna Haraway, Tere Vadén and Mika Hannula, Kirstie McClure, Schlosberg, and others who might not primarily count themselves as “pluralist” but who nonetheless have inscribed themselves into this only partially realized “tradition.” Plural-world forms of poetic innovation with different moods— alternative ways to render the space between self and world—provide a philosophical antiessentialism that reduces neither to deconstructive, diacritical relations nor to identity-political positivities. The point of plural-world poesis is to offer an “n + 1 ontology,” where the act of adding worldviews and new modes of cognitive alignments limits hegemonic discourse and gives a richer sense of embodied worldhood to communal experience. So in this study even the supercategory of ontology, of “Being,” becomes numerous. Artists from marginalized social groups have always recognized the power play inherent in stabilizing and hierarchizing a particular set of values as well as the need to negotiate multiple identities simply to get by. The social marginalization of the poets in question proves a condition for their deep


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pluralist insights into the roots of multiple-world dwelling in concrete practice, the poetic methods for pluralizing homogenizing views of culture, and the effects of such interventions on the larger poetry community. This book finds, in contemporary multiethnic experimentation, a relation to plurality that makes such experimentation exemplary. And so this book is intended as an introduction to a method for reading multiethnic avant-garde poetries, in specific, and literary texts, in general, as a form of investigation into the possibilities for contemporary pluralism. Since pluralist theories and poetries play off of each other throughout, it is not possible to offer a thoroughgoing survey of all of the poets whom I would include in this work. Instead, I have tried to focus on a few poets who provide an intuition of deep-level pluralism as well as to unfold the characteristics of this philosophy in an engagement with these poets’ serial poems. I hope to examine the ways in which questions of race and ethnicity have expanded the field of possibilities for expression within the American literary tradition as well as the tradition of American pluralist writing. But, of course, I am unable to exhaust the wide range of these possibilities. Finally, this book is concerned with another of George Oppen’s poetic phrases (in addition to the chapter’s title): “The covenant is / There shall be peoples.” The poets in this study position themselves against unitary, identitarian, or singular conceptions of the political domain and they insist on the irreducible plurality of the social realm. And while the relocation of the poetic voice across multiple, simultaneously occurring worlds arises from the displacement of Native American, Chicano, and African American groups, these poets of internal colonization and diaspora have rewritten the terms of deterritorialization and renounced visions of a final arrival at a destined place. They eschew ethnic-national grounding in favor of social groupings that continually emerge and evolve, and all view the social subject as a site of multiple and intersecting group memberships, of which citizenship in either the demos (state) or the ethnos (group) is but one. What is most interesting about all of these poets is that none of them envisions an apocalyptic or utopian epiphany to history, but, instead, each uses the complexity of the serial form to open up worlds in the plural. By situating “ethnicity” and “poetry” within the broader-gauge practice of strategic pluralism, multiethnic avant-garde writers demonstrate ways that poetry theorizes as much as it reflects ethnic identity. And whether the identities in question are those of poetic messages or subjective agents, contemporary poetics needs an account—or at least an anticipation—of what might come after the subject of cultural

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difference undergoes its current changes. Asking the question, “Is it Ethnic or is it Poetry?” with an eye to plural worlds and the role of poetry in creating them suggests that neither the category of the ethnos nor that of poesis describes a singular, isolable field. In transnational activism, the ethnos crosses all borders, even while poesis consolidates and coordinates activist concerns by moving across ethnicities and languages. Multiethnic experimental poesis introduces the pragmatic notion that the most personal or social comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve comes from innovating upon given identities, adaptably encountering many worlds, and cultivating the capacity to recognize and move among them.

Chapter 1

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Plural Worlds and Azt ec-Chica no Ser ial Poetry A n Em erg ent Protes t L i t erat u re Many words walk in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds are made for us. . .In the world, we want many worlds to fit. The Nation which we construct is one where all communities and languages fit, where all steps may walk, where all may have laughter, where all may live the dawn. —Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Indigenous Clandestine Revolutionary Committee General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Mexico

W

Po e tic En-wo r ldi ng

riting about the EZLN, one of many globally publicized “indigenous insurgencies at the turn of the twenty-first century,” historian and cultural critic José Rabasa remarks that any thoroughgoing historicism—as well as any detailed ecology of present social forms—requires confronting past cultures and localities with a critical awareness of both (their and our) past and (their and our) present “backgrounds and habitus.” Properly critical thinkers, that is, need be familiar with at least two worlds, two modes of organizing what counts as real, at once. This eye to ontologies in the plural makes up a minimal condition for intelligibly reading the process of globalization and the forms of transnational dissent that arise in so-called global cores and peripheries. In its call for cultural plurality, Rabasa’s critique seems to strikes a familiar chord. Calls for “multiexperiential” complexity echo throughout discourses of the new—New Historicism, modernist (anthropological) relativism, postmodernism, liberal tolerace and

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national multiculturalism, postnational global consumerism—and even backward in time—to Romantic subjective humanism. The difference lies in Rabasa’s vision of the poetic and plural nature of “worlds.” In much of his published scholarship, as well as his work at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley, Rabasa attempts to evacuate traditional notions of the self and, in place of identity, to expand and enrich our notions of “worldhood.” Ultimately, according to Rabasa, “world” becomes a more powerfully considered, generatively ambiguous, and “poetically” loaded term than it is in its current use. Logically inconsistent but artistically appropriate, for Rabasa and for currently emerging schools of thought what is meant by a world is neither an objectively determined set of causes and relations (which explain the “universe”) nor a subjective set of choices and perspectives (which inform personal opinion).

Plu r a l - Wo r ld Dis se nt/ Descent Contrasting the global distribution of Zapatista insurgent energy (via the Internet) with the (contemporary) Zapatistas’ appeals to ancient, indigenous experience, Rabasa closely reads Folio 46r of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (ca. 1562), painted by a native Aztec tlacuilo (roughly, a poet-priest) under the supervision of Dominican friars. The codex provides a “vivid example of the invention of native pictorial vocabularies for depicting colonial institutions, material objects, ideologies, and authorities” (Rabasa, “Notes”). Most importantly, it provides a model of a highly complex, pictorial and poetic serial form of political dissent, an ancient, pluralist mythology capable of inspiring the contemporary formation of a new transnational imagined community. Studying the radically discontinuous and multithematic expressive form of the Nahua codex, Rabasa finds that—contemporaneous with early Spanish colonial attempts to theorize the New World in terms of one comprehensive worldview (e.g., in Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s 1610 epic, Historia de la Nueva México)—native Mesoamerican tribes at the time of the Spanish conquest had already dwelled in a deeply pluralist—even postglobalist—world. That is, rather than a community made up of meaning-intensive (Renaissance Modern) humanist subjects, on the one hand, or a rigidly monotheistic community adhering to a singular, ranked (Dantean) order of values, the Aztec realized alternative, polytheistic (admittedly quite violent) arrangements of conflicting values, and they poetically envisioned multiple, temporarily abiding worlds at once, many at play within the single visual-linguistic space of the codex.

Plural Worlds and Aztec-Chicano Serial Poetry

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As a form of dissent, the plural-world literacy evoked and enabled by the codex gave the Aztec numerous forms of self-representation and expression even during the height of Spanish colonization. By using the codex to render the differences not just between Aztec and Spanish worlds but also differences within each of the Franciscan and Dominican missionary projects, the Nahua tlacuilo was able to pluralize even the Spanish colonists’ own comprehensive self-representations. And the comprehensiveness of the Spanish self-representation itself grounded the project of early modern global hegemony. Before, and yet beyond, postmodernism’s dialectic—between identity-political, epic comprehensiveness and neoliberal cosmopolitan relativism—the Nahua manifested a pluralistic view of numerous, irreducible styles of being—a series of discontinuities and unexpected resonances among plural worlds. Although no contemporary reader would welcome a return to Aztec culture (as though this were possible anyway), Rabasa’s insight into the plural-world possibilities of the codex leads him to indicate that, in studies of the past and the present, like his own, we must account for the “articulations of possible alternative worlds to those of late capital,” wherever and whenever they may appear. In fact, framing the notion of alternative worlds in the plural is itself a way of articulating an “other” to late capital, which needs a singular, worldwide set of equivalencies in order to operate. Rabasa’s focus on the generative pluralization of comprehensive, universal types may seem too formal, rather than ethical or content-based (e.g., ignoring the fact that many Aztec worlds themselves were not “humane,” and that their activist literacy “failed” to bring about change). But to ignore pluralist form is to ignore the fact that five centuries later, serial poets writing from the Chicano Movement in the United States continue to employ serialized, specifically Aztec, codex-like forms of cultural production in the service of activist political goals. The use of Aztec knowledges remains a viable mode of realizing progressive, nonviolent ends and for decontaining comprehensive systems of Anglo-supremacy and late capital.

Ser ia l Fo r m and Pol it i c al C ontent In Chicano long poetry, and in the Aztec codex, worlds themselves remain juxtaposed, each intelligible in its own terms but only partially intelligible to others. Different matrices of meaning coordinate different local worlds and what appears in them. In the world of everyday experience, the earth is at rest. In the techno-scientific world, the earth is in motion around the sun. For the Aztec, the sun oriented

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religious ritual. And in the world of exploited physical labor, the sun causes misery and measures the duration of that misery every day. But there is no Archimedean point at which the “true” (contextless) earth and sun appear. In terms of ethics, no such terra firma appears either. Encounters among worlds, in order to remain “open,” must avoid appealing to a singular, higher criterion of value outside the terms of the encounter. Like worlds, discrete series—discontinuously arranged within long poems—also unexpectedly combine and tentatively resonate, related by what might best be considered “family resemblances.” Worlds remain discontinuous and recombinatory, and this process of rupture and intertranslation requires a long, paratactic, and accumulative form: serial poetry. The pluralist nature of seriality and its “tangential” directions becomes clear reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera, which, early on and throughout, offers a puzzling account of the ancient Aztec: “During the original peopling of the Americas, the first inhabitants migrated across the Bering Straits and walked south across the continent. The oldest evidence of humankind in the U.S.—the Chicanos’ ancient Indian ancestors—was found in Texas and has been dated to 35,000 B.C. In the Southwest United States, archeologists have found 20,000-year-old campsites of the Indians who migrated through, or permanently occupied, the Southwest, Aztlán—land of herons. . .the edenic place of origin of the Aztec” (20). As readers “migrate” through this anthropoetic paragraph, remarkable series of forking paths emerge: what begins as a “scientific,” evolutionary-historical account of migration across a land bridge (into a new geographical world) suddenly takes a detour and crosses an unseen discursive “bridge” into a set of knowledges and a vocabulary based on another way of ordering experience (a new poetically interrelated world). That is, archeological history yields to a mythic account of the origin of the tribe. Even before evolutionary history morphs into mythology, though, other islands of discursive discontinuity begin to appear in the account. In scientific temporality, language such as “oldest evidence” seems inevitable, and yet “Chicanos”—a slang term appropriated from farm workers by Mexican-American students at Texas A&M University during the civil rights movement—appears as a fixed scientific term, too, of equal archaeological weight. Meanwhile, as readers arrive at the mythic northern homeland, another tremor rumbles through the poem’s discursive ecology: we are asked to entertain more than one allegedly comprehensive discourse at the same time. The language of “ancient ancestors” orients participants in a traditional ceremonial


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invocation, and Aztlán remains productively ambiguous: both and neither science and myth. The name Aztlán is a politically inflected appropriation from Aztec creation mythology. It first appeared in The Ramírez Codex (1583–87) in the form of a Spanish missionary’s translation of Nahuatl informants’ statements (Gonzales, Harvest 105). And given the layers of mediation that the land of origin has undergone, it certainly cannot be rigorously vouched by archaeology. Anzaldúa’s mythopoetic history is sensitive to the fact that words and turns of phrase carry complexes of meaning and effects, so that different cultural areas as well as different historical epochs set themselves different possibilities and tasks of thinking. And she brings out these alternative possibilities in her serial departures from continuous narrative and scientific discourse. Anzaldúa’s migration, made in medias res, to another system of signification, situates her poem in Joseph Conte’s category of serial poetry. (And I would situate it even more specifically in the category of serial Mythopoeia.) Anzaldúa unveils plural worlds that constitute complex, richly contoured boundaries, or localities, of knowledge. What readers learn is not a singular anthropological truth about race, gender, and sexuality. Rather, the human sciences and regional myth are both complete representational systems, and each realm or world makes an authoritative claim on the people within it. “The mistake,” according to Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin, “comes in thinking of such systems as devices for representing an antecedent reality. Rather, by determining the categories in terms of which its realm is to be described, a representational system determines the sorts of things its world consists of” (Goodman and Elgin 565). But neither do we take away from Anzaldúa a sense that any particular social construction or cultural vocabulary has been set up by mere whimsical decision. As empowering as this second option sounds, it ultimately comes from a strong subjectivist, consumerist mentality and a flight from involvement. Evoking the theme of migration so central to Chicano/a poetics—and the millennia of migration throughout the Americas that preceded the imposition of the European concept of the nation—the poet is moved across worlds by the demands of her ethnicity, sexuality, and discursive positioning, even while she feels compelled to reexamine and innovate upon these demands. Borderlands/La Frontera is not a throwback to Carlos Castañeda’s hallucinogenic anthropology, then, or to a “prideful” ethnic nationalism (a brush that has tarred almost all of Chicano protest poetry on the pattern of Jameson’s “national allegory”). Rather, Borderlands is a Contean serial poem that, true to form, takes as its actual “subject” the “diverse ways in which its

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elements come together,” instead of “discovering immanent form and unity” (Conte 15). The Aztec codex, as serial form avant la lettre, provides another set of roots—an additional world of aesthetic concerns—to feed Anzaldúa’s “branching” presentation. Sometimes considered the precursor of the modern-day comic book and Internet interface (because of their demands for the parallel processing of information, as well as their combinations of picture and text), the codex is a both a preconquest and a contemporary mode of knowledge.1 In Borderlands, Anzaldúa uses both preconquest and postmodern exemplars to poetically arrange and restage multiple “new-world encounters.” Like Anzaldúa, Alurista (Al berto Baltazar Urista Heredia), Alfred Arteaga, Francisco X. Alarcón, Cherríe Moraga, and Eléna Rivera use serial forms to juxtapose incommensurate worlds. This juxtaposition allows poets to negotiate the contradictory demands of strong identity and identity constructionism by envisioning pluralized models of selfhood. Rivera, for example, in her 2000 series, Unknowne Land, creates echoes among yearning, lyrical voices that try speak to each other across the four elements. Like Anzaldúa, in their serial poetries, these poets are concerned with showing the way that cultural plurality actually works, especially as a way of giving voice to dissent while keeping open the possibility of constantly confronting and rethinking their own, locally situated positions and claims.

Th e Aztec at a C rossroads Since the late 1960s, and increasingly today, a good number of Chicano activist poets, writing within Aztec traditions, use the paratactic serial poem, other experimental postmodern forms, and the Mesoamerican codex to “sample” (Alfred Arteaga’s term) and to put into play—to destabilize—established features of Euro-Western epic and the modernist poetic sequence. Poets forced to the social and economic margins, first by Anglo-American colonialism and then by triumphal capitalist multinationalism, have proven uniquely able to leverage their inside-outside and innovative-activist social positions to write new worlds that enable both local self-realization and multiple abiding affiliations, on levels that range from regional to national to global. Their decision to write in longer serial forms enables a kind of self-fashioning that does not preclude communal concerns, aesthetic value, or traditional models of selfhood, while it does reimagine these concerns, values, and selves. By using the serial form to make networks of texts, poets within the civil rights era Chicano Movement


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(1965–75) and their savvy successors have been uniquely able to depict plural worlds within a single linguistic field and to translate fragmented experiences into multiple livable identities. The plural worlds that Chicano/a poets put into play model a kind of civil rights protest that thrives in the encounter rather than its resolution, and they forecast a form of intervention in the mass proletarianization and cultural leveling forces that now go by the name of “globalization.” In light of globalized popular-cultural representations of Aztec culture and its contemporary symbols, it seems tempting to note the ways that the vast and complex image repertoire of ancient Aztec culture, in an age of global branding, often appears reduced in advance to a commodity fetish. “Hybrid” identity as a form of cross-marketing is evidenced in recent televised invitations to visit Disney World’s newest “Mex-ploitation” concern—the Coronado Springs Resort on Lago Dorado, themed to a “colonial Spanish, Mexican feel”2—as well as in the “highly versatile” sport-recreational vehicle by Pontiac, called the “Aztek.” But there remains a subtler point behind the consumer trending of “Mexamerica” that gets driven home here: despite the fact that Mesoamerican emblems and images are made to conform to typecast roles, for industries ranging from tourist service to truck manufacture, these images are themselves given to a remarkable amount of paradoxical, even poetically generative, slippage. They retain resonances of authenticity and stable identity, that is, even while being franchised out or tourist marketed. And similarly, the tendency of artists like Guillermo Gomez-Peña and others to parody “Aztecamania” and “Az-technologies” leaves in tact the field it draws from. The aura of the authentic, on the one hand, and the “tele-present,” or in Derrida’s term, “iterable,” character of native Mesoamerican identity, on the other, engage in a gestalt figure-ground interplay, each sense of identity moving into the other’s background as the other emerges as the predominant figure. In this light, it seems that the Aztec mythos may itself have become one of “the most versatile vehicles on the planet” (to quote Pontiac), but in I. A. Richards’s sense of a “vehicle” rather than Detroit’s. And in Chicano Movement poetry and criticism, the Aztec cosmos usually comes fully equipped with similarly shifting references to its geographically real, and yet ideologically constructed, “timespace”: the fabled northern ancestral homeland called Aztlán, now occupied by the United States.3 Cultural and broadly poetic preoccupations with images of Mexico and the formerly Mexican U.S. Southwest as a versatile vehicle began on both sides of the shifting U.S.–Mexican border in the nineteenth century. Contemporary critic Daniel Cooper Alarcón traces a long

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line of writings—from R. H. Dana’s 1840 novel, Two Years Before the Mast, to Malcolm Lowry’s 1946 Under the Volcano—that recreate Mexico’s paradoxical “constructed-essentialism,” or its flexible rootedness. In a letter to Jonathan Cape, introducing his novel, Lowry notes, “we can see [Mesoamerica] as a kind of timeless symbol of the world, on which we can place the Garden of Eden, and indeed anything else we please.”4 Here Lowry anticipates Cooper Alarcón’s thesis that Aztec images of origin can paradoxically retain their stability while playing an overwhelming number of contradictory roles. Cooper Alarcón suggests that, from the frame of reference of identitypolitical activism and local insurgency, the Chicano mythos remains capable of remaining rooted to the “once upon a time” structure of authentic origin, while (within cultural-consumerist sets of relations) it also appears happily ever-open to reinscription and reinvention. As Hubert Dreyfus indicates, and as Subcomandante Marcos’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation has discovered, “the perfect postmodern artifact is the Internet.” Sherry Turkle has described how the net “is changing the background practices that determine the kinds of selves we can be” (Dreyfus and Spinosa, Technology 318). In her recent book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Turkle details “the ability of the Internet to change popular understandings of identity” (264). On the Internet, she tells us, “we are encouraged to think of ourselves as fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, and ever in process” (263). Certainly this understanding of identity emerges as the EZLN goes global—online from Chiapas—and imagines traditional community on a transnational scale. But appearing before the net and within Chicano protest literature during the 1960s, the self-consciously virtual-real construction of Aztlán—conceived as a matter of performance as much as of ethnic inheritance—assumed its role as one of the most popular themes in Chicano cultural production. Aztlán appears made and remade, in graffiti, in “walking murals,” as the title of a journal, in films, in mockumentaries, on Internet sites, in nativist insurgencies, in contemporary tribal rites, and in performance pieces, as well as in long poems that consider Chicano selfconsciousness as emergent, decentralized, and in process. And similar fixations with postnational cultural identity have become increasingly popular multimedia themes.5 Video poems by Luis Alfaro, Guillermo Gomez Peña, and Xavier Piña, as well as online sites hosted by “Cyber-Raza” and “Robo-Raza” all espouse a nominalism that renders Mexican-American social identity as primarily virtual—that is, self-consciously constructed. These poet and performers’ projects involve using multiple languages, including broken English, Spanish,


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street slang, computer code, and multinational corporate-speak to cross linguistic borders and to illustrate the instability of individual selfhood as it intersects with the broader categories of linguistic and visual innovation. Group identity, centered around the breezier, playful qualities of the image of Aztlán does not seem, in these cases, to be bound by physical, nation-state, or religious-institutional boundaries. But, as Román de la Campa reminds readers, “while globalization may appear to move the world past nationalist zealousness, there is growing evidence that globalization also emboldens it” (de la Campa xi). In evidence for riptides within postnationalist currents, Aztlán also appears throughout Chicano cultural politics as a stable, centered ground for dissent and a source of fixed, ethnic-nationalist essence and authenticity. In recent Mexican-American nationalist attempts, like those of the “Mexica Movement” or of Chicano Studies Professor Charles Truxillo at the University of New Mexico, “California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona must secede from the United States to form the Chicano republic of El Norte (The North) stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.”6 Truxillo also proposes the racial consolidation of whites and Asians as the U.S. Southwest would become a proposed “Republica del Norte,” united under the aegis of Aztlán. But no less does the image of “the children of Aztlán” reclaiming their homeland inflect Anglo-American (hysteriabased) image politics in recent debates on immigration, and reactionary responses in the form of proposed guest worker programs that would effectively legalize second-class citizenship for undocumented migrants. In addition to ethnic nominalism, ethnic nationalism clearly motivates the signifier of Aztlán. Something there is about Aztlán that does not love a wall. A neocolonial and metaphysical “stolen paradise” that may yet be returned, or returned to, the image of Aztlán translates both the fluidity and the impermeability of borders—the boundaries spanning the United States and Mexico as well as the slash across the binary formation, self/other. Over the course of Aztlán’s long discursive history, the plurality and flexibility of its images—of the flaming heart, the double pyramid, la Virgen de Guadalupe, and Florícanto (the Spanish term for poetry: “flower and song”), for example—have facilitated the swift absorption of Aztecana into a circuit of postcolonial image consumption. Aztec symbolism has even made its way into guest appearances on The X-Files, The Simpsons, and numerous Cheech and Chong movies,7 not to mention Mel Gibson’s world-historical conflation-exploitation enterprise— the 2006 film Apocalypto.8 Meanwhile, for at least the last forty years, ethnic nationalist protests have sought to consolidate themselves by

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poetically consolidating and then essentializing, closing down, and fossilizing the trope of Aztlán. And so, a lodestone of critical discourse, the under- and overdetermined—essentially poetic—concept of Aztlán at once remains an essentialist site (of indigenousness) and a self-deconstructing supplement, both capable of galvanizing political action and yet forever cited out of context. While Aztec myths resiliently tolerate ongoing logo centering, decentering, and Epcot-centering, Aztlán remains contemporary U.S. poetry and Chicano criticism’s favorite terra incognita. As Rafael Pérez-Torres indicates, the procession of metaphors for this theoretical El Dorado has become as elusive, dynamic, and complex as the signifier “Chicano” itself (678). And Chicano cultural criticism offers as many Aztlán parodies as paradigms: border theory figures Aztlán as a “palimpsest,” a “multilayered textual construct,” a “hybrid space,”9 a “scar” (Anzaldúa 10), as well as an “archipelago,” a “rhizome,” and Mary Louis Pratt’s “zone of continuous encounter” (known more widely as a “contact zone”). J. Jorge Klor de Alva notes the “perfection” of the utopian concept of Aztlán: “Under no other [poetic] sign or concept,” he remarks, “were so many Chicanos mobilized and as much enthusiasm galvanized into political action—except for the concept of Chicanismo itself”10 (to which the concept of Aztlán was rhetorically linked). Rudolfo Anaya cites the ritual practice of reclaiming Aztlán in poetry as nothing less than the Chicano Movement’s ongoing “naming ceremony.”11 Taken together, so many critical interrogations and self-renewing tropes seem to form a multicommunal serial poem in its own right, worthy of study at the cultural level of multigenerational reception rather than the aesthetic level of personal artistic production. A New World poetics offers a cultural study of the concept of Aztlán itself, as a poetic series composed by at least four decades of readers spread across at least two worlds (“First World” and “Third World”) and at least two cultural epochs (modern and postmodern).

Avatar s o f Aztlán Discontinuous, fragmentary forms seem most appropriate to the flexible fixedness of Aztlán as it first gets figured in Chicano poetic activism. Chicano Movement activist Alurista, and recent MexicanAmerican experimental poets writing in long forms, each, in significantly different ways, use serial poetic form to generate, and put into dynamic interplay, the variety of incommensurate elements—Rabasa’s “articulations of possible alternative worlds”—that cohere in the


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trope of Aztlán—a trope that is at once metaphoric, metonymic, synecdochal, and ironic (a la Kenneth Burke’s famous essay, “The Four Master Tropes”).12 These serialists suggest forms of pluralism that prove much more generous than traditional, melting pot assimilationism and yet less fragmentary than global capital’s fluid identities (what Cordelia Candelaria thinks of as postmodernism’s fluid “codeshifting”). Alurista’s 1971 sequence—Florícanto en Aztlán—and Alfred Arteaga’s 1991 Cantos find that a discontinuous poetic form allows them to dedicate their energies equally to the expression of abiding cultural identities and to the poetic invention of additional sources of affiliation. Although inspirational references to the descendants of the Aztec appeared in the United States as early as 1925—with José Vasconcelos universal, spiritualist discussion of “La Raza Cosmica”— politically motivated and self-consciously activist references to “La Raza” began to appear in the 1950s and 1960s in association with La Raza Unida party causes ranging from student activism to land reclamation, education reform, and grape boycotts. “The People of Aztlán”—the aboriginal, North American settlers of Mexico whose “adaptability” was a formula for their success (Vasconcelos)—named themselves most clearly in the Chicano Movement’s 1969 free-verse constitution, the famous “Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” which the poetactivist Alurista helped draft in March 1969 at the Denver Youth Conference of Chicano activists—a conference organized by his friend, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. Alurista coauthored the plan with such other Chicano activistartists as Luis Valdez, Jorge Gonzales, and Juan Gómez-Quiñones.13 Here Aztlán—more specifically, the trope of the return to the original, racialized timespace—became the symbol of Chicano self-determination and of a refusal to recognize borders drawn by the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. By operating within an alternative, Aztec cyclical temporality, the 1969 plan effectively predates and thus invalidates U.S. colonial treaties: “We the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán. . .declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, our destiny. . .We do not recognize capricious borders on the bronze continents.”14 This text, framing “the Chicano Constitution,” as it came to be called, renders identity and difference primarily in ethnic-nationalist (epic) terms, addressing key Movimiento themes—education, land rights, voter registration, tax relief for the poor, labor organization, and spiritual unification—largely in terms of ethnic composition. Even the composition process leading to the plan itself is mythically linked to

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the soil, to the call of the “grassroots,” as were similar, though less far-reaching, manifestoes, like the United Farm Workers’ 1965 “Plan of Delano.”15 Despite this visionary appeal to a closed, rooted identity, however, and contemporaneous with the national epic form of the plan (with its organic continuity and its essentialist language), Alurista developed an alternative, “open field,” poetic version of the poetic-political chronotope of Aztlán. This significantly more complicated figure emerged in classes that Alurista taught in 1968 at San Diego State University.16 Here he began to treat Aztlán as an already problematic symbol, quite different than the UFW’s black eagle logo, for example, and he began to render its figural repertoire in multireferential language more similar to avant-garde serial poetry and the codex than to protest literature.17 In San Diego, in Alurista’s hands, the myth of Aztlán followed a significantly more fraught and complex trajectory than it would in Denver, taking on much added detail until it appeared in Alurista’s 1971 long poem, Florícanto en Aztlán. In this serial poem, made up of one hundred discontinuous but related lyrics, Alurista uses the image of Aztlán to theorize ways that poetry may allow new senses of space and time to emerge. In Florícanto appear codex-like pictographs arranged on multilingually numbered pages. Though Alurista’s cantos are arranged numerically (as was the case in Pound) rather than syntagmatically (in epistolary form, as was the case in Olson), they are also arranged pictorially. If Pound’s Cantos’s numerical arrangement (following Dante) suggests the “absolute structure” of epic (Conte 38), while Maximus’s arrangement of subsections by letters admits a relatively “more open, discrete, and recombinatory seriality” (Conte 38), then Alurista’s Florícanto (published at around the same time as Charles Olson’s death and the publication of Pound’s Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII) scales up in serial experimental organization: Alurista uses numbers to divide cantos and pictograms to divide sections; one section both does and does not predicate the next; and the graphic elements themselves admit of multiple thematic combinations, both with other section headings as well as with motifs in the poem. In addition, Alurista activates the margins of his pages, drawing vertical lines down the center of twelve of the poem’s one hundred cantos, creating a field of possible thematic combinations both within and across borders, as well as in conjunction with other themes that accumulate over the course of the series. Alurista uses this graphic border to impressive ends between his first two cantos:

Plural Worlds and Aztec-Chicano Serial Poetry when raza? when. . . yesterday’s gone and mañana mañana doesn’t come for he who waits no morrow only for he who is now to whom when equals now he will see a morrow mañana la Raza la gente que espera [those who wait] no verá mañana [will not see tomorrow] our tomorrow es hoy [is today] ahorita [right now] que VIVA LA RAZA mi gente [my people] our people to freedom when? now, ahorita define tu mañana hoy

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la canería y el sol [the cannery and the sun] [dry grass] la mata seca, red fruits the sweat the death el quince la raya [payday/in line] juanito will get shoes and maría maría a bottle of perfume y yo me mato [I kill myself] y mi familia también suda sangre [also bleeds] our blood boils. and the wages cover little only the lining of our stomachs we pang but mr. jones is fat with money with our sweat our blood why?

Apparently drawing a “capricious border” of his own, Alurista graphically separates these opening cantos without initially providing clear grounds for their distinction. Anticipating Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and echoing José Montoya’s 1967 poem “El Louie,” Alurista mixes caló, Standard English and Spanish, ancient Nahuatl,18 and other dialects throughout Florícanto as well as recalling, in the image of “mr. jones,” Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” (And throughout Florícanto, Alurista will make numerous references to popular musicians such as Carlos Santana, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, and various 1960s U.S. folk-based forms.) As effective and influential as this experimental form will prove to later poetry, here such heteroglossia at first seems to obviate the need for two columns. If “when raza” and “la canería y el sol” each already stands as “a heap of broken images,” to quote Eliot’s Waste Land, and if they relate to each other only “stemmatically”—if they remain only distant branches of a family tree (as occurs by Conte’s definition in serial poetry)—then why further interrupt this page and the poem’s continuity by adding a border?

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Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, in his 1967 epic Yo Soy Joaquin, had made similar use of the print border but with a clear end in mind—to intertranslate: I am Joaquín lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society, confused by the rules. . . suppressed by manipulation. . .

Yo soy Joaquín, perdido en un mundo de confusión, enganchado en el remolino de una sociedad gringa, confundido por las reglas. . . sofocado por manipulaciones. . . (1–5, 7)

In his ethnic-nationalist epic, Gonzales uses a “split-screen” technique in order to divide the synthetic “Mexican-American” identity in two (English on the right; Spanish on the left) as well as to reinvestigate Chicanismo’s buried dialectical struggle. Similarly, Javier Piña’s 1992 video poem, “Bilingual in a Cardboard Box” emulates Gonzales’s localist-separatist poetics by directly opposing its Mexican and Anglo content on half-screens, again, in order to represent these still-antagonistic systems. On each screen in Piña’s work, each language is used to convey the exact opposite content of the other: in Spanish, “I’m surrounded by friends” translates as “I am alone” on the other side of the split screen border. In such dialectical poetry—epic, sequence, or lyric—each world conflicts with another until one set of criteria outside of the encounter is found, according to which one world may be ranked above the other. Where the hyphen in “Mexican-American” selfhood should represent an open, conflictual space between two incommensurate but equally valued worlds, the Anglo American has imported his criteria of value into both worlds and naturally found the non-Anglo world lacking. The dialectically oriented response is to switch polarity and to judge both worlds according to universalized Mexican (Spanish and native) criteria, with similar results. Simply to combine worlds, the Anglo-Saxon/native-Mesoamerican synthesis (Aufhebung or Abolición), amounts to asking for a set of values that both worlds would privilege, thus annulling the uniqueness of either in favor of a fixed, stable identity. The case appears more complicated, though, in Alurista’s bordercrossing translation: as many differences seem to emerge within borders as appear across them. Columns one and two resist each other and initially seem to reward a continuous “vertical” reading, yielding eventually to a left-to-right, horizontal “border-crossing” approach as


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it becomes less clear how to unify the experience of reading “NorthSouth.” The poem’s opening mantra, the ritually repeated “when,” concentrates the setting in the present moment, where the focus of the poem remains dominated by the disappearance of past traditions and future prospects. At this stage, time consciousness is torn between an epic-oriented future that promises a determination of the significance of the struggle (“La Causa,” La Raza, will be realized) and Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary admonition that nothing in the past can be lost to history (the poem also asks, “when has there been a unified, revolutionary Raza?”). Two worlds, oriented by two different temporalities, simultaneously emerge. Even within one column, any single historical perspective disappears. Column two, meanwhile, speaks of the cannery and the oppressive heat of the sun, to suggest a mode of time reckoning oriented by grinding labor, as well as the mythic time of solar centric rituals and the migratory history of the Aztec, recalling a past that was characterized by self-determination. This opens two other, unrelated temporalities within the second column. In terms of temporal bearing taking, the “when” remains elusive, since, for most of the poem, it is qualified only by negatives: “Yesterday’s gone,” and “tomorrow doesn’t come.” And the “when” is accompanied by both a question mark and an ellipsis. These anomalies suggest that waiting and seeing, alone, offer an unsatisfying sense of time. Repeated deferrals such as “yesterday,” “mañana,” and “morrow,” and the futility of the search for a definitive “now” point, all seem to unify column one—as themed around social fragmentation and the role of political activism in creating a meaningful present. In Alurista’s eleventh canto, the poet is visited by the eagle avatar of the god Tenoch, source of the vision of an eagle devouring a snake on top of a cactus, the vision that led the Aztec to found their capital city of Tenochtitlán. This canto, like so many others, is divided. In the lefthand column, the visionary poet is told (concerning revolution and spiritual clarity): it is here now la tierra de mañana [the land of the morrow] get up and labra plant the seed of our self-assertion in the land (canto once).

Reliving the founding myth of the arrival of the Aztec, the poet at the same time remains rooted in the present-set, future-oriented political cause of self-assertion. By way of taking our historical bearings, readers

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could say that the poem “happens” during the late 1960s, alluding to a pre-Hispanic historical period (before 1519 or maybe some time around 1325, when the Aztec arrived), but this sounds inappropriate to the kind of time reckoning that the poet has in mind. This left-hand column of canto eleven seems to “absorb” European calendar time within visionary eschatological time and seems to “sublate” or even to abolish the Anglo presence in favor of la raza, who belong to “the land of the morning” (read variously as “the land of tomorrow”). But the right-hand column radically breaks both the tone and the theme (not to mention the temporality) of its counterpart: zapata’s incarnate feet in the tracks of our fathers order of loving execution —amérika’s— guadalupe-hidalgo treaty bullet shot to justice no blood spilt (once/eleven)

Here, now, the nonviolent assertion of civil rights (which echoes César Chávez’s famous 1970 interview, “Apostle of Non-Violence”) is more clearly set in the familiar terms of Euramerican time reckoning. Like Emiliano Zapata (and Pancho Villa)—who fought both Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship of Mexico and his ruling regime’s complicity with U.S. mining companies—the political-poetic prophet incites his people to challenge the military-industrial hegemony of the United States that leads not only to maquiladora wage slavery in Mexico but surplus rural labor and hostile working conditions in the United States. As in the first decade of the twentieth century, its eighth decade deploys the same techniques to alienate noncitizens, to insure complicity and to extract labor. So in this column, the poet lifts the curtain on “a little bit of history repeating,” while reveling in the consonance between “bullet shot” and bullshit treaties. In this second case, mythic time is merely suggested (forgetting, for the moment, that the entire poem is revealed in dreams) by invoking the specter of Zapata. Further, the climactic lines of this second column presuppose a revolution already underway, announcing that “today we eat/dreams no more.” What had originally seemed like a powerful vision revealed in myth melts into air as the more material concerns of political activism, eating, and sleeping somewhere warm displace ethereal concerns with visionary inspiration and religious “awakening.” Readers are imaginatively torn, caught in the conflict


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between the worlds of mythic and materialist inspiration, unable to find an escape hatch of synthesis or any extra-world grounds for evaluation. Just as persistently as readers need to know “which world is ‘true’?” Alurista resists any singular commitment to a particular language or destiny or to any one set of types, practices, traditional pasts, or future goals. In terms of the poet’s alternative, surreal “subjectivity”—a kind of receptive adaptability or nonstandard human agency—what seems truly visionary is Alurista’s reliance on mythic forces that replace traditional European notions of subjective or objective causality. For the poet, the process of making manifest that which holds authority over the race, be it Tenoch or civil rights, the revolutionary future or its Zapatista past, falls within the realm of the divine. In dreams, “en el sueño,” the poet sees and hears in a dimension that appears mythic. Accepting this realm leaves the poet open to images and icons from Aztec mythology, which materialize for him in codices and his own drawings. The poet disowns any sense of his own decision to occupy one world or another, and he does not see Tenoch through typecast attitudes of his own, but with attitudes appropriate to the kind of creature that Tenoch is: a divinity who gets the poet in synch with foregrounded practices and elements of his environment. The next canto (12), called “you know that I would be untrue,” jumps ahead roughly 650 years to Jim Morrison’s seductive invitation. But no sooner does the poet repeat that “we couldn’t get much higher” than he returns to the solar centric hierophany of Aztec ceremony, ascending “la piramide del sol” (canto 12). While the Aztec world had resonated in the margins of 1960s civil rights activism, now 1960s popular culture provides the background soundtrack for the foregrounded image of the Aztec pyramidal temple. Unlike the timeless moment that forms the subject of the traditional lyric, time is “stretched” in more than one direction or duration through most of the poem. For “the race” to feel compelled as a historical subject and to define its future, there must already exist a race, yet just as clearly the first column of the poem “when raza” also calls for the construction of La Raza. Images of the race coming together to replace commercial relationships with communal concerns reappear and recombine throughout the series. Tracing the different ways that time moves within alternative worlds, the poem’s meaning branches off to resonate with at least two sets of possibilities: the emphasis falls on both a predefined group that must consolidate its past through speaking out, and on a dimly defined set of regional groups that must name themselves through revolutionary action and

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create a meaningful present out of what Andreas Huyssen calls “usable pasts.” If La Raza could find a representative leader (most likely an activist poet), that leader would need both to represent the people’s will in language and to provide the people with a language that they might use to constitute a political identity. The poet needs to operate in at least two time frames in order to translate lost time into “a time chosen and realized through self-assertion, which in turn is freedom” (Juan Bruce-Novoa 73). Each canto, and even each column, refers to many others, in many registers but, like a hidden world, influences the orbit of a visible one. When readers or characters are in one world (such as visionary), another (such as cultural material) becomes the background, giving meaning, limits, seriousness, and contour to the way of being that is emphasized in the foreground. In fact, the mythic dream as a background to the protest actually gives both the protest and the dream more depth and meaning. World crossing enhances the experience of each particular world. In terms of Florícanto’s “seriality,” Alurista does not primarily describe serial mono-worlds (first, the revolutionary present, then the revolutionary past, then Aztec ritual, etc.), but a plurality of ways of being and cross-world passages among them. And although reader and poet can go from one world to another, neither can do so at will, at least not without losing a sense of what is special (what it is that makes a claim on us) about each world. It takes more to cross worlds than the decision to do so. When we understand the world we are in—its materiality, historical contours, and limits—for Alurista, we are able to act more decisively, understanding our local situation and embodying its commitments. Only at the point of being claimed by one world can readers move into another, and this nonvoluntary transition among many worlds concentrates the claims made by each. In addition to enabling both a sense of ethnic nationalist identification and a centrifugal thematic motion away from any singular sense of identity, Alurista’s serial-poetic border crossing also anticipates a distinctive transition from modernist notions of communication to the postmodern rendering of communication as the flexible transfer of information. In effect, Alurista’s borderized serial offers a poetic hypertext one (human) generation in advance of that cultural form. In a different context, studying the ways that “library culture” transitions into “information-retrieval culture” during postmodernism, philosophers Dreyfus and Spinosa draw their own, similarly bordered text:


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Library Culture

Information Retrieval Culture

I. Careful selection

I. Access to everything

a. quality of editions

a. inclusiveness of editions

b. perspicuous description to enable judgment

b. operational training to enable coping

c. authenticity of the text

c. availability of texts

II. Classification

II. Diversification

a. disciplinary standards

a. user friendliness

b. stable, organized, defined by specific interests.

b. hypertext—following all lines of curiosity

III. Permanent collections

III. Dynamic collections

a. preservation of a fixed text

a. intertextual evolution

b. browsing

b. surfing the web (Dreyfus and Spinosa, Philosophy of Technology 318)

Dreyfus and Spinosa engage and move between modern and postmodern worlds by means of considering the library from within the world of the online information seeker, while at the same time perceiving the net as a form of literacy that bears interesting similarities to other forms of the book. Within the world of net literacy, the library appears as one terminus among many that enable researchers to construct meaningful knowledge. But as long as research follows the singular, bibliophile paradigm of literacy, this practice does a poor job of functioning within the postmodern world. But from the frame of reference of the library, the net might appear (to an open-minded researcher) to resemble rarer forms of the book, like the codex, for example. The codex unfolds its sense in multiple directions, following numerous “lines of curiosity,” even while its materiality suggests modern values such as authenticity. In this light, Alurista’s codex poem or protohypertext crosses and recombines worlds, making the particular experience of each world seem more centered. Anticipating the transition from modern to postmodern worlds, and putting each into generative conflict, Alurista’s poem enables both “hypertextual following all lines of curiosity” (the mind’s postmodern parallel processing of information) and “stable, organized,” even archaeologically sound, categories of literacy (based on the mind’s serial information processing).19 No need for a higher truth or set of value criteria emerges from the exhilarating, playful encounter between modernist and postmodern discourses.

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Since the act of pluralizing and serializing colonial U.S. identity itself constitutes Alurista’s protest, no higher truth or extralocal set of values holds sway over the encounter between the worlds of the Nahua and the colonial United States. Even though “Gringo Society” is often indicted in the poem, this indictment comes from the perspective of the frustrated Aztec priest-scribe, the tlacuilo, rather than from a source of “external reason” and judgment, set outside of the poem itself.20 “La raza” is (tabu)la rasa, and Alurista can only command the race to define itself somehow from within. Seen close up, Alurista’s columns reiterate an increasingly complex movement between freedom and fixedness that occurs at ever larger scales within the poem, the poet’s own obra, and the Chicano Movement itself: subject-positions remain both lapidary and yet to be announced, that is, essentialist and performative.

Tr ans l ating A ztlán By unsettling any one worldview, going Nahua rather than going nowhere, Florícanto opens what Édouard Glissant thinks of as “relational identity,” locally—between the Aztec and La Raza—and geopolitically—between Mexico and the United States. In his Poetics of Relation (1997), Glissant finds that instead of being linked to a creation myth and the myth of an original locale and cultural unity— through a “root identity”—a decisively different kind of “relational” identity is linked to consciousness of the “contradictory experience of contacts among cultures.”21 The serial use of the figure of Aztlán positions all of the worlds associated with it into this kind of relation. Alurista’s serial poetic figurations of Aztlán allow his readers to imagine themselves anew, as collective audiences that span current nationalities and traditions while sharing overlapping, local histories. This openness to archipelagos of affiliation absorbs, even while enriching, the transpacific Maoist philosophy that migrated into Alurista’s poetry and the rural-based Chicano civil rights movement. And though Alurista’s second, related, serial poem, Nationchild Plumaroja (1972), was designed as a “little red book” meant for distribution on college campuses and at gatherings, both Florícanto and Nationchild are designed in defiance of any unified account of history, even Marxism. Both books appear in the form of combined script and pictures, meant to recount Chicano history from both Aztec-traditional and Chicanoactivist perspectives, enabling multiple levels of representation. In “borderizing” Aztlán and pluralizing hegemonic systems, Alurista creates what Dreyfus and Spinosa call a plural-world model.


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In Disclosing New Worlds, Dreyfus and Spinosa note that a “world” depends on three characteristics: “(1) it is a whole of interrelated equipment, skills, goals, and practices that realize identities; (2) these identities are coordinated by the integration of tasks into sets of roles or, linguistically, into sets of tropes that hang together with other such sets; and (3) these sets themselves unfold within, and inform, a broader set of cultural identities that provide a point to engaging in activities” (17). Cultures and past historical epochs of cultures make obvious candidates for worlds. But worlds can be imaginatively invented, too, as can the identities of those within them. Alurista does this in creating a poetic theory of types. His sets of types remain complete and consistent, like the essentialist’s, yet only locally coherent and often contradictory, not globally comprehensive (e.g., how can an Aztec tlacuilo also be an activist professor?). This local coherence remains flexible and capable of geographic distribution. Plural senses of experiential localness are distributed “not along the boundaries of nations and individuals, but through them” (Vadén and Hannula 136), so that the warrior priest may seem a transnationally intelligible (if historically marginalized) possible identity. But this flexibility itself is what gets surrendered in the demand for certainty, fixity, and universality. Plural-world thought claims that the notion of a single, all-embracing context, a global ontology that claims a single set of types and relations among singular identities, actually depends on this thick plurality, in the way that the superstructure is said to draw from, and yet efface, its base. Though most often neglected, plural-world dwelling is structurally necessary to meaningful experience, even to the creation of the universal principles that would mute experience. Dreyfus and Spinosa offer that “There is at least one world in which we are at home and others with which we have dealings of at least minimal [projectable] intelligibility, [and] the disruption of our relatively stable distinctions [defines] where different worlds come into each others’ margins” (“Antiessentialism” 754). At points of disruption, misunderstanding, translation failure, and the like, readers perceive that “people inhabit different worlds if those types that the inhabitants themselves consider important to their own self-understanding are translatable in another world only instance by instance. They take it that such untranslatable and important types are ones that manifest the style of that world” (754). Calculated mishaps and “mis-maps” that occur between different literary, linguistic, and cultural worlds can intensify the experiential nearness of each respective world in revealing the opacity of other worlds.

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Frustrations that the poet or reader experiences in the act of locating identity in several worlds show that “each world has a complete, consistent, and internally coherent, but not a comprehensive set of types” (“Antiessentialism” 755). While a shared, universal economy or arrangement of values would allow transparent verbal exchange, deliberate misunderstandings highlight the ways that each world remains unique. Between the poles of identity politics and fluid identity, readers of plural-world serial poetry can experience “dwelling in several, weakly incommensurate worlds, and can occupy more than one identity at a time” (737), that is, by translating their histories as local and multiple, rather than finding a place for their histories within a singular world history. Alurista’s deliberate obstruction/construction project—his practice of staging what analytic philosopher Donald Davidson calls “partial failures of translatability” across conceptual schemes (Davidson 185)—meaningfully marginalizes comprehensive, dominant, colonial, and hegemonic forms of intelligibility. Alurista’s readers must coordinate and migrate across (coordinate in the act of migrating across) weakly incommensurate worlds, each of which translates into the terms of the other only instance by instance. In Florícanto, both worlds—Aztec cyclical history’s fifth sun, “Quinto Sol,” and the scorched earth that awaits the migrant—coappear, incommensurably. Alurista’s agonistic struggle between ritual migration and the modern sedentary nation-state situates both worlds inside of the other. Crucially in Alurista, there is no type to type translation of important terms between genuinely different worlds. The sun, Western philosophy’s guarantor of essence since Plato, the dazzling light in which Dante contemplates the medieval Christian God, and the paradigmatic type of types, loses its universal power but gains in particular resonance as it falls to earth and moves in two different worlds or sets of types: the sun is both oppressive heat source and the Aztec godhead in Alurista’s poem. This crossover enables Alurista to avoid the techniques of social othering that devolve upon ethnic-nationalist romanticization (Aztec sun worship is not a ritual that one group might authentically reenact), and instead he enacts poesis as a method of adding imagined worlds onto the known, allowing for stable distinctions among each, while recognizing the flexibility of identities. If the goal of translation can be said to involve bringing the intelligibility of one world over into another, then poetically calculated translation failures actually affirm and intensify weakly incommensurate worlds. The choice remains up to the reader as to whether or not to ignore the poet’s generative disruptions of singular, leveling understandings. But Alurista makes this difficult. His project is to lay cognitive maps


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on top of each other in order to cause disruptions that render audiences aware of the different worlds that they themselves dwell in. And he leverages his border-subject positions into mythic serial poetry. As Alfred Arteaga notices, “Chicano poetry works out linguistically with thought what the border does culturally with the nation and what mestizaje does racially with the body. Such poems locate the work of the poem in the working out of the individual [and vice-versa]. An interlingual poem about border crossing or about Quetzalcoatl is a poem about the mode of both the Chicano poem and the Chicano subject” (Chicano Poetics 14). Where essentialisms (either global universalist or localist identitarian) propose a singular, universal set of types (or mythic archetypes), and deconstruction predicates all types on the singular, universal condition of their impossibility, plural-world dwelling offers a viable alternative to both traditional essentialism and deconstructive antiessentialism by replacing the aspiration toward global totality with the realization of multiple, dynamic worlds. For Vadén and Hannula, this compromise plays a requisite role in properly democratic encounters. Local commitments with the character of openness, relativism, and multiplicity and the gathering power of authentic, communal involvement necessarily render “the most virulent forms of chauvinism and elitism impossible,” while “a sense of rootedness in a tradition” does not disappear into a distorted worldorder (Vadén and Hannula 41). If, for Conte, the serial form is uniquely postmodern, then Alurista presents a unique seriality and a new postmodern form that grounds local senses of belonging while tying them to multiple traditions in addition to crossing borders in multiple directions. Offering his own “composition by field,” Alurista can employ Gonzales’s “borderizing” technique but not its “choose and lose” paradigm. Additionally, he is able to sample Charles Olson’s Mesoamerican, poetic mythos, as well as Ginsberg and Rothenberg’s dawning spiritualist fascination with Mexico, and to write himself into the explosion of interest in Latin America (especially the Wassons’s ‘shroom-poetics and Maria Sabina’s Veladas) that characterized the 1960s. (We may add to this list of Mexica-phile texts the poetry of Rukeyser, Oppen, Kerouac, Levertov, and many others.)

O n th e “Downsi de” of the P lu r a l -Wor l d Poe ti c S er i es Despite the central role that Alurista plays in rooting and freeing the poetic figure of Aztlán, and despite his innovative and still-relevant

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technique, Alurista’s particular poetic experimentation leads to an unsettling question, one which neither Vadén, Hannula, Spinosa, Rabasa, nor Dreyfus anticipate: although it may be “open,” is a deeppluralist, poetically conceived multiculture necessarily progressive? Can there be such a thing as a conservative pluralism? What if all of the gods in the pantheon are hostile or negatively disposed, at least toward one social group? What if a number of local worlds remain strongly traditional, in regards to their treatment of women, for example? To acknowledge those critics who sense that Alurista’s poetry and political plan do still in fact bespeak or even mythologize a measure of traditional localism, it must be admitted that more than one poetic world that Alurista imagines retains ethnic nationalism’s willingness to overlook crucial sets of nonethnic differences. Despite, or really because, Alurista so complicates the notion of ethnicity, there remain other essentialized or given identities that continue to be taken for granted and critically untreated in his plural-world poetics. Florícanto still ignores some types of proletarianization that cross many borders, such as the feminist component of the Chicano/a student movement: Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). Whether essentially situated in a singular world or conceived of as migrating across plural worlds, categories of gender and sexuality still remain undertheorized in earlier movement poetry, and as a consequence what becomes possible is a plural subalternity for women. As Gloria Anzaldúa points out, women remained oppressed in preconquest, late Aztec worlds and in post-Cortes Spanish culture, and in the United States. And in terms of sexuality, readers also remember that in 1996, Luis Alfaro calls himself a “Queer/Orphan of Aztlán,” indicating that the possibly liberating concept of Aztlán remains alien to the homosexual artist. He and Cherríe Moraga suggest that both traditional and revolutionary Chicano worldviews, along with mainstream, Anglo-American heteronormativity, can overlap and reinforce each other at various “choke points” to create recursively repressive spaces. Finally, although Alurista realizes Renato Rosaldo’s requirements for creating a movement that was “postmodern ahead of its time” (Rosaldo 216), postmodernism in the arts can be a leveling force as well, and antifundamentalism can have its own neoconservative elements insofar as it conduces to political quietism or Rortyan “irony.” In fact, recent statements by high-ranking, right-wing U.S. government administrators, to the effect that they “create reality, while [reporters] merely document it,” put a decidedly creepy spin on performativity. And neoliberalism’s recurrent Ponzi schemes, in


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which the performance of success hide the actuality of economic failure, continue to show that postmodern groundlessness is not always progressive. This said, Alurista’s contribution to Chicano poetics, hybridity theory, and border studies remains decisive. In addition to his creative practice, Alurista sets the terms for an ongoing critique, even of his own past poetic contributions. George Hartley reads in “the social and political development of Chicanismo” a series of shifts in Chicano politics “from a focus on ethnicity to gender to sexuality.” Hartley takes this increasingly individualized progression as the context that shaped the poetry of Moraga, Alfaro, Anzaldúa, Carmen Tafoya, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. Meanwhile, Cordelia Candelaria finds that Chicano cultural production moves from more simplistic versions of ethnic nationalism to increasingly complex forms of interaction between dominant and marginalized cultures over time. Although each of these evolutionary models ignores the simultaneity of complex and direct statements that occurred during the Chicano Movement, they do reveal that in order for each new iteration of political and social development to engage its previous focus (to migrate from a base while in some sense staying at home), innovation upon and the preservation of worlds is required. Florícanto as well as Alurista’s subsequent serial poem, Nationchild Plumaroja, introduce a technique of innovative identity, pluralist “borderizing” and “de-containment” that set the standards of progress by which Alurista and his contemporaries are, and will, continue to be judged. And in the messy, conflictual encounter between worlds, Alurista’s plural-world serial poetic technique reveals a strongly democratic awareness of the need to learn the other’s language—to look for sets of values that overlap with one’s own world before muting the world of the other (and, in a sense, one’s self) in favor of “higher” criteria, ranked values, or universal terms. Finally, as is shown in the example of contemporary Chicano serial poets, the project of writing a poem that de-contains history necessarily contains its own, ongoing method of critique and sense of finitude. It remains just as compelling a poetic task in the present to pluralize Alurista’s “chauvinist” worlds as it was for Alurista to pluralize earlier Mexican-American and AngloAmerican modernisms. Poetic pluralization is by nature a limited and ongoing critical method.


Chapter 2

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Alfred Arteaga and Fra ncisco X. A l arcón For ms o f Fire and Tim e in t he Po et i c Ser i es

Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous —George Oppen, Of Being Numerous

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n offering an exemplary pluralism that both respects Aztec native ritual and offers a contemporary, revolutionary invocation, Alurista’s avant-garde writings—and the works of today’s poetic avatars of Aztlán—generate productive tensions between the drive to build a comprehensive narrative (via conceptual bridges and tunnels) and the poem’s own thematic discontinuities and deliberate mistranslations (its islands). In the richest poetic interplay of “ancient magic and modern verse,” boundaries and bridges between worlds reveal “present and past passions” (Arteaga in Alarcón xi) as richly layered and self-limiting. And these limits need be recognized, if not foregrounded, in order, first, to reveal the contours of each world and, second, to allow genuine conversations to occur between them. As Tere Vadén notes in “Ethics and Gods: How is a Local Ethics Possible?” that contradiction isn’t the end of the world: We have to take the positive claims of our local world seriously while at the same time realizing that those claims may be radically incommensurable with regard to other worlds. The tasks of our thinking may be

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry incommensurable with regard to the tasks of other types of thinking, and there is no (phenomenological, poetic, or other) description of those tasks that could in a non-neutral way devise (structural, formal) bridges between them. Rather, such bridges of openness have to be based on experiencing the positive content of conflictual claims. Consequently, the starting point of cross-cultural openness and a shared ethical discussion is not understanding, but misunderstanding. (Vadén 422)

The topics of word-bridges, islands of incommensurate cultures, productive misunderstanding, and dialogue without resolution all characterize much of today’s thinking within translation studies. And they are also the driving concerns within Alfred Arteaga’s 1991 serial poem, Cantos. Offering a theory of signification that admits more plurality than do binary oppositional structures, Alfred Arteaga points out in his 1997 work of cultural and literary criticism, Chicano Poetics, that to begin with, the Spanish term for poetry, Florícanto (“flower and song”) arises from a Spanish colonial (“cannibalistic”) translation of Nahuatl words—a translation that has forgotten something crucial about its own hermeneutic practice. Unlike Indo-European languages, Arteaga argues, Nahuatl works by a kind of linguistic localism. The language signifies by juxtaposing tropes to render them even more generously ambiguous. Assuming that the Aztec admitted anything like an aesthetic view of reality, or a “literature” that somehow stood apart from politics and religion, the Spanish word Florícanto would seem simply to translate the Nahua word for “poetry”: “in xóchitl [flower] in cuicatl [song],” just as “Aztlán”—along with its derivative, the word “Aztec”—apparently refers to the Nahuatl compound word for “land near the herons.”1 Aztlán, however, also refers to “the white lands” (of origin) and further carries the suggestion of an island. Arteaga instructs readers that while European concepts work by asserting an illusory positivity—a word-for-thing substitution—the Nahua form of signification, called difrasismo, works by creating a temporarily abiding bridge between plural conceptual systems rather than by alleging a link between signifier and signified within a singular field of signification. Some difrasismo terms, such as the word for city (water + hill) work together as a metonymy, while others, such as “flower and song,” work differently. “Song functions as a synonym, for Nahuatl poems were sung. Flower, however, is a metaphor” (Arteaga 7). Using his own ancestral bridge to the contemporary, Arteaga’s attempt throughout Cantos is to take “important concepts for Chicanos and to articulate them in light of a mode of Mexican-Indian thought” (Arteaga 7). His image of “a line,

Alfred Arteaga and Francisco X. Alarcón

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half water [+] half metal,” for example refers to a border and bridges the Aztec difrasismo, “water + line,” with a metaphor from Mexican American border politics, “metal + line,” to get water + metal. While conventional European aesthetics and prosody considers metaphor as the representative transfer of a (mere) concept for a (real) thing, Kenneth Burke approximates difrasismo more closely when he speaks of metaphor (famously) as conveying “the this-ness of a that, and the that-ness of a this” (Burke “Four Tropes”). If our ordinary notion of language supposes that signifiers merely represent a reality from which they stand apart, difrasismo appreciates words as metonymic links (relationships that participate in what they represent). These difrasismo links are determined by locale and by time period, and the links themselves (the operator “+” in “flower + song”) are considered part of the sense that results. Difrasismo celebrates words and their connections as thingly, very much a part of reality. Modern Western poetics, however, considers words as separate from the world (even in the case of metonymies) in order to posit theories as to how they connect. And the way that they supposedly connect is neither rooted in words nor things, but in the autonomous meaning-giving act of the (rational, male, European) subject. In one-world realisms, there exist only the object field and the subject, then, living together in a cramped ontology, rather than distinct, deeply resonant worlds— representational systems that solicit different arrangements of words and things. The rationalist notion of a singular world has not always held sway, not even in European linguistic history. Consider the Homeric metaphor, “The wine cup of Ares,” when taken as a reference to a warrior’s shield. This example forms our paradigmatic case of metaphor (the metaphor for metaphor?) and yet it seems blandly prosaic simply to understand one thing as standing for another in this complex image. On a plural-world account, however, the domestic, wine-drinking, celebratory world of revelers, including the poet, is manifest in the image of the wine cup, while the warrior world appears in light of Ares (and the implied shield). In polytheistic, pluralistic Homer, each world is copresent within (bridges across at points to) the other. In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach notices that, upon Odysseus’s return home, the poet digresses from the main plot line for an unexpectedly long time to discuss the history of the scar by which Odysseus can be recognized. Being sure to foreground every element of character interaction and thought, the poet often provides “orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures” (3), in the interest of fully externalizing every element of

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the story. In this poetic foregrounding, relationships among characters, time periods, practices, and things become explicit and fully present, and for Auerbach, this quality decisively separates the Homeric world from the roughly contemporaneous world of the Old Testament authors. For Auerbach, the difference between these two cultures represents a difference in their respective “manner of comprehending and representing things,” which amounts to different worlds (8). What is missing from Auerbach’s account is the fact that not only is every thing related—and every relationship externalized—but numerous worlds coappear as well, and these worlds move within each other’s margins as they clamor for attention within epic space. Warriors fight in the hopes that their efforts will be recalled in the feast and banquet world (as well as others), while revelers make sense of their world by regaling each other with inspiring stories of warrior worlds (and others). In the Ares case, neither world is privileged, while each coexists with the other. According to Arteaga, Alurista had begun to articulate a difrasismo theory of culture that Chicano poetics replicated at various scales (lyric, sequence, and serial poetry) and across genres (drama, narrative, comic books, television shows, etc.). The style of difrasismo embraces resistance and coherence, struggle and consensus. In such a theory, worlds themselves are poetically cast in a “continuous encounter” (Saldívar 14) or agon, rather than a simple antagonism. This deep-level pluralism (his hybridity of hybrid worlds) underwrites Arteaga’s comparison of Alurista and Anzaldúa in his book, and Arteaga attributes much of the inspiration behind his own sequence to the influence of Alurista’s earlier poetic technique. Engaging Arteaga’s Cantos, Roland Greene coins the term “new world poetics” to suggest both the legacy of Spanish conquest in the New World and the new worlds that poesis gathers together. Epic, legend, and myth—epos, logos, and mythos were originally similar forms of knowledge—are all related forms of poesis, understood as a gathering and presentation of what matters to the community into the shared cultural space of local, collective awareness. And Arteaga’s technique involves reexamining the legacy of European “external” colonialism and Anglo-American “internal” colonialism with an eye to the process of worldmaking itself: how it works and where it oversteps limits in making comprehensive claims. Arteaga tracks various ways that poesis coordinates roles, goals, skills, practices, words, moods, and understandings into shared, meaningful worlds. He also points out ways that poesis obviates its own local character by coordinating worlds too far into a singular, comprehensive


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system. He shifts traditional critical and poetic attention away “from agents per se [e.g., from lyric poetry] to the dense cultural networks within which agents feel at once interpellated and alienated [e.g., to the poetic series]” (Altieri 778). Both the series poetic Cantos and Chicanismo are marginalized forms within what Juliana Spahr calls the “educational-industrial complex,” made up of U.S. anthologies that render poetry as so many multinational marketing efforts to circulate MexicanAmerican expression as “local flavor.” But for Arteaga, the marginality and the difficulty represented by serial expression help to keep it from reckless appropriation, hopefully restoring a sense of nearness and involvement to North American deep history. Arteaga identifies his ability to posit and explore new worlds as arising from his social position as Chicano. Guillermo Gomez-Peña notes something similar in his 2000 Dangerous Border Crossers: “Chicanos and Latin Americans will always be temporary insiders or insider/outsiders. And that is in fact a condition we will bear until we die. And I don’t mind it because it grants us a special kind of freedom” (197). Arteaga is able to negotiate his social placement into the theoretically subtle restoration of mythworlds and the creation of new worlds that remain culturally intelligible but irreducibly complex. In Cantos, he reconsiders conquest history and modernity. In Roland Greene’s words, Arteaga’s poetic critique falls less on “the New World of the Columbian encounter [than on] emergent worldviews.” For this kind of work, “world-description and the unraveling of given-ness matter more than [historical] coverage, which is probably illusory anyway” (“Wanted” 339).

N otes o n a “Fire Poeti c s” Juan Felipe Herrera calls Cantos a “centrifugal language spin-border breakage.” If Plato’s philosopher intuits the pure light of truth, Cantos has “found one of the lost keys to the Raza caves of Fire poetics.” It is also “a book written in tongues” (Herrera again) that begins by recalling William Carlos Williams’s prescription: “to begin to begin again.” From the first stanza onward, desires for a singular, objective historical account, or unmediated contact with reality, are at once set up and deferred: X antecanto: the xicano sign These cantos chicanos begin with X and end with X (page 5). . .

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry PRIMERO. Arrival First, the island. The cross of truth. Another island. A continent. A line, half water, half metal. (lines 1–5). . . An island of birds (6) An island of female birds (13) Could there be one more island? (32) gold? Eden-Guanahaní, perhaps another? (34–35) india (52) Terra Nova (103) the edge of this world and the other (105–6)

Although “this canto primero” would have to be reproduced in its entirety to adequately address its richness (and even then with difficulty), several of the canto’s branching thematic paths—and the extended poem’s discrete series—begin to appear on the horizon right away, before diverging and recombining: 1. Discrete (insular) localities that are “essenced” differently, each from the other, even while sharing (crossing) points of similarity 2. The “West” in the form of Donne’s as-yet-unexplored female body 3. The female translator who (mis-)translated colonial Spanish and Nahuatl 4. Global expansion of Spanish trade at the expense of near genocide and centuries of exploitation and sexual depredation 5. European mapmaking (world-making) as strangely “torn” between systems, eliding pre-Mercator systems (representing sea monsters on maps) and the straight lines of an emerging global system of


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bearing-taking (the sea monsters appeared below a compass bearing and legend) 6. The currently enforced and militarized border “line” between the United States and Mexico The list goes on, but for Arteaga, poesis will involve opening laterally aligned realities and crossing worlds to form a network of crossed and separated local worlds. Arteaga’s centrifugal language spin poses an open-pluralist countermemory to visions of contained plurality. Already apparent is the fact that no one cognitive map can represent the different kinds of worlds that a traveler would find geographically situated in the New World. In Arteaga’s lyric construction of Aztlán lies an awareness of the textually layered character of identity and the socially marginalized subject’s ability to construct radically new yet temporarily abiding resonances. The concerns sometimes traverse the periphery of the poem and, at other times, emerge into its core. As a matter of Chicano-Nahuatl poetic practice—a practice that encodes poetry as ritual rather than aesthetics—Arteaga also relies on the image of graphic lines within his poetic lines in order to foreground the embodied, performative aspect of presenting Chicano poetry. In reading his poetry to audiences, Arteaga follows the Mesoamerican practice of taking his bearings before reading out loud to a group. This bearing-taking ceremony sets the performance locale apart from mundane concerns as special: four poems, the “Cantos Primeros,” open the Cantos. According to Arteaga, “Francisco X. Alarcón says that [the tlacuilo and the audience] address the cardinal points before they turn to the four directions and begin. Francisco begins his poetry readings that way: he asks the audience to stand, to face the four directions, and call out ‘Tahui’ [“here”] in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. This gesture and a similar sensibility in our poetry explain my work, his work, the greater trajectory of Xicano poetics” (Arteaga, Poetics 8). Not only is poetry a conceptual mode of naming what is important to the community, but also, in Alarcón and Arteaga’s hands, it is a material mode of production and an actual skill for situating the community and establishing a shared, localized sensibility. Stopping and taking bearings is not opposed to migration as a key theme in Chicano poetics but rather each practice appears punctuated by the other. Arteaga’s poem does not simply rehearse the orientation ceremony but inscribes it onto current national borders: “the line, half water, half metal” is then both the horizon, the U.S.–Mexico borderline,

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the line between the two religious Nahua dualities, and the line between the Mexica past and postcontact Spanish narratives. By sampling genres and worlds, Arteaga provides the kind of posthybrid, plural-world resonances that Alurista had gestured toward earlier. In Arteaga’s poetic vision, marginalized others understand themselves as existing within multiple worlds, of which the colonizer’s remains just one. Market forces, like nativist impulses, try to create and root ethnic identity; advertising sectors necessarily manufacture “authenticity” at the very moment they take it away—selling it to consumers in global tourist industries. But in response to attempts to render the children of the Nahua as unified subjects of study or up for sale, Arteaga points out that the Nahua themselves map reality across several irreducible alternative cultural styles at once. Not only does Arteaga pair and then disaggregate Christian and Nahua creation myths (Eden-Guanahaní), but when Arteaga claims that “this archeology is born: here / tibia, here ball courts, codices,” he also shows that “the studies of Man” were born out of the colonial encounter, during which God’s book of creation began to appear discontinuous, desultory, centrifugal in its signifying chains, and unexpectedly recombinatory. In short, when the typology of God’s text began to hint that it may be less a matter of testament than a serial poem, the reaction was a felt need for an ultimate order, for straight lines. In addition to these senses of the line, two incommensurate visions of space-time emerge in “Primero.” In the word of the Aztec, the space that opens between earth and sky is the religious, mythic space in which divinities appear—the land of mountains in the clouds. The Aztec horizon unveils a crossing (an “X,” or chiasm) between complete clarity and revelation (sky) and what is self-standing, unclear, and impenetrable (earth) and then mirrors this X in other islands above the clouds. In the colonial mind, however, the central distinction is not between earth and sky but between dry land and sea. Looking to the land from the sea, the colonizer appreciates only that realm upon which construction, settlement, and installation are possible. In the act of conquest, healthy plural-world crossing is replaced by hegemonic suture, territorial seizure. For the colonial Spanish, the Atlantic crossing represented the importation of the Spanish Inquisition (and Torquemada’s cross), an economic-exploitive double-cross of the natives (redoubled when Pizarro crossed paths with the Inca), and the leveling of pluralities (the leveling of temples and monuments) in the interest of Spanish land claims.


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In terms of its pattern, the poem begins with an obliquely stated question concerning the way that identities (subjective, ethnic, or national) may be contained and “known.” Knowledges are carnal, navigational, religious, ornithological, and, among others, literary (and as his precursors Arteaga cites James Joyce, John Donne, Sor Juana, Tupac Amaru, et al.). Notwithstanding its three promissory lines—“Primero,” “arrival,” and “first”—the poem never “arrives” at any definitive reference for the “line,” “the island,” “the cross,” or the “truth.” What can be known—the truth, though not merely subjective nor calculative—remains a matter of how a world is “essenced,” how it solicits people to arrange it: in the scientifically arranged world, an ornithological knowledge of birds indicates where and with what they fall on a taxonomic grid, but such knowledge will not make even minimally intelligible how birds might relate to “female sounds,” “swarming” leaves, red “silences,” and “slithers in thorns.” And if metaphoric conceits yoke together discrete Aztec worlds of the skybound (birdsong) and the earthbound (flowers), this recalls John Donne’s Elegie XIX “To His Mistris Going to Bed,” in which the “metaphysical” poet admonishes his lover to let him explore her body, the body of a new world. This, in turn, brings the poet back to the female sounds of the new-world birds. So, in a sort of metaseriality, even Conte’s typological criteria of continuous and discontinuous are “localized.” Ideas that seem discontinuous in one world may be continuous in another. Also, what may be considered a “metaphysical conceit” for T. S. Eliot may be a setting free by nonviolence into new associations, according to Arteaga. Propositions may be true or false within a given system or language, but languages cannot be either true or false, and neither the Western grid-lined nor the Mesoamerican (“flighty”) world can be more “true” than the other. If the Aztec calendar were to re-cycle, perhaps, optimistically, the next time around these two worlds could meet in a spirit of respectful conflict and not brutal leveling. The serial mirror-play of the poem may seem contained somewhat if we consider that “the continent” refers either to South or North America, but even if this possibility were relatively certain, the more we learn about the poem’s reference to geography, the less able we are to draw a bead on any specific, unified account of history. Who arrives, for example, is a question that may be answered not only on several fronts but also from within several time frames: the Aztec arrived by land during the fourteenth century, and the Europeans arrived by sea from the fifteenth century onward. But the line—“half water” and “half metal”—also refers to the contemporary geopolitical line

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described by the fenced U.S.–Mexico border, across which (North and South) the descendants of the Aztec travel still. “The island” refers to what will be known as San Salvador, the first island on which, of course, Columbus landed, off course, in 1492. In search of Cipango (Japan) and “the Great Khan,” his expedition moved on to another island, and then another, across the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola (Haiti). But over the course of Arteaga’s text, the island itself wanders off rhetorical course. The islands would seem, for the Aztec (and the Inca), to suggest a source of Glissant’s “root identity”: a mythic-visionary, metaphysically given locality—except that it is put into an overdetermined set of relations with other islands, in this case islands set in “the mountains” (3.6): “una isla en las nubes” (an island emerging upward through clouds); “una isla mixtitlan” (3.9; the Nahuatl term for “in the clouds”). Also, by AD 1519, two hundred years after their arrival, the Aztec empire stretched from coast to coast of today’s Latin America, thus forming another island, of a sort, between two oceans. And the island just as emphatically describes the earth itself: according to Aztec cosmology, “the Nahuatl conception of the world [was] designated by the compound term cemanáhuac,” the suffix of which derives from the word for “‘that which is surrounded by water’. . .like a ring” (León-Portilla 14) or “a disk surrounded by water.” It is also Prospero’s island, as Arteaga’s multiple Calibanic allusions indicate. Its signification continues to float farther, throughout the poem, to include Ireland—“from green Tara island to / green Tenochtitlán island, / from Erin to Aztlán” (3.99–100)—on a metonymic journey that links Tara and Tenochtitlán as sharing a role in the shadow of an imperial neighbor. “The line” will become the genealogical line of “the woman” (Doña Marina, among many others) who “enchanted” and “diverted” the Europeans and who bore the mestiza bloodlines. In a related vein, “the line” signifies the literary line of cultural transmission from the Old World to the New, which we now appreciate as multidirectional: European writing, such as Donne’s, as well as Villagrá’s The History of New Mexico, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and More’s Utopia are said to have influenced the dawning self-awareness of Europeans in the New World, and yet Arteaga’s references to James Joyce, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges also recall the way that the vernacular of European literary modernism was transformed by its migrations through South America. And in terms of literary lines of influence, honorable mention goes to Sor Juana de la Cruz, “The Phoenix of Mexico” and “America’s Tenth Muse” (technically


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bumping Anne Bradstreet off of the top-ten list)—a seventeenth-century Mexican nun who wrote in Afro-Spanish, Nahuatl, and Gongorist Baroque Spanish, preserving popular Mesoamerican lyrics and defending the autonomy of native women.

Collective Readership in the Vis ionary S er ia l Poem Given the poem’s “false starts” and its equally numerous recombinations, readers feel dislocated in respect to definitive historical reference, unless we are willing to locate history—even the sense of how time moves—within particular worlds. In addition to “hurling its pieces like spears” (Herrera), Arteaga’s new world serial poem reexamines and pluralizes colonialism in sonic and visual terms. His eighth and ninth (conjoined) cantos use an experimental model, similar to Alurista’s, which “borderizes” two worldviews. But these contact zones have become even more serialized and fragmentary, recombinatory at even more levels, and increasingly self-conscious of the role of linguistic play. These lines involve “homophonic” or “sounds-like” mistranslations, cultivated to humorous and critical effects, and the lines refer to sight and sound, Spanish and English, and—within the realm of meaning-making—both sonic and symbolic references: muñeca, muñequita muñeca de paja muñequita hecha de paja muñequita no tienes nada muñequita nomás la paja muñequita

world-echo, little world-echo world-echo on the page little world-echo ambiguous page little world-echo no tender nothing little world-echo names on the page little world-echo

qué vas a ser cuando crezcas en el verano de año que entra mamá o muchachita o quedas paja muñequita

why was a lord wandering crazy in the veranda but did not enter mother of so much and so little on the dearest page little world-echo

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry [little doll made out of straw little doll made out of straw tiny doll you have nothing baby doll only the straw little doll what are you are going to be when you grow up in the summer of the coming year a mother or a little girl or will you still be straw little doll]

The line “muñeca, muñequita”—translated as “world-echo, little world-echo”—mistranslates the Spanish word for doll, “muñeca,” as an imagined compound of the words “mundo” and “echo.” While “muñeca de paja” literally means “doll made of straw,” its literal and homophonic senses proliferate. The “world echo / on the page” (pajina, in Spanish [suggesting pajaro: bird]) refers to Arteaga’s own hand (“wrist” also translates “muñeca”) and to poetry as well, to writing out a re-presentation (or echo) of the world on the page; and the sonic resonances of muñeca mistranslate “mundo” [world] into muño- and then echo the English word “echo” as “eca” (9). This compound muñeca/world-echo, which is a word (doll) in the Spanish sound system, becomes an unusual, ambiguated compound (worldecho) in English. As familiar with the Zukofskys’s Catullus as he was with Alurista’s Florícanto, Arteaga translates material, acoustic elements from one worldview into the symbolic signifying economy of another: “en el verano” (in the spring) mistranslates as “in the veranda,” while “no tienes nada” (you have nothing 8.5) misreads “no tender nothing” (9.5)—that is, you give nothing, or nothing is tender to you. In this poem, Arteaga does not simply oppose Spanish-speaking and “English-only” points of view—too many homophonically mistranslated lines send too many (mixed) messages for this. When Arteaga’s poetic line continues to transform itself—as it does in canto 9, where the verb “see,” becomes the “sea,” and “sí” (yes) turns into the letter “C” in “Capitalism,” readers instead appreciate the poet’s attempts


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“to breathe” Spanish into English (cf. Zukofsky’s attempts to breath Hebrew into English in “A-15”) and to move—haltingly, in a stuttered, troubled motion—across conceptual schemes. In rendering his own homophonic translation, Arteaga mimics the not quite bilingual reader’s attempt to make sense of Spanish in English, but he is not merely being parodic: the poet sets up echo chambers across languages and models the way that readers can read actively, breathing different forms of life into the language of the poem. When readers interact with the poem in this way, a new collective reading is formed across the lines. This blended text poem uses the strained relation between its columns as an occasion for its readers to create their own additional poem and to realize new levels of complexity themselves. As it echoes across worlds, rather than sounding the depths of a single world, the echo highlights the self-contained character of each local world as it passes through. Arteaga’s generative, proactive reading/rewriting of his left-hand column in the right becomes a messy encounter that, while literally incorrect, proves poetically imaginative. Any intent of clear translation that the poet could entertain in interweaving columns and lines here seems crossed and complicated, as not only concepts but also their frames of reference—semiotic and symbolic, empirical and theoretical— interact. The most famous crossed lines are those that make up the “X” that Arteaga discusses in his “antecanto”: the X that stands in for the “ch” in “xicano verse, verse marked with the cross, the border cross, the cross of Jesus X in Native America, the nahuatl X in méxico” (Arteaga). But this hybrid world crosses others since the “X” also stands for Mexican revolutionaries’ famous gun belts, slung in an X-pattern across their chests. By sampling obscure languages like Nahuatl and revolutionary history, Arteaga does not presuppose the modernist Eliotic or Poundian reader—fluent in Classical Greek or Latin, “there with me at Thermopylae”—but instead requires that his readers study alternative historical worlds or use their own homophonic translations to breathe new life into known worlds. Arteaga’s poetics also demonstrate ways that poets from socially marginalized groups sample modernist poetic sequences like Williams’s Paterson and Pound’s Cantos in response to the complex types of agency that they need. Although earlier twentieth-century sequences were also multilingual, such sequences ultimately use multiple languages and cultural myths to capture “the exact character of certain exalted expressions” (Altieri 779n). Chicano Movement sequence writers, on the other hand, become “absorbed by life in each language and by the complex pulls and possibilities that exist between

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languages, rather than by vision through the language” (Altieri 780n). Certainly, Arteaga’s crossing lines of interaction affirm Marjorie Perloff’s assessment that “it is the intersection of different (and often conflicting) forms of agency at play that generate [Arteaga’s] poetic language” (On and off 187). Rimbaud’s “I is an other” turns into Arteaga’s “I am the point of my own X” (“antecanto”). His “I”s arise where linguistic lines get crossed, which is also the point where readers enter into conversation with Arteaga’s contradictory expressions.

A S k ei n o f Li ter ary L i nes The Cantos brings in to conflictual play—by referring to, departing from, mutating, recombining, and then rereferencing—epic and sequence poetry. Arteaga deforms Pound’s Cantos, Neruda’s Canto General, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s “Primer Canto” from the epic Historia, William Carlos Williams’s use of Mexican sites like Chapultepec in Paterson’s “Sunday in the Park,” and Eliot’s appropriation of Baudelaire in “The Waste Land.” Arteaga’s apostrophe to the reader (2.55–56), “desocupado/lector,” rejoins Les Fleurs de Mal by way of Eliot. And Arteaga’s recombinatory poetics also (dis- re-)connects José Martí, James Joyce, Gayatri Spivak, and Carlos Fuentes. In terms of the visual design of his Cantos, using Yreina Cervantes’s mural “Alerta” for the book’s front matter, Arteaga maps the present political climate of Southern California onto Nahua cosmology. The mural draws a traditional Aztec circular calendar, which divides its four quadrants among the four worlds of Aztec creation. In his Aztec Thought and Culture, Miguel Léon-Portilla describes this spatial Aztec cosmology, the earthbound manifestation of which is mapped as an island: “The universe is divided into four well-defined directions, which, although coinciding with the cardinal points, encompass more than mere direction; each includes a whole quadrant of universal space. The directions are East, land of the color red and region of light, representing fertility and life; North, black region of the dead; the West, region of the color white, the land of woman, whose symbol is the house of the sun; and the South, the blue region to the left of the sun, a direction of uncertain character” (47). The myths tell of four different suns and the destruction of the fourth leaves the world in darkness. The creation of the Fifth Sun (Quinto Sol), our present cosmos, takes place at Tenochtitlán, the center of the map, and “when the Fifth Sun is destroyed by earthquake, according to Aztec belief, there will be no other.”2


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Arteaga certainly had in mind both the Aztec “map” and its apocalyptic resonances when he chose the photographic representation of Yreina Cervántez’ mural. Cervántez’s mural divides space-time into four regions, but it then sets the Los Angeles Police Department to the north, in “the land of death”—within the smoke of the “black Tezcatlipoca.” In a visual rendering of Chicano time-space—a “Xronotop Xicana”—the mural resituates Aztec cosmography without sacrificing its vernacular tone or its evocative power. Relocating the U.S. Border Patrol in the Aztec underworld, the mural also displaces the central visual space (the twin temples of Tenochtitlán) with the razor wire fencing of the U.S.–Mexico border. So Cervántez does not simply redraw the Aztec calendar but she superimposes it onto contemporary border politics. Arteaga mimics this superposition of states with his use of the cognitive map that creates points of overlap within and between Aztec and Anglo worlds. Arteaga’s poetic version of Cervántez’s visual performance—especially his homophonic translation—bears out Charles Altieri’s assertion that Arteaga sets up “echo chambers” in order to complicate systematic appropriation (779). Both Charles Altieri and Marjorie Perloff take Arteaga as their model of an artist who is able to negotiate the rugged terrain between different kinds of difference: poststructural difference and identity political difference. According to Perloff, by 1993, “différance as deferral [has been] gradually replaced by the very specific difference of identity politics” (Perloff, “fin de siècle” 168). But Perloff does not take account of the fact that, although this transition implies an opening for exoticized and clichéd poetry, it also promises powerful new opportunities to ring complex variations on the theme of self/other.3 And while Conte had praised the serial form as uniquely postmodern and disruptive of dominant discourse, he did so to show how serial poetry vexed the possibility of linguistic representation (“différance” as the deferral and difference inherent in signification), and not the way that political representation (and social protest) can reconfigure selves as situated in different yet related worlds simultaneously. Perloff herself bemoans the fact that poetry in the 1990s had become identity-political (as do critics as different as Charles Bernstein and Harold Bloom), even while Arteaga seizes on the increasing socialization of signification to provide a higher level of cultural complexity by revealing new worlds as laboratories for experimentation with collective forms of agency. Taking advantage of his social placement astride marginal and central subject positions, Arteaga writes himself into new worlds, each of which he renders intelligible but irreducibly complex.

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For Arteaga and Roland Greene, among others, poesis refers to the “en-worlding” process itself, understood in terms of both (1) the positive and (2) the negative cultural work that it does, providing (1) the exactitude of world-description and (2) “the unraveling of givenness” (Greene, “Wanted” 339). The focus of Arteaga’s 1991 Cantos as well as Francisco X. Alarcón’s 1992 Snake Poems fall on the New World contact narrative from a perspective of a present that seeks to mobilize history’s once-missed possibilities for open encounter. Consequently, they reserve their lyric critique not for exposing “the historical details of New World encounter” (Greene 339), but for the way that, by a series of colonial, metaphysical techniques, including epic poetry, multiple forms of experiential nearness were yoked by violence together.

Th e Aztec S nak e Wheel In Francisco X. Alarcón’s Snake Poems, the author samples fragments from his namesake (and possibly distant relative), Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón (1587–1646), a Catholic parish priest and protoanthropologist from Atenango. In an attempt to double-cross his conquistador past, Alarcón returns to the writings of Ruiz de Alarcón in order to make historical amends and to complicate contact history: “as new as Snake Poems is, it is bound inextricably to the past,” says Arteaga (in the introduction to Alarcón, ix): “It is like the serpent of fire that opens up its mouth to meet its double at the center of the exterior ring of the Sun Stone known as the Aztec calendar.” Alarcón snakes back on Alarcón, from new world poetics back to New World conquest, sometimes succeeding, often self-consciously failing, to translate one world into the terms of the other. As Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman point out in the tenth installment of their Chain poetry journal, Chilean poet Andre Ajens coins the term “transluci-nacion” to speak of the aesthetic possibilities for creative mistranslation. Generative translation failure, though, also makes critical discourse available and even enables a viable for of protest poetics. These failures characterize movements across the “source text”—and within Alarcón’s own text—of the Snake Poems. This series represents an encounter and response, a translation of a translation of Nahuatl native religious invocations, curing myths, and spells. Ruiz de Alarcón was commissioned by the Spanish Inquisition to compile, translate, and interpret Nahuatl forms of expression. In doing so, he became—in addition to a translator and commentator—a poet and shaman of sorts, and an unwitting (and unwilling) tlacuilo,


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despite the fact that he was promoted to ecclesiastical judge for his zeal in torturing his informants. The “new” Alarcón offers a self-conscious translation, the meticulousness of which arises from knowledge of conquest atrocities and his desire not to remain bound by any one world. His is a translation of a translation, in which four sets of interlocutors remain transcribed and complicit: the Nahuatl informants; F. X. Alarcón himself; Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón; and contemporary audiences. No one emerges feeling comfortably at home. In the “Movements and Migrations” subchapter of “Freedom from Domination in the Future,” the last chapter of his 1993 Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said subjects to critique the colonialist desire to feel completely at home, which must be resisted at all costs, as such a feeling suggests that, wherever one feels at home—be it on the couch, saluting a flag, genuflecting, or traveling the world—such a feeling indicates that this home locality may have become rooted, closed, essentialized, and absolute—the singular ground for experience and the monadic enclosure of a subject unable to engage others flexibly and openly. Past a certain point, to the extent that one feels at home in a locality, that locality itself loses contour, significance, and uniqueness. Once fully “at home,” imperialist desires thrive. This is why Said finds himself “returning again and again to a hauntingly beautiful passage by Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony: ‘The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his’” (335). Said takes from this quote “a model for anyone—man and woman—wishing to transcend the restraints of imperial or national or provincial limits.” And he finds that “only through this attitude can a historian, for example, begin to grasp human experience and its written records in all their diversity and particularity” (335). Following this prescription, in a poetic act of social protest against ongoing colonial practices in the United States and the global maquiladora-zation of Mexico, F. X. Alarcón, the poetic historian, will work through his attachments to U.S. citizenship, English and Spanish languages, Native North- and Central-American pasts, and Mexican identity. Giving his readers a gift—a form of protest that also provides a generous alientation effect—Alarcón unravels attachments to show that none is “anchored or rooted in reality” (Said 336). Each world, present and past, provides a source of commitment and meaningful experience, given the self’s willingness to inhabit more than one world at a time. But Said espouses a condition of “hybridity,” and agrees with Adorno, who laments that for the refugee, “the past life of émigrés

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is annulled. . .because anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist” (Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life 46). Hybridity that integrates a past into a present self, though, still supposes a unitary background against which selves are synthesized, rather than irreconcilable backgrounds that occupy shifting roles of figure and ground. Alarcón is not so monistically inclined. As a serial poetic enterprise, Snake Poems cannot help but slide across multiple, local thresholds and shed residual, squamous layers of root identity as the poet puts worlds into relations with each other. Subtitled “An Aztec Invocation,” Snake Poems is a series of invocations or appeals to spiritual authorities who hold sway over alternative, equally valuable lifeworlds. Each lifeworld makes up a discrete section of the poem: penitents; hunters; farmers; lovers; diviners; and healers. These worlds do not reduce to different occupations within one more organized world, however, as similar elements within each “calling” fit within their respective worlds in different ways and therefore matter differently. Worlds interact in a magical labyrinthine play that reveals these worlds as differently the same. In addition to appearing in sequence, the worlds that move into the background retain language that the poet uses to inflect the speaker’s foregrounded identity in each section. Themes suggest themselves from the margins. And by mobilizing this complexity, added to the different mode of signification available to Nahuatl thought, F. X. Alarcón profoundly alienates Ruiz de Alarcón’s attempt to write a comprehensive tract. His alientation in turn appears as motive for Ruiz de Alarcón’s own interpretive commentary, providing reductive anthropological details concerning the informant’s behavior. Images of mirrors, images of hearts, and sonic images of lines from songs give shape to Francisco Alarcón’s staged encounters between worlds. The poem, “Heart,” “fragrant / flower / open at / midnight” (25), for example, does not merely convey imagist detail— it also alludes to the Nahuatl word for heart, yóllotl, which derives from the same root as ollin, the word for movement (and the title of the poem preceding “Heart”).4 León-Portilla translates ollin as “that which may be defined as the dynamic quality inherent in the human being,” suggesting a presubjectivity and emergent lyric selfhood. The chain of signification “Heart-flower-night” spans several systems at once: as the poem develops, heart and flower increasingly belong to a cosmic animating principle (and to the world of the priest-poets); flower and night to sexuality and fertility (the worlds of Alarcón’s lovers and farmers); and the open-hearted expression to penance (the world of the penitents).


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F. X. Alarcón begins the series’ “Penitents” section with a “Traveler’s Prayer”: tla xihualhuian tlamacazque tonatiuh iquizayan tonatiuh icalaquiyan

Come forth Spirits from the sunset From the sunrise

in ixquichca nemi in yolli in patlantinemi

Anywhere you dwell As animals As birds

in ic nauhcan niquintzatzilia ic axcan yez. . .

From the four directions I call you To my grip. . . (35, lines 7–16)

Alarcón shows the ritually repeated prayer that a young Nepantla or native would repeat as a rite of passage (and that the Roman Catholic Church would later appropriate). Ruiz de Alarcón, both confessor and ethnographer, notes that “in each village there was a large, well-kept courtyard, something like a church, from where the tlamacazque, the old priest, would send the tlamaceuhque, the penitent, on his rite of passage” (Ruiz de Alarcón I: 4, in F. X. Alarcón 34). Whether or not the prayer constitutes what might accurately be called “repentance,” the poet leaves to the reader to decide, but during the rite of passage the initiate renounces selfhood and invokes the wise one, Quetzalcoatl. The English preamble reads: I myself I Quetzalcoatl I, the hand, indeed I, the Warrior I, the mocker I respect nothing. (lines 1–6)

Despite the preponderance of the personal pronoun (and the bravado of the first person speaker), the first thing that the penitent does is to summon animate divinities that mark the transition from one world to another. In an essay on the poetic and the prophetic voice, Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “someone singing, during the song, is not a subject” (239), but instead that presubject stands in a sort of readiness to receive

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experiences that make a claim on him or her. Quetzalcoatl, in his numerous aspects of writer, warrior, trickster, hunter, and farmer, waits at the crossroads of a new world. Each of the possible callings that Quetzalcoatl offers attunes the initiate or brings him into an appropriate mood for making sense of local experience. And the poem reveals its traveler persona as gaining original, strange new access to everyday phenomena as he moves into a new sense of the way that words and things cohere. Though thoughts of death, seasonal journeys, and moods visit him as though from outside his current world, they are not controllable or repeatable at will—unlike physical forces. But these moods are unlike subjective states, too. Prone toward cultivation or destruction, desiring or renouncing, hunter or farmer, the ephebe understands that worldviews are moods that people are in rather than subjective states. Though moods are usually considered subjective psychological states, “inner” states do not really describe why it is that situations can simply appear as threatening or lighthearted, erotic, desperate, or transitional, all without the poet having to do any thinking about them in advance. So the penitent cannot simply decide to move between worlds, as though he were simply “the Mocker,” the one for whom all experience is equally nonserious, but in the predominant role of the traveler, he will be conveyed across the worlds of the priest, the hunter and the farmer, each of which beckons from the side of the traveler’s path. Meanwhile, the figure of the “hand” of the traveler anticipates the distant, background world of a later poem called “working hands” that discusses the plight of contemporary migrant workers in the contemporary United States: “working hands” we clean your room we do your dishes a footnote for you but hands like these one day will write the main text of this land. (134)


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And “this land” is the locality where the initiate comes into his own, a place that can be shared, but over which it seems unnatural in the extreme to imagine that one group could preside and dictate social relations. The “mine-ness” of the land to the native signifies a sense that it matters, never a sense that a person could hold on to a locality as property. Though often violent, the world of the Nepantla is a “comedy” insofar as no particular world is ranked more highly than any other (since ranking requires a tragic choice). But each world engages in a horizontal mirroring of the other (and, crucially, none “reflects” a higher truth). “Mirror Mountain” (in the translated prayer, “For Finding Affection”) is “the place of encounters.” There, the young poet, a “Youth and Warrior,” asks for a mate “to arise like the sunshine” (Alarcón 91). Ruiz de Alarcón’s world, on the other hand, is “tragically” arranged, since different ways of being and alternative sets of values must ultimately be forced into one arrangement of values: ambiguities must be reduced, hierarchically. A metaphysical decision must be made as to which world and which identity will become reified and which others will be fragmented and thrust to the margins. So while Ruiz de Alarcón literally damns all native creation myths as the work of the devil, F. X. Alarcón reinspires creation myths, especially in his last section, called “New Day”: fireflies in the night dreaming up the cosmos (150; lines 21–25);

And in another poem he envisions [the]. . .empire of darkness yet disarmed by one needle of light (149);

And finally, he evokes the Moon celestial drop of milk of our Mother’s breast. (147)

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In the poem “New Day,” “we are all together,” claims Francisco Alarcón, but not united in a utopian vision. Instead, the vastness of space is punctuated by plurality, images of nurturing and guidance— breast, mother, milk, starlight—and almost childlike awe at the richness of local experience. In addition, Alarcón’s poetic imperative relies on pluralizing sources of divine inspiration for the people: “I go on calling / names / keep hearing / my mirror” (21.15–18). This calling refers to a ritual priest’s education, or Calmécac: “It was the duty of the tlamatinime [ritual priest] ‘to place a mirror before the people, that they might become wise and prudent, cautious’” (LeónPortilla 104). Holding up the mirror before the people becomes F. X. Alarcón’s duty. Reminding readers that social protest movements always have a religious component, he offers a polytheistic plurality in place of his namesake’s hierarchically arranged monotheism. In F. X. Alarcón, it seems as though, while one might conceivably realize a monotheistic religion culture-wide and still admit the possibilities of genuinely open and democratic encounters, polytheism precludes culture-wide dogma and orthodoxy by structural necessity. In terms of contemporary poetic theory, Alarcón comes to depict plural-world dwelling as a viable way past the current opposition between the work of “innovators” (usually framed in terms of linguistic play) and “outsiders” (usually framed as expressive subjectivity, e.g., in the literature of social protest). And this poetic encounter has begun to clear a space for a much more generous form of pluralism.

Th e Time o f the Vi si ona ry S er i al Poem While Nahua codices are “post-globalist” in the sense of operating beyond the closed, homogenizing locality of globalization, including what Ira Livingston calls its “paradigm of self-contained and self-sustaining systems” (Autopoesis 10), the codex also remains “pre-lapsarian.” Plurality is the condition of the possibility of singularity. This is not to say that polytheism ever offered a “kinder, gentler” worldview, nor especially that it was somehow purer or closer to a truth of some kind. Rather, the reinspiration of myth in the serial poem reminds audiences that localities are neither primarily epic nor epochal but local and conflictual—as well as being banal, agonistic, tentative, and fragile. But the discontinuity and plurality that set the codex and the series apart from other cultural articulations also form the condition of their own possible oblivion. Poesis, deep pluralism, and polytheism do not contain any internally set limits on the amount of resonance that they can generate before becoming repressively total. Just as open poetry


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invites more, rather than less, poetry on the part of its readers (while closed poetry invites only distant admiration), open locality invites more rather than less conflict, although this conflict must occur “horizontally” in order to happen at all, across languages, values, and knowledges that remain self-limiting, self-consciously nonhierarchical, and not ranked but strategically serialized. Drawing on American Modernist poets as well as local expressive traditions, contemporary Chicano poets play with serial form and with the figure of Aztlán to create multiple registers of translatability. This practice causes “aftershocks” (the name of another sequence by Alfred Arteaga) that decompose the (transcendental) ground presupposed in every kind of closed locality. And these series of shocks make it possible to use the categories of the other without fossilizing one’s own cultural identity or commodifying and simplifying cultural difference. By using the serial form to generate tension between the drive to narrative and the poem’s discontinuous form, Alfred Arteaga and Francisco X. Alarcón are able to theorize as much as they reflect social identity.


Chapter 3

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G o ds at t he Crossroads Between t he S e lf and th e World Rad ic al Po ly thei sm in N. J. L o f t i s Monotheism, this rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human type—the faith in one normal god beside whom there are only pseudo-gods—was perhaps the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity. . .In polytheism the free-spiriting and manyspiriting of man attained its first preliminary form—the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes—and ever again new eyes that are even more our own: hence man alone among all animals has no eternal horizons and perspectives. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science If we believe that religion has a presence in human societies in any fundamental sense, then we can no longer speak of universal religions in the customary manner. —Vine Deloria, God Is Red

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hen teachers offer college courses on “Polytheism,” the syllabus is most often oriented around the historiography of religion, rather than around the ways that polytheist writers attune their readers to a plurality of marginalized interpretations of reality—that is, to local worlds. On the contemporary institutional scene, pluralist religions are conceived as social rituals, available to ethnographic study, rather than as a plurality of incommensurate social norms for attuning ourselves to distinct worlds or authoritative contexts “in which we perceive, act, and think” (Dreyfus, Romanticism 265). Its academic categorization reduces plural-world spiritual practice to a form of plurality-inthe-past, beyond which Enlightenment humanity has evolved. The academic disciplinary setting is organized by the notion of a singular

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norm of truth, as verifiable correspondence to a singular reality, and this norm coordinates a comprehensive rational system. Within this system, the notion that polytheist, plural-world writing might serve as a creative, powerful mode of social and political activism in the present is usually ruled out in advance.1 Typically, course offerings on polytheism appear within departments of religious studies, listed under such titles as Trance and Sacred Journeys, Western Esoteric Traditions and Practices, and Religious and Secular Cosmologies, and while they reflect the diversity of world religions, they also establish and leave unquestioned their own transcultural anthropological method. Rarely do these curricula explore the system of faith that supports the monolithic notion of a common background (a sameness) against which world-orienting myths are compared, and even more rarely are religions explored as poetic articulations that configure local worlds. So while the curricular requirement of “diversity” may be met in terms of course content—in Native American Religions, Religion and Gender and African Religion courses, for example—the plural, weakly incommensurate nature of local worlds is reduced in favor of ethnographic comparatism. As compelling as these and similar course titles appear, they embody the cultural tendency to contain the deep-level plurality inherent in polytheistic practice within the disciplinary arenas typical of academic curricula.2 In almost all cases, familiar categories and comparatist methods structure the syllabus.3 And when polytheism is added as one more among many aspects of a socially marginalized culture, students of that culture are tempted to miss the potential for radical activism that deep plurality introduces.4 Students of Native American Religions, for example, may appreciate a wide, multicultural diversity of past and current religious practices among numerous tribes of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere. They may compare cultural rituals of native America with European colonial religious diversity and schism, but they miss Vine Deloria’s insight, for example, that “monotheism is usually the product of the political unification of a diverse society more than it is the result of a revelation of ultimate reality” (65). In God Is Red, Deloria remains in search of a “novel approach” to thinking about tribal religion, and he sees through claims that cultural experiences of the divine should be confined to ahistorical reflection. Although Deloria posits his own view of universal truth, it is rooted strongly in time and place, politics, and the poetic imagination of plurality. And from the perspective of a New World naturalistic polytheism, Deloria turns his focus on the monotheistic structure of Christianity to reveal

Gods at the Crossroads Between the Self and the World

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that “it arose out of a Near Eastern milieu in which control of populations was the important value, and in its institutions it had continually sought to exercise control over the beliefs, values and behaviors of large masses of people” (268), a project which persists in the vision of universal reason. For Deloria, “Native American Religions” serve as a form of culture critique rather than historiography or ethnography. Religion and Gender courses posit matriarchal and matrilineal societies (such as the preconquest Iroquois) as viable, even enviable, alternatives to patriarchies of ancient and contemporary types, but in such a course, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony seems problematic insofar as its male protagonist, Tayo finds spiritual salvation by reviving a matrilineal renewal ceremony in the contemporary world, even while that world itself has been dreamed up by Laguna gods in another world. Polytheistic practice may realize pluralist historical potential in imaginatively envisioning the kind of “multiple subjectivities suggested by feminist epistemologists” (McClure 122). Kirstie McClure argues for “the political possibilities inherent in the recognition and validation of multiple subjectivities” (Schlosberg 592), and Silko’s particular kind of metapoetics provides a critique of the singular identity required by the citizen of the modern state. A course on African Religion, which might compare the numerous historical rituals of the people of a geographic region, would miss the contemporary use to which North American poets of African descent—from Derek Walcott and M. NourbeSe Philip to Ishmael Reed, N. J. Loftis, and Nathaniel Mackey—foreground the agonistic nature of African gods in order to intervene in the monocultural model of acceptable discourse in American poetry and English-only language policy. M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Afrosporic” writing, for instance, allies her African linguistic and historical heritage with sources of counterdiscursive identity: in Looking for Livingstone, Philip’s persona visits a series of mythic African tribes, all of whose names poetically rearrange the word “silence,” “who teach her the power of self-imposed and selfexploratory silence” (Rose np). In She Tries her Tongue, the subversive and nurturing tongue of the mother challenges the “father-tongue” of English imperialism, including scientific theories of language acquisition. Philip also identifies with Philomena—raped and silenced by Tereus and a Western imperialist tradition—and most recently with the numerous gods of the Shona, the Twi, and the Yoruba: the language groups of the 150 slaves murdered by drowning, thrown off of the British slave ship Zong in 1781 (Zong! 184). Philip’s polytheistic references indict British law, imperialist education, and the English language itself, with its literary conventions, as

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instruments of colonization. And in Zong!—her most recent “recombinatory antinarrative”—Philip tells “the story that can’t ever be told” (204), owing to its inconceivable inhumanity toward Africans, the “preselected” vocabulary available to global English, and the colonizer’s alleged access to universal law. Kamau Brathwaite also offers an alternative cosmology in his Middle Passages. In the poem, “Damballa Noom,” the poet exoticizes the religion of the European: “and their are ceritain noblemen. their priests you might call / them. who talk too much & mutter & make zodiac / signs & have. you will find. a great deal of influence / among the warriors & older women” (17). Here the image of the cross yields to the dynamic, complex crosshatched cosmology of the poem’s traveling references (centered in the Atlantic rather than in Europe). The point of reflection on current academic instruction in polytheism is not to encourage that religion courses be more comprehensive, but to demonstrate the nature of the current cultural management of polytheism: to show that the historiography of religion misses the potential intellectual and political practice available to those who are willing to imagine a plurality of deities and to analyze poetic figurations of deeply contradictory worlds. The old-fashioned version of “American multiculturalism” (dating from the 1960s through the 1990s to the present) is of little practical consequence so long as the “multi-” is contained and managed by the notion of “culture” in ultimately singular universal terms. Frantz Fanon influenced anticolonial movements in the 1960s by highlighting the contradiction between the “white mask” of universal subjectivity—as either self-defined subject or subject of history—and the social reality imposed by the fact of colonization—of having a localized, enculturated and “embodied schema.” Fanon finds, in language and in what Merleau-Ponty calls “the dialectic between self and world,” grounds to resist the traditional classifications of the racial order. In reviewing Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization by Dominique Mannoni, Fanon praises the book’s sincerity of purpose, for proposing “to prove the impossibility of explaining man outside the limits of his capacity for accepting or denying a given situation” (Masks 84). But Fanon then goes on to criticize Mannoni’s “objective” findings—of an innate psychology of the colonized. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks then offers a phenomenological account of the emergence of self out of “a real dialectic between my body and the world” (111).5 A universal, empty, and unified understanding of being—in a word, ontology, according to Fanon—is only possible as a colonial fantasy since the realities of colonization, which would render


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one race necessary (as object, colonized) for the essential negating activity of another (as subject, the colonizer) introduces “an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological [necessarily singular and universal] explanation” (110). In the poetry of Loftis, Mackey, and Philip, African and Caribbean gods attune self and local world to each other, providing Fanon’s local dialectic between self and world. Taking polytheism in its localist, deep-pluralist, and deeply “poetic” sense—the sense of articulating and reconfiguring local worlds— reveals that the poetic imagination of local gods, for instance, in Philip, serves as both critique of cultural sameness and a “recombinatory” vision of play among disintegrated differences. Polytheism in the present keeps sight of marginal local practices, while “democratizing” the overall framework of social practice by looking at the issue of gods from an agonistic, localist (and not exclusively from a humanist or epochal) perspective. The study of poetic polytheism as a response to social marginalization is a cross-cultural poetic study that theorizes ways to create the social conditions that would enable the expression of multiple worlds and the freedom to move among them. The poetic study and application of modern(-ist) polytheism in European culture usually takes shape around Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot’s use of James Frazer’s 1890 ethnography in twelve volumes, The Golden Bough.6 Largely writing through this comparative study of myth, modernist poets evoke the plurality of alternative lives expressed by polytheism to a different effect than Frazer’s own academic comparatism or myth historiography. In Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, and HD, among many others, polytheism is understood not merely as one more element of cultural ritual contained by anthropological discourse. Instead, polytheism develops as an imaginative framework and a literary mode of cultural critique, even though literary modernism’s defining modus operandi involves suggesting a higher form of cultural unity in place of the perceived social fragmentation of the dawning twentieth century. Operating within a modernist cosmopolitan worldview, these poets do not, of course, see the plurality of gods as a political, localist phenomenon. Eliot’s The Waste Land is mockheroic in the service of reflecting post–World War I cultural anomie and contrasting this social and ethical fragmentation to the kind of focused, meaningful lives available during Eliot’s imagined heroic ages of Western civilization. Eliot reveals to modernity its own threadbare culture, and even though the poem claims only to provide fragments that the poet can “shore against [his] ruin,” The Waste Land consists of a five-part lyric-sequential vision, unified and revealed by Tiresius in the Greek underworld.

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In his early Cantos, Pound’s poetic personae take a detached view of the world’s various pasts, engaged in the task of “gathering the limbs of Osiris,” amassing “luminous details” in the hope of facilitating a global cultural Renaissance. “The new method of scholarship” Pound announces, “is the method of Luminous Detail. . .certain facts give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence and law” (“Osiris” 21). The practice of gathering is guided by a future-directed temporality (even retroactively), and the accumulation of unified meaning ultimately controls the poets’ materials. The modernist world-poem does not look back into the past in order to leave its images fragmentary or to render details ambiguous and capable of recombination. And if modernist gathering is the way that practice, style, and mood get coordinated into a more intelligible world, then modernist poetic language subserves this tendency. Cantos begins by gathering pasts, setting The Odyssey’s Nekuia (its twin accounts of a descent into the underworld, from Books XI and XXIV) within the Anglo-Saxon language of The Seafarer. Here Pound theorizes rather than effacing his own act of translation by choosing literatures from two quite different traditions in order to present them to a third, which he is in the act of inventing: the contemporary cosmopolitan renaissance. He also crosses worlds between the predominantly oral culture of Homer’s time and the post-Gutenberg world of commercial literacy by deliberately erring and turning a publisher, Andreas Divus, into one of the oral poem’s heroes.7 Pound’s role is student and gatherer of the luminous details in world literature and history. Later in the Cantos, he will reflect on the poet’s own role as Hermes figure, bringing details over from numerous worlds to unify cultural values, details, and expressions and to elevate them to the world-poem’s Olympian heights. Against the background of Pound’s world-poetic impulse, readers approaching The Odyssey through Pound would see Odysseus (and Hermes, one of his guides) move between different worlds in order to focus and remember (in the sense of recalling and collecting) an antecedent cultural unity, rather than moving between worlds in order to keep local worlds from being unified. “The essential thing in a poet is that he builds us a world,” Pound writes in Poetry magazine in 1915, and cultural syncretism becomes the preferred mode of world building in the modernist sequence. But modernist polytheism yields to “postmodern” relativism as a mode of culture critique even as the later Cantos are being written. In Human Universe (1967), Charles Olson brusquely prescribes that ethnography and comparative literature (both of which are guided


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by universal developmental narratives) should stop short of drawing likenesses across decisive cultural differences: “Who cares for likeness? A likeness recognized is only something to move in from, until difference, which is identity, is found. To stop at any likeness is to stay in the bath. Equilibrium is laodicean. One must disturb it. It is a lie. It ain’t true, at least it ain’t good enough. Or it is a truth for those who sleep. You know, even a glass of water won’t spill on the mattress!” (Olson 151). In “Homer and Bible,” Olson finds that the most fruitful comparatist method is the most limited—tracing words or practices from one cultural world to another without implying from the translation a shared, universally valid conceptual scheme. In fact, Frazer’s is explicitly the kind of syncretic vision that Olson would repudiate. Ludwig Wittgenstein called Frazer’s unifying understanding “savage,” and, by 1955, Wittgenstein had chosen to notice “family resemblances” among “language games,” having abandoned his earlier method of taking the world as a logically arranged set of atomic facts and states of affairs to which language might or might not correspond. For Olson, if the Egyptian word for an offering of food (drp) moves through Ugaritic to Greek, for example, and ethnographers can trace the Semitic roots of key features within Indo-European epic, this does not mean that these different language families manifest alternative expressions of the same fundamental truth (Olson 151). Olson is thrilled, in fact, to learn about the Egyptian roots of words that Homer brought into the Greek of the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the same extent that Olson is disappointed to see ethnographers continue their comparatist method past a critical threshold, at which point all cultures appear to carry the same empty, anemic message. Pointing out the danger of world-epic reduction, Jeremy Vooght finds that Pound’s Cantos “express a culturally supremacist intent,” exhibiting what Derek Walcott has diagnosed in “The Muse of History” as a dangerous tendency to prophesy, reminiscent of Virgil: “The polemic poet, like the politician, will wish to produce epic work, to summon the grandeur of the past, not as myth but as history, and to prophesy in the way that fascist architecture can be viewed as prophesy” (Vooght 43). In “opening up” verse in such a way that language and composition could guide the practice of gathering, Olson did not anticipate that a term he himself had coined (“postmodernism”) would articulate two equally superficial discourses—on the one hand, turning into linguistic reductionism (also know as “pantextualism”), dedicated to the leveling of all meaning into a play of signification (poststructuralism), and, on the other hand, reducing deeply abiding cultural differences into demographic statistics (“multiculturalism”). But, following

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Olson’s reading of myth, readers may appreciate that polytheism can pluralize and even democratize universal, modernist accounts of history without becoming “too postmodern.” And by offering a range of acceptable lifestyles, positing neither a single norm nor an unbridled range of differences, Olson participates in a “kind of pre-tragic pluralism” that “does not mean the leveling of different worlds.” Steering a similar course, Hubert Dreyfus finds, “Odysseus was not a postmodern chameleon of identities, changing shape according to individual wishes,” and neither was his identity fixed, but rather Odysseus’s movement among and adaptability to plural worlds demonstrated his “acceptance of the local authority of gods” (Vadén, “Ethics and Gods” 422). The pluralist universe conduces to “creative diversity” in Édouard Glissant’s sense that against the currents of homogenization, civilization itself is decisively moving toward a view of reality in the plural, despite Western globalist attempts to objectify and commodify cultural difference. Inspired by decolonialization movements in Africa and Asia and the sharply accentuated political consciousness of the non-European world, as early as 1981, Glissant remarks “a massive transformation in civilization, which is the passage from the all-encompassing world of cultural Sameness, effectively imposed by the West, to a pattern of fragmented Diversity, achieved in a no less creative way by the peoples who have today seized their rightful place in the world” (Glissant, qtd. in Naylor 71). Drawing attention to plural worlds is a project that contemporary writers align with decolonization. And contemporary poets evoke multiple languages, incommensurate histories, and plural accounts of reality to show the instability inherent in the flow of individual identity as it forms resonance patterns at intersections with more communal categories of regional myth, traditional ritual, local worlds, and polytheist arrangements of experience. The poetic ability to put into play multiple localized worldviews enables poets to recover local ethics, to critique monoculturalism and its intolerance of difference, and to motivate a “liberation poetics” in American poetry. Local worlds are organized by reference to paradigms that configure the self-world dialectic. In the work of N. J. Loftis, these local paradigms appear as gods, and following epic examples of the heroic Nekuia, Loftis will frame his contemporary black aesthetic within an underworld that is both pretragic and modern, drawing allusions from Olson’s favorite literary timelines: “Homer and before; Melville and after.” And Loftis does perform an ethnographic practice that Olson would enjoy. For one thing, Loftis traces Homer’s model of the underworld to Egyptian sources, as did Martin Bernal’s controversial


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Black Athena. But in his 1973 poetic series, Black Anima, Loftis also seems to rehearse Olson’s final, “deadening” step of imposing and leveling the field of comparative religion by rendering political, local experience in the margins of his overpowering final visionary experience of a marriage between the races. Caught between pluralist and monist systems, it could be said of Loftis what Isaiah Berlin says of Tolstoy in his 1953 essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”: that his art reflects a generative struggle to reflect one great ideal, while he also sees “in all its teeming individuality, with an obsessive, inescapable, incorruptible all-penetrating lucidity which maddens him, the many” (74). Sampling Berlin’s sampling of Archilochus, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (Berlin 74), and Loftis is torn between these knowledges. Loftis’s poet claims to follow the example of two modernist precursors. He explicitly models his poem on Frazer’s ethnographic method (with its developmental account of culture), as well as Carl Jung’s ahistorical account of personal development (in which the outward persona reconciles with the subconscious anima). Having chosen not one but two universalist accounts of self and culture, then, Loftis would seem doomed in advance to organize his material within an ultimately self-closed, fundamental account of reality. Add to these influences a civil rights era integrationism and Loftis’s own Aquarian, transcendental vision of liberation through heterosexual expression, and it becomes unclear what, if anything, could challenge such a “prophetic,” if not “culturally supremacist,” epochal vision of positive self mastery. Although multicultural tolerance itself stands among the noblest goals of humanist politics (and among the least realistic, according to thinkers from Freud to Zizek), Loftis’s desire to fix an apocalyptic point in history at which history would stop—by way of offering a transcendent, ecstatic vision—amounts to elevating humanism to a monolithic force for the coordination of all practices. This vision of totality amounts to an ontological threat. As Dreyfus notes, such a “totalizing style” restricts “our openness to people and things by driving out all other styles of practice that enable [human beings] to be receptive to reality” (Romanticism 268). But even while it seems that, in Loftis, the last (and universal) word is Afrocentric liberation and global tolerance, the dynamics of Black Anima is much more complex. By emphasizing the profound and contradictory substance of black history and experience and by setting contemporary race politics amid dialectical images from ancient polytheistic rites, Loftis both closes and opens his readers to new sources of authority and localized ethics.

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Black Anima is a mixed-genre serial poem that “borrows heavily” (Loftis 117) from Frazer’s Golden Bough. Frazer’s work, subtitled A Study in Magic and Religion, enables Loftis’s allusive technique—as expressed within the poem—“to combine myths as it seemed to my advantage” (Loftis 117). What Loftis’s “advantage” might look like by 1973 remains an open and complicated matter, since by this (literary-) historical point, he has at least two options: he may “combine myths” in Eliotic fashion—as fragments to shore against African American cultural ruin, until they might be unified into a new universal—or he may reveal that his myths fruitfully contradict each other. In this second case, each myth is valuable and illuminating, each is true, each remains distinct if resembling others; and rather than offering different perspectives on one comprehensive world, there is nothing more fundamental than a plurality of myths. Loftis’s poetic-psychoanalytic ethnography opens a field of rich allusion to practices and figures from many historical worlds, often finding a language for the social critique of Western civilization in Sumerian and Egyptian myth, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Divine Comedy, The Waste Land, and Cantos, as well as in the figure of the anima and the literary gesture of travel through various underworlds. But the poet manages this material by reference to two ultimately developmental conceptual schemes. Taken from Book 6 of the Aeneid, Loftis’s evocation of the golden bough before the poem begins, frames Loftis’s series as extended poetic travels through “The World Below.” In addition to Virgil and Frazer, Black Anima selfconsciously borrows from Pound and Eliot, from Dante, Homer and the Egyptian Book of the Dead (otherwise known as The Book of Going Forth by Day). But Loftis’s work will not be “a comparative study of human beliefs and progress from magical through religious to scientific thought” (Soanes) as Frazer’s study was. If anything, scientific thought is revealed as one more form of myth, and the poem’s “progression” is toward magical union. Loftis’s title also owes its origin to a related universalist discourse—Carl Jung’s theory of the anima: the archetypal, semiconscious (female-encoded) inner self of the male (to which the animus is the male-coded female self). But during the course of the poem, the individual anima of the poet so imbricates the anima of the race that it becomes indeterminate whose, which, or whether any self has been realized by the poem’s end. Loftis’s literary project is further complicated by evoking the range of topics from the works of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, Frantz Fanon, and Herman Melville (among quite a few others), including specific references to The Souls


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of Black Folk (1903), Up From Slavery (190?), Moby-Dick (1851), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), and longer works by Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Melvin Tolson, and Robert Hayden. In its reference base (in both Western uses of Egyptian myth and in James Frazer’s work) as well as in its purpose (to provide a regenerative, single “unified vision” 117), Loftis’s project, like Melvin Tolson’s 1965 Harlem Gallery, might suggest earlier-century modernism as much as it seems to evoke Afrocentric ethnic nationalism. In terms of his poetic style, Loftis is most clearly indebted to Pound, beginning Black Anima in medias res, and giving the impression of having followed the pattern of the high-modernist “world-poem.” The poem begins, And I sit here for five days now sit here in prison for running a stoplight in election year. (5)

This repeated “And” commences a journey that takes the reader from the poet’s prison cell to the Alamac Hotel on upper Broadway “through the underground of contemporary Europe to Queen Nefertiti’s Egypt and back in search of black identity.”8 Of equal interest are the poetic forms and precursors that the journey takes, ultimately leading to a multidetermined set of references. “Suddenly the woods / were filled with faces” (11) suggests Dante’s selva oscura, Pound’s “Station of the Metro,” and in the context of the poem, the Underground Railroad. As “music filled the woods” (11), the rhythms are figured as “dissipating the holy hush / of ancient evenings” (12), which evokes Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and the poet’s desire for a new understanding of the angelic nature of the imagination. The poem’s repeated “turning, turning turning” evokes Yeats’s “Second Coming” as well as serving as anaphora to the earlier image of the loom. But using the language of European modernism, Loftis sets this holy hushes not among Yeats’s “widening gyres” or “complacencies of the peignoir” (Stevens), but rather in the political context of slave rebellions. Pound’s Cantos’s use of “and” to commence the poet’s journey links Pound’s long poem to the epic tradition that he wants to continue. And his use of “and” conjoins past and future. Poetry was to lead history forward for Pound, and his Cantos were supposed to serve as a reintegration of history. But Pound ultimately felt as though his project could not cohere like Dante’s sequence had. No matter how many cantos he created, no wholeness or resolution could be provided, and

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Pound perceived this inconclusiveness as a failure of his vision. If, nowadays, the fragment, collage, and series have become dominant art forms—according to Joe Conte and Chris Beach, among others— this owes to an irreducible uncertainty in the humanities, an awareness of Berlin’s “the many” that had begun before Pound’s time and that, as the theory goes, had he known about it, would have led him to write a more discontinuous series instead of a modern lyric sequence. But if, on the other hand, indeterminacy can be considered as a starting point, and “and” only suggests the next element in a series, then indeterminacy may destabilize all totalizing claims. But this gesture itself does nothing to gather skills and practices into local, temporarily abiding identities. Loftis’s poetic practice of the “and,” then, needs to destabilize the cultural dominance of white America (his collective figure of “Whitey”) without destabilizing all possible worlds, and then to build and install a number of alternative diasporic worlds. As becomes clear in Pound’s second canto, which meditates upon Robert Browning’s Sordello, the role of the poet as someone who assumes masks and changes his or her identity explains Pound’s experiments with numerous voices, selves, and “Personae.” Following the Cantos, Black Anima is a collage, and though it self-consciously tends toward unity, it offers a cycle of fragments in not-quite-epic form, moving through a series of masks. Cantos tried to be a “poem including history,” but this requires a coherent view, not to mention an enormous historical sweep. As summarized by Marjorie Perloff, Pound’s intention was to weave his Cantos around three threads9 or leitmotifs: Live man descends into the world of the dead; The repeat in history, in which characters foreshadow and recall character types; and Ovidian Metamorphoses, by which principle everything changes.

Loftis will explore and enact Ovidian changes, providing paratactic assertions and ellipses that present a challenge to hierarchical moments. Within Loftis’s first section, “Changes,” the early poems meditate on personal identity before the next section, “Hell,” suggests the eruption of history into the present. “Birth and Rebirth,” the poem’s third section, returns the poet to Africa, and “Black Anima” finds in the worship of Egyptian and Greek culture a possible return to “spring of unbound freedom” (90). In seeming tribute to Pound, Loftis’s “Changes” section starts and ends with “and.” There is no beginning or middle and each poem seems to throw the meaning forward. Loftis’s poem divides along the lines of his poetic guides or influences as


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well: “Changes” provides a nine-poem meditation, occasioned by the poet finding himself lost; “Hell” provides a nine-poem Nekuia; “Birth and Rebirth” takes the reflective tone of a prose poem while recalling Frazer’s archetypal death and rebirth myth; and “Black Anima” evokes and builds upon Jung’s theory of the anima. Images of “soiled sunlight” appear in the first lines of the poem and suggest a descent into a world of shadows, during which the poet sees Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in the prison library, “reading from a strange history / the book of our collective dream” (6). Images of “dialectics at a standstill” (to borrow Benjamin’s alternative wording) then multiply, “constellating” Malcolm X, GongaMussa, Cinquez, Jefferson, and Egyptian mummies. Where Pound’s repeated characters adumbrate and figure each other, Loftis’s characters await the language that would reanimate them in a new context: in life we were known only for our opposition, the poet among his people the active man among his books the single city reached by a thousand winding entries.. . . Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Black Eurydice there is no name wild enough to tame . . . her trembling breast . . . No Babylonian prophesy of doom could efface the wonder of her effigy striding behind me step for step the windless stairs unwinding into day turning, she had gone away. (52)

These cultural citations seem to suggest each other (in the unity of Cleopatra-Nefertiti-Eurydice) even while they wait to be brought back by the Orphic poet and read by a culture that can understand what practices they could represent. Loftis leaves these characters in the underworld, “wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born,” to quote Matthew Arnold, who shared a concern with cultural regeneration (“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” ll. 85–86). Loftis’s underworld is laterally arranged (unlike Dante) and his characters uncertain of rebirth (unlike Virgil). While this departure suggests that Loftis presents images that he leaves

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singular but suggestive, other images in the poem strongly point toward increased resonance of meaning. Cities, rings, the prison cell, the Alamac Hotel, all suggest centers of activity into which differences are drawn and unified. Malcolm X—who has been Loftis’s guide through the first poem—admonishes the poet in a paternal gesture, Take this ring all of whose parts have a common center joining what is to come with what has been and give it to your bride whom you shall meet in Africa And: (6)

What appears to be a gesture of poetic Afrocentrism becomes a poetic gesture toward Blake’s romantic “restoration to unity.” The poet will journey through time across the United States to Europe, to Mecca to dynastic Egypt and back, in search of possible sources for an enriched vision of cultural unity, one that can “survive the gale of history” (Loftis 7). Though this project sounds universal—Joycean, even—besides appearing as a nightmare in Loftis, history also appears as “the signature of all things.” As the poet “sits in the Alamac Hotel” in poem two, background voices tend to break up as visual objects come into sharper view. Here Loftis’s poetic phenomenology seems quite complex as he reveals a presubjective source of experience. “Turning the flux to objects” (7) seems to imply the idealist activity of the poet’s intentionality, but a few lines later, turning attention becomes the activity of material things themselves. Objects become subjects, weaving themselves into a sensible, temporarily abiding whole. The “signature of all things” turns out to be their belonging within a tendency to gather, through which identity, practices, and even history tend to become organized. While offering this phenomenology, the poem’s two voices (the speaker and the image of “you”) suggest two interwoven kinds of images. In the first voice, “the flux of objects” resolves itself into the vision of “a naked figure [that] flowed / along the Harlem River” and “tied a knot in time,” perceived by a viewer “beyond experience.” Manhattan Island is then compared to a ship on the middle passage. As the body flows away and falls “under sea,” the poet’s vision fades into historical recollection, but past and present are tied together as


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the poet next refers to a specific location, “near the lighthouse.” The body has floated down the Harlem River, presumably into the East River, headed south until “at Wall Street,” it is “set free” apparently to the oblivion of the sea, to reappear later in future lines of the poem. While similarly weighted references to material and ideal views of reality, and of the near and the far, make the source of experience seem unrepresentable, the other poetic voice turns objects over in front of the mind’s eye (the rock in the poet’s hand; the body in the river): “turning, turning in sunlight / weaving the light against it” (8). As the waters “try the mouth” of the floating corpse, the poem ties a rhetorical knot in time, self-reflexively knotting together images of the rock and the body. What seems crucial here, the pattern that arises in the river and tries the mouth, is the image of weaving. Poetic voices weave disparate images together (poetic reflection and homicide), as the poet remarks a weaving activity. While light and vision tend to invite the poet’s imagination to take an ultimate view, beyond experience, the act of close examination and the poetic counterpoint of voices suggest locality and plurality. The poet’s desire to stand back and to study the act of meaning-making reveals a desire for the white light of complete meaning, but “weaving the light against” the body and the weaving activity of seeing from multiple perspectives prevent any meanings being summed up. As the body floats into the bay and away from the poet’s vision, the hands of the corpse are picked clean by fish, and the revealed skeleton seems primal, universal, “free,” and beyond experience to the extent that it is unidentifiable, lifeless, disembodied, and white. The world of whiteness is a world of certitude with no residue, nothing left outside of representation and therefore no possibility of new collective interpretations of experience. Whiteness as an extended visual metaphor refers to the chaos that results when one dominant world claims to amass all other possible worlds, past and present. Loftis traces the optics of whiteness to show that whiteness considered as an absence of color actually results from a compression of all color and all difference into one oversaturated vision. Whiteness as a social standard means absolute cultural reductionism, and the white emerges as strange and strained symbol for universality. In addition to using the loom as a guiding metaphor, Loftis also provides a number of references to interpenetrating rings to adumbrate the irreducible diversity of the disparate cultures that populate the United States and the world. Images that suggest irreducible plurality are fleeting in Loftis since communal gathering and political mobilization require unity and identity. And the image of the ring also

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unifies elements within the poem and ensures a peaceful cross-cultural encounter, even unifying the first poem and the last. But alternative images of the poet standing back from the loom, surrounding himself with different groups of people or refracting white light, allows Loftis to imagine alternative, plural manifestations of the sacred that cannot be homogenized. While Loftis’s agonistically arranged images of the immanent and the transcendent, black and white, rational and racist seem to divide the terms of the poem in two, images of weaving intersperse themselves into the conflict over the (dualist) opposition: unity/duality. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari mirror Loftis’s criticism of the search for the “all-form” (monist or dualist) when they admonish readers, “to return to the story of multiplicity, for the creation of this substantive marks a very important moment. It was created precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape [historical] dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come” (Plateaus 32). They argue that we live in an age of “partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers” (42). To David Schlosberg, we are those “partial objects” and we are defined through the many states and situations through which we pass (20). And Loftis’s passing poetic references to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as to Du Bois and Washington, refrain from deciding whose views were “right.” In fact, he makes no judgment other than to suggest that the impulse to take a side serves only the white establishment, and rather than align himself with one persona or another, he adds more historical figures, states, and situations to the poem. Irreducible to oppositions, images of the sacred appear and proliferate. Immediately upon alluding to Joyce’s image of history as a nightmare and Ellison’s meditations on history, Loftis slips into another kind of reverie: Still sometimes, when the sun sinks behind chestnut trees and evening settles you see the strong faces of Blacks around a fire and air turned yellow and the sound of Deep River cuts through the undergrowth drifting down to you. (10)


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While this passage recalls images of the Harlem River, the drifting sounds steers readers away from the language of doubleness. The sun is no longer the source of bleached bones, blinding whiteness (or transcendent vision), but it is modified by twilight, seen as softer in its sinking and mediated through natural sources; and the black faces are illuminated in their strength by an alternative source of light—the fire in the yellow air. At this point, the white light is broken up, refracted, dispersed by the prismatic activity of the poet, who highlights visual and acoustic differences, as a fire crackles, voices talk, and sounds of the song “Deep River” drift through the woods. In a challenge to the philosophical metaphor of vision as revelation of monolithic unity, Donna Haraway uses the metaphor of vision to examine the multiple ways things can be seen depending on one’s experience. From different experiences and even in different moods we see different things and things appear under different aspects. Haraway argues for a “politics of epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims” (589). Knowledge cannot be achieved through the view from nowhere. So not only does the poet perceive a world of differences, but it is a specifically located world of richly complicated differences, as opposed to the poet’s isolation in his jail cell and hotel room. Loftis next cites Frederick Douglass’s narrative, but free-associates the mention of Sundays in Douglass’s narrative with Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Sunday Morning.” All three texts—Black Anima, Narrative of the Life, “Sunday Morning”—present vivid images, and all three talk in different terms about the role of the imagination. For Stevens, the imagination is “the necessary angel,” the messenger from the realm between the subjective act of meaning giving and the objectworld. The divine is the realm in which things acquire their look and their appeal to us, the way that moods give “a candid kind to everything,” to quote from Stevens’s later long poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942). For Douglass, Mrs. Auld’s reading lessons to young Fredrick provide a new perceptual framework or outlook on the world, one that gives a new look to situations. And one of the main points of Black Anima is to explore the mythic, presubjective realm of experience, the unrepresentable background against which experience becomes meaningful and expressible. So each source is related, if only insofar as each source refers to a form of dwelling that precedes the division of subject and object. But the substance of Black Anima’s historical references seem so discontinuous at times as to defy anything but the loosest kind of

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coordination. If the slave narrative resonated more exclusively with meditations on nonreligious divinity from “Sunday Morning,” then it might be argued that Loftis’s goal is to provide a singular secular mythos. Loftis does not only sample Stevens, but Phyllis Wheatley and echo Olaudah Equiano as well, along with additional references to literacy and slavery—his references include Joseph Conrad (and Conrad’s allusions to Dante in his description of slaves in Heart of Darkness), and then travel back to Homer’s dependence—for both literacy and key features of plot—on the Afro-Semitic origins of the alphabet and on models of the journey to the underworld. An awareness of difference as an ancient kind of healing—beyond and before the meta-level difference between unity and duality— is coded as African or African American, and “Deep River” recalls Langston Hughes’s ancient (syncretic) persona in the poem, “The Old Negro Dreams of Rivers,” which Loftis cites later. Poetry (as Naylor says, apropos of Nate Mackey) “generates cross-cultural recognition embodied in song” (73). And through song, in Glissant’s words, “the dispossessed man organizes his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise,” but in that noise is embedded “real meaning to which the master’s ear cannot have access” (Glissant 124). Loftis’s attention to the sound of the loom involves a readiness to hear conflicting messages without “adding them up” in harmonious synch. While Loftis’s echoes of Whitman’s “Drum Taps” resound through the end of his first section, they do not announce the advent of war. And while Pound’s polyphony of drum sounds introduces his canto four—announcing the rebirth of Aphrodite—in Loftis’s prelinguistic, rhythmic communication reference is made to both the dropping of bombs and the sound of the loom, themes of death and life: Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Drop drop drop drop drop Boom Boom Boom Boom Drop drop drop drop Boom Boom Drop Drop. (38)

These lines are followed by references to missiles scorching the sky and to the repeated image of “weaving the light.” And the “real meaning” of these sounds could just as easily suggest the death of Western civilization as the weaving pattern out of which collective social


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groups begin. Song originates in time out of mind, but it begins again and gathers new complexity, separately, in the worlds of Egypt, Israel, Greece, the Caribbean, and the Deep South of the United States. Cued by the acoustic image of “Deep River,” Loftis imaginatively returns to his room in the hotel, to meditate further on music: The music shuffled past me in 633 at the Alamac while Miss Brown seductively exposed her thighs her eyes meeting my eyes (10) And:

And while the conjunction points toward the future, the image of Miss Brown figures an earlier moment in the poem, during which the poet envisions Brown legs astride the straits wide to receive me exposing unbloomered thighs, plums for the professor the wiry hair splayed out like peacock’s feathers. (8)

Loftis’s sexual imagery opens up a minefield of unexploited puns— “unbloomered” and Molly Bloom at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, the peacock, and epic heroic descriptions of legs astride (from “his legs bestride the ocean” from Antony and Cleopatra) all recall sexual desire. The progression has been from the undifferentiated flow of experience (the river), to the emergence of song, to sexual desire. And yet at no point in this trajectory does a clear subject emerge. But the image of the poet as “professor” then suggests Jung’s candidates for the archetypal female animus in the developmental individuation process. The animus (the masculine side of the female unconscious) progresses along an evolutionary continuum: the athlete/muscleman/thug and the professor/cleric. “The professor” is a version of the animus that the female unconscious reconciles with her conscious persona once she has reached a level of self-awareness adequate to allow integration to occur. This development allows females to relate to others and to be related to as complex individuals. The most important aspect of

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this level is that the animus is now developed enough that no single object can fully and permanently contain the significations (not Jung’s term) to which it is related. In other words, the sophisticated animus recognizes irreducible plurality while appreciating that identity has no content. Sexual integration (in the physical act as well as in the archetypal union) reveals plurality and self-mastery at the same time. Loftis establishes a pattern of using goddess imagery to suggest plurality, and the poem’s first versions of polytheism appear in punning shifts between the ancient past and the present, such as “Aretha is at the Apollo” (35): Black soul sister whose veiled tribal sounds shattered the mask of Athena Aretha is at the Apollo screeing on a shield the dreadful prospects of tomorrow.

Apollo, in Greek mythology, is the god of wisdom, son of Zeus and Leto and brother of Artemis. He is associated with music, poetic inspiration, prophecy, medicine, pastoral life, and, in later poetry, with the sun. The Greek counterpart to Ra, the Egyptian sun god, Apollo was worshiped as the creator of all life. And of course Loftis refers to the Apollo Theater, located on 125th Street in Harlem. Athena is worshiped as the goddess of wisdom, handicrafts, and warfare. She is often allegorized into a personification of wisdom, or Sophia, which is the Jungian version of most complete awareness achievable in the anima (consciousness of increased plurality). Where in Pound’s forth canto the beauty of women is linked to the destruction of men and cities as the poem opens with an allusion to Euripides’s The Trojan Women, in Loftis, women create music, life, civilization, and plurality. Athena is also the goddess of weaving. “The mask of Athena,” a white mask, represents her appropriation by the pre-Classical Greeks as goddess of wisdom, obscuring her black skin in the sense that the source of Athena is debatably African. Aretha Franklin shatters Western ethnocentrism by becoming “The Black Athena,” protesting traditional accounts of Apollonian wisdom (considered as detachment) by embodying “Black volcanic rhythms” (34). At the same time, the shield of Apollo refers to Auden’s “Shield of Achilles,” in which the goddess, Thetis, disappointedly looks at the shield that Hephaestus had made for Achilles:


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She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead.

Only a warlike future awaits Thetis’s son and Western humanity, and Aretha likewise perceives the continuation of Vietnam-era horrors. Yet the sound of her voice is capable of carving (or screeing) new images on it. Loftis’s titanomachia does not merely symbolize a racial wish fulfillment in the political unconscious. His gods and goddesses represent alternative ways to arrange experience, but he has no idea how or whether their struggle will end. Tracing the sources of the underworld—necro-political history— even further back than ancient Greece, the poet is informed, “Here’s Homer’s hell.” Pushkin then tells him (54), the archetype is Egyptian where the sun fell over Luxor scribbling its dread command in Ikhnaton’s brain. (54)

Ikhnaton, husband of Nefertiti, an Egyptian pharaoh who came to the throne as Amenhotep IV in the fourteenth century BCE, famously renounced polytheism, introducing a monotheistic cult based on worship of the sun (Aten), in whose honor he changed his name. He moved the capital from Luxor (Thebes) to the newly built city of Akhenaten. And ironically, under a historically unique monotheism and unity, the Egyptian empire began to fragment during his reign. Upon Akhenaten’s death, Egypt would return to a polytheistic form of life. Here Loftis evokes the controversial myth of a non-Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic source of monotheism and Occidental civilization. References to Egypt as the source of Judaic monotheism, Athena as based in African goddess prototype, and the ten Hebrew commandments as derived from the Egyptian Book of the Dead all resituate medieval Christianity, Greek rationalism, and the Hebrew law all within the framework of Egyptian magical spells for the proper comportment of the dead. Poem 13 returns to the Egyptian mythworld by giving voice to Isis’s lament for Osiris:

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry Come on home to me, Wherever you done been Come on home, my brother, my husband. (56)

Loftis situates the worlds of African religion and modern vernacular within each other’s margins, providing no firm indication of which time period readers now occupy. Before any such bearings might be provided, Loftis typically changes scene and moves on to suggesting yet other worlds. At this point (canto 13), Frantz Fanon, rather than Tiresius, the Cumaen Sybil, or Virgil, serves as guide for the poet who sails through the setting of Shakespeare’s Tempest, figured as Caliban, having escaped from Prospero. Here Loftis has in mind references to Caliban from Lamming, Césaire, and Retamar, proposing Caliban as a symbol of violent colonial history. The brother/husband Osiris has been dismembered, and the poet must learn to renounce the desire to remember universal subjectivity, in the act of throwing off “the so-called dependency complex of colonized peoples” (Fanon 83). Fanon tells him, “Content yourself with momentary / snatches of reality” (57). For Fanon, Césaire and Merleau-Ponty’s concerns lie in returning to the unique relevance of local situations and embodied sensations, what Merleau-Ponty and Césaire both call “the flesh of the world” (Césaire in Fanon 125). And local situations are necessarily plural. Poem fourteen begins with the (Homeric) traditional invocation of the muse before telescoping the image of the muse through at least three layers of history: Sing in me muse, Mary, mother of sorrow, seduced nightly in your cell. (58)

Loftis’s layering is always surprising and each line adds a new image. But rather than rely on paratactics, Loftis provides a hypotactic sentence unified by tangential clauses, seemingly woven around the branching references to the image of Mary. In this Poundian condensation, incongruous elements are synthesized by juxtapositions, but the poem leaves indeterminate whether the point of these histories, on the one hand, is to commingle and indict white society—which has devolved to the point of imprisoning its most inspired figures—or on the other hand, whether the point is to depict a multiplicity of histories. This passage, and the poem that follows it, remain indeterminate in their stance toward plurality. The Greek and Christian avatars weave across time with the woman whom Loftis pictures in her cell to show


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that “[black and white] histories are now and forever commingled.” What is unclear is the strength of this “commingling,” however. If African and American are linked in one fate, then to show the African roots of Greek epic and the Afro-Semitic linguistic source of Christianity amounts to liberating African and Euro-American societies from the mythology of European cultural dominance. But this commingling is incapable of liberating society to any concrete, particular worlds. In a nonsynthetic vision—of only weak commensurability between African and Euro-American experience—the experience of the prisoner’s abuse, the mythos of Christianity, and the Greek literary model simply embody different forms of closed locality in different ways. This is a nonarchetypal, truly comparative reading of myth without a telos. More than comparing gods or worlds, Loftis moves to a metacultural level and compares African systems of polytheism and monotheism, and European poly- and monotheisms to provide a complex, pluralistic framework for the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s. Not ironic relativism, but committed pluralism, even a plurality of polytheisms emerges in Loftis. But whether the poet’s focus falls on the endlessly self-renewing moment of cross-cultural encounter or on an Afrocentric identity politics, in either case, white cultural hegemony means cultural death. Mary is the victim of caseworkers, after all, who fall upon her “like cloud-gathering Zeus” (58). But this is also a Jungian passage. Anima development refers to the process in which male subjectivity opens itself to emotionality, and, in that way, to a broader spirituality by creating a new conscious paradigm that respects intuitive processes, creativity and imagination, and psychic sensitivity toward others. Along this journey, the third phase of the anima after identifying with Eve and Helen involves identifying with Mary, named for the Christian theological understanding. At this level, the male anima has developed a receptivity to women, who are seen as irreducible to the simple terms of virtue. The poet and Fanon pass on through a series of other historically compressed images. Loftis portrays Virgil’s Carthaginian (African) queen, Dido (whom Aeneas does encounter in the underworld) as a welfare mother (62), in addition to the image of Odysseus soliciting a prostitute and riding at the stern of a vibrating bed. Nonetheless, the poet withholds implicit value judgments between epochs, and, as a result, these images, iterations, and constellations do not form Eliotic mock-heroic compressions. Loftis’s allusions open a field of signifiers, citations arranged on the page as partially integrated quotes (like the index at the back of the book). This flux of experience is capable of gathering itself into intelligible reference, but not into coherent criteria for value judgments.

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Dominant history leaves a trail of wreckage and unintegrated lives at its margins. According to Reyes Mate, a similar form of unintegrated image field appears in Walter Benjamin’s theological reflections. And for Mate, the poetic act of finding contemporary resonances among fragmentary experiences from the past might create a plurality of integrated experiences. For Mate, “while the cause of the oppressed does not prevail, the victors of yesteryear continue to produce victims, new victims. That entails the acknowledgment of solidarity between generations; the noble causes of the past generations make it possible to overcome the injustices that are committed against us. And they will not die again in vain if their cause would triumph in posterity.”10 Both Odysseus and Aeneas left victims along the trail of their journeys of exploration and the founding of empire. And in one reading of Black Anima, Loftis gives a voice to these oppressed. This triumph of the present appears when the poet next compares “Dante’s Hell” and “the stockyards of Chicago” (64). In the stockyards, slumlords are hung and gutted like pigs while politicians boil in their own fat and the people who run the yards “have won revolutionary victories in the street” (66). More than simple revenge, Loftis envisions inventive contemporary settings in which past victims of European history may gather and redress the wrongs of the past. According to Lucero-Montano, “in Benjamin’s view, the past that really matters—the liberating past—is the one that is not present. For the theories of progress, the past assumes the cost of the future; for historicism, the past is the substance of ideology that legitimates the present, and facilitates the reproduction of the past, that is, the relations of domination and power.” But Benjamin grants the past a new meaning. He looks for that past that might be capable of shaking the actual structures, capable of stopping the trade of present happiness for past suffering, capable of stopping the reproduction of past misery and injustice. For Benjamin, the object of historical analysis “is a special past, which must reveal a new dimension of history”: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognition, and is never seen again. . .For it is an irretrievable image of the past that threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image” (Benjamin, Illuminations 255).11 For Loftis, social disarray exists across 3,000 years of Western imperialist history, which has marginalized alternative ways of encountering human beings in pursuit of the empty dream of control over all possible worlds. “Now” is no different than “then,” so long as the oppressed fail to recognize their revolutionary potential. But that revolution cannot be Marxist.


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There must be no point at which the subject of history comes into full self-mastery, so revolution must consist in restoring the many rather than replacing the one. Benjamin’s “dialectical image” describes an image produced by a new mode of production (in Benjamin’s case, industrial capitalism, but one could also think of the postmodern lyric) “in which the new is intermingled with the old” (“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” 148). Benjamin suggests that “these images are wishful fantasies” through which the proletariat (or collective) could preserve the novelty of the present system of production while appealing to “prehistory” in order to imagine a classless (or collective, utopian) society. Benjamin suggests that the dialectical image can be presented by the commodity but only as a fetish object or substitute for the actual dialectical image. Loftis’s Nekuia is rife with dialectical images but the vision of a fragmentary past also propels the poem forward. In echoes of Eliot, the poet is told to leave this exhibit of images, even though he looks back like “The Angel of History” on ruins: You cannot look upon a dawn’s fawn flesh where a moonlight city stands dismembered as bones in a butcher’s can. (73)

The section titled “Birth and Rebirth” immediately succeeds this image, and in it, the emergence from the “hellhole” is accompanied by richly colorful descriptions of the dawn: “Soft whirls of sunlight fondle your face as the dawn rises to greet you from her place dropped over the black mountain like a rosy necklace” (77). The poet is told, “You must begin here at the beginning, if it is a beginning, risking everything, even death, if you are to escape the death already taken root in you” (77). In the land of the dead in Virgil, there is no risk, and in Virgil’s world, the only gods are gods who govern empire. Loftis needs to find, or to reanimate, older gods—previous ways of organizing worlds—who enable true joy and sadness, love, and dynamism. These gods can inspire New World African people, generating worlds to which they can commit and for which they are willing to take risks. Risking death means ascribing authority to a cause, willing to die for it, and therefore willing to define an identity in reference to that world. The poet emerges from hell off the coast of Barcelona, at sea, still lost but reassured by the sight of land: “The ship tosses softly by high cliffs” (77). At this point, again, rhythmic sound is accompanied by images of woven light:

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry Churning churning churning weaving the light against it.

And the morning sunrise is figured as “not even the light, but the new gleam nourishing itself in the womb of sky” (77). Still at sea, the poet sees a naked figure floating before his boat, still suggestive of the middle passage and the corpse in the Harlem River, but now the body speaks: America my nation Egypt is my destination. (79)

As the poet is reborn, the middle passage is reversed, and the United States belongs to the poet’s past, Africa to his future. Explicitly citing Amiri Baraka’s statement, “We are an African people” (Loftis 81), the poet realizes that belonging to a world involves being deeply inscribed by it, embodying it. Therefore, a change of world cannot come about solely by renunciation, but to become a destiny or destination the African future needs to offer compelling possibilities that had previously been scattered to the margins of American culture. As the poet arrives in Egypt, the experience of newness overwhelms him, and he remarks in an apostrophe to the reader, “You can make little sense of this hieroglyphic muddle” (83). And the poet imagines that “the shadow of history” stretches before him. As he becomes more familiar with his new environment, he sees that “what time has taken away” (to wit, revolutionary history), “it must give back again” (88). The mummified body that the poet encounters stands for an embalmed history, a body more or less preserved from history. But the mummy itself is overdetermined. Although a preserved Egyptian source of alternative, unspoken history awaits reanimation, the emerging orientalism in the United States during the nineteenth century also established a new cultural fascination with Egypt and a commodification of the ancient as well as a fetish object in the mummy. “Birth and Rebirth,” the prose poem dedicated largely to Aphrodite, reborn on the surf, begins with an image of “the white huntress” who “rises at dawn to feed the swans, and at evening she hunts the menacing black boar, with flashlight probing the forest or stalking the string of fishing villages along the Nile” (84). The lover turned huntress “was Aphrodite, whiling away the afternoon beneath a tree in the forest reading Moby-Dick, or hunting that old bear with a stick” (85). That Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty, fertility, and erotic love, would spend her afternoons reading Moby-Dick seems difficult to imagine but


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several pregnant links suggest themselves at this point. Like Loftis’s earlier passages that link images of whiteness and empty universality, in Moby-Dick, Melville, too, meditates on the meaning of whiteness: Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?. . .the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge. (194)

Aphrodite, the white goddess, is described as having been born from the sea, and the Greek term is “foam-born,” from aphros. The rebirth of Aphrodite suggests cultural renaissance in Pound (“a cock crows in the sea-foam”). But in Loftis, cultural regeneration is more complex. In Moby-Dick, Melville uses whiteness as an (overdetermined) symbol for overdetermination. And for Loftis, while whiteness represents anemia and death, the rainbow, a chorus of sounds, and the practice of weaving all suggest plurality as health.12 Whiteness refers to the “dumb blankness full of meaning” that results from trying to add up all possible worlds (or colors) into a singular principle, which then reflects its uniform, blank appearance back on objects. But within Loftis’s duality of black and white, black equates to “the land from which you came, calm and vibrant like a double swirl of flutes drowned by the burst of mandolins.” Against this world he sets “the world of Whitey with its three-button-suits and revolutions over the price of tea” (93). White America is not simply characterized as obsessively conformist (gray-flannel suited) but as engaged primarily, and almost exclusively, in practices of cultural homogenization. Loftis refracts this homogenizing gaze in favor of a more varied background, colored by vibrant images and complex acoustics. In a new, receptive state, the black poet leaves Lenox Avenue’s “cheap neon light”—that is, American commodified brightness, guided by neither compass nor sextant, “for to reach the sacred city, you must lose yourself to the other more godly possibility in you, leaving the familiar avenue, suddenly startled by the noise of birds” (94). “Catching up to [black] destiny” means that the reader must “cling to the depth within you, that drives you, turns you, like some

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old bird-god consuming itself to be more fully what it is” (95). This bird god is the phoenix, a unique bird that lived for centuries in the Arabian desert and then burned itself on a funeral pyre and rose from the ashes with renewed youth to live through another cycle, suggesting that the race might possibly, but not necessarily, emerge renewed after apparent disaster or destruction. But the poet also brings the Egyptian world back to Manhattan, so that even Lenox Avenue seems to reveal magical possibilities. The spirit of conciliation leads the poet to leave history behind without forgetting it, but at the same time, he welcomes the “friendly dialectic that shocks Justice out of her sleeping and substitutes new meaning in the place of the old” (96). And the poem ends undecidedly between two stances toward plurality. As the poem closes, the poet seems both to have completed a journey and arrived at a homecoming beyond current American racist practice, almost to have attained a view beyond experience, situated in a cosmic perspective and an elevated mood. And as black “spiritual and racial salvation are wedded,” the poet realizes that “all this was woven upon the symbolic ring you placed around her finger,” which links African and North American continents (109). Though different worlds are woven together without collapsing into one another, the close of the poem “gives back what time has taken away,” and “the wedding party dances down Broadway, unconcerned about the weather or what the day will bring” (Loftis 110). Although the poem surveys multiple manifestations of the sacred, these are finally unified in at least four modes: 1. In a synthesized Marxian dialectic—where the African people are the subject of history, and history as subject becomes fully selfaware 2. In a Jungian process of becoming conscious of deep unifying principles 3. In a related Jungian process that ironically leads readers to recognize the absolute specificity of each self 4. In the reconciliation of Egyptian with Greek (Isis-Aphrodite) cultural elements, on the model of Frazer’s ethnography. In Loftis’s comparative ethnography, the god that attunes readers to the poet’s final, cosmic mood (accompanying his “single unified vision”; 117) is the black anima, the soul of the world. The poet seems to have provided a modernist monotheism that has reconciled the contradictions among gods of incommensurate cultures. In a decidedly


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Eliotic vain, Loftis uses a range of footnotes and endnotes to guide readers through his allusive field: “Aphrodite is also Isis, in search of Osiris, her lover-brother,” and she offers “the promise of renewal, yet she remains only a promise” (117). The two most important myths for Loftis “are those of Aphrodite and Osiris, which [Loftis] has purposefully melded with the modern sexual myths of Black-White relationships” (117). In a sexual integration between black and white, the black male has accepted the black anima. Images of Africa enfold Europe, and the African goddess marries Adonis.13 While acoustic images from weaving (the “purled air”; 27) suggest knitting, swirling motion, or babbling sound, and these sounds interrupt the poet’s experience of the British (imperial historical) Museum, the poet nonetheless seems to offer a singular, if much more capacious, Afrocentric account of history that comes to displace Anglo-American history. Loftis comments on his poem as archetypal monomyth toward the end of the text: “This too was prefigured in the dance, binding the transitory body to a soul in which all the old archetypes flutter about in their accustomed way” (109). But this extended metaphor takes a typically undecidable position with regards to plurality. Mainly for the reason that readers are not familiar with “the accustomed way” of archetypes, Loftis can convey both a sense of fate (a dance that prefigures a union) and a diametrically opposed gesture: the reembodiment (relocalization) of plural worlds that had been subsumed to a universal ideal. This reembodiment of experience repeats the poetic standing back from the loom and the refraction of whiteness: the relation of body to world is modeled on the pattern of fluttering butterflies. In both the pattern of butterfly wings and in the pattern of their flight, butterflies provide an image from nature suggesting richly complicated movement from plurality to singularity and back. Toward the end of his journey, the poet learns, “you cannot see it [as ending], but you can see it as beginning. We are only the bud now, but shall come to be the full thing, spreading out across the ghetto landscape like a vast horizon” (90). The poem ends with a return, of sorts, to the original terms of the poem: “For a long time you’ve traveled in two separate worlds” (93), but now those two worlds will becomes something else. The images that have guided most of the text are black/white, followed by unity/dualism. But what is implied is a final opposition: unity–versus-duality/plurality. These more complicated terms arise more clearly later, as plurality infuses duality. Loftis seems to reconcile his disparate cultural material within a broader framework of Jungian archetypes, except that he also breaks up the godhead at the same time that he consolidates it.

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So, does a monochrome light “dawn upon on the whole,” to borrow Wittgenstein’s phrase, or does the image of weaving weave the poem into a more textured—plural and yet related—set of meanings (modes of self-world dialectic) that are attuned by various gods? In its imagery, the poem trembles between a deep pluralist logic of weaving and an ultimately unified and unifying vision, centralizing its meaning. But what seems to carry the poem beyond the agon of various historical and social worlds into a final vision are its premises in the universality of Frazer’s model, its starting point in the Jungian individual subject, Jung’s own universalism, a residual 1960s communal vision of utopia and perhaps, most of all, Loftis’s own poetic precursors. A clue to the cultural sources for Loftis’s ambivalence and his aporia regarding whether holism or particularity gain the upper hand in Black Anima may come from a material cultural source, lying within the publishing industry itself. According to the stated agenda of the Livewright Press imprint, Black Anima in effect reanimates the modernism of the New York Armory show, held sixty years prior. Livewright published e. e. cummings, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Hart Crane, and a number of other early twentieth-century luminaries, and the goal of the press’ New Writers Series, which published the thirty-year-old Loftis poem, is “to encourage today’s young writers, provide the best of contemporary writing for the reading public, and again play a part in discovering tomorrow’s greats.”14 The ghostly notion of finding “tomorrow’s greats” today admits a strangely divided, posthumous temporality that encourages poets to anticipate (and by anticipating, bring about) a paradigm that must be more universal and inclusive than any present system. Our current literary temporality assumes two stances toward time and language, both “modern” but each opposed to the other. The tendency to consider the eventual—positive or negative—reception of a literary corpus as somehow destined from its creation suggests that in the course of our everyday time-reckoning, our historical gaze falls forward from the present, that is, toward a future that will provide increasing clarity about the past. In Heidegger’s definitively modernist statement, “authentic” time involves “a running ahead [that] seizes [and makes sense of] the past.”15 Within this scheme, or system of time, human being is essentially future-directed. In his discussion of the Greek Kairos as “the Moment that lies in resoluteness,” Heidegger borrows a term from Kierkegaard and thinks of authentic time as “the blink of an eye” (Augenblick), in which one receives an identity that gives new meaning to one’s past actions. Such a refocusing of roles and goals creates a coherent, retrospective or


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revisionist narrative of past events, re-oriented toward one’s new way of being in the world.16 Heidegger’s sense of modernity also echoes Nietzsche’s account of art’s possibilities in our age. For later Nietzsche, art can direct “modernity against history, [as] a kind of forgetting that is a new origin, giving us a new past.”17 Unity in the future is (seen to have been) prefigured in advance. For Heidegger, the form most adequate to the task of making it new—of naming a new cultural paradigm—is poesis (or Dichtung), and his examples are drawn largely from (German romantic) lyric poetry. On the other hand, assuming that literary reclamation also remains the duty of our enlightened vigilance in reexamining the past, criticism assigns an active role to remembrance and finds the past forever unresolved. In this alternative, past-directed account of temporality, “[even] the anticipation of what is new in the future is realized only through remembering a past that has been suppressed.”18 As Walter Benjamin thinks of it, in his view of an “authentic” or all-encompassing experience (Erfahrung) of history, “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”19 Art reveals dead cities, much as Loftis’s backward gazes often do. In Benjamin’s understanding, the past does not prefigure so much as it makes demands on the present, whose duty it is to reopen the past to radical scrutiny. In this scheme, the past stands before us, awaiting our reinscription of it with every present moment. To adopt this view and to break from our customary sense of history as continuity— as a series of developments predicated on earlier developments—is “to sacrifice the epic dimension of history, in favor of a specific and unique engagement with [the past].”20 The task of Benjamin’s historical materialist is to unveil moments in the past that seem discontinuous with their larger context and to highlight their revolutionary but unrealized potential: “to set to work an engagement with history original to every new present”21 before being swept “backward” into the future.22 As a collector of fragments, Loftis also weaves the noise of colonialism’s victims into his visit of the British Museum, as well as rescuing Mary from victimization, and making plural discontinuous worlds out of the different views of Du Bois and Washington, Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Jr. The form most fit to this cultural work of remembrance, Benjamin, at times, suggests, is poetry: “Remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever deeper layers.”23 For Heidegger,

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poetry becomes a future-oriented act, the “founding, grounding, beginning, and bestowing”24 of a unified cultural understanding (that Heidegger calls aletheic “truth”). By contrast, in Benjamin, the special “rhapsodic” insight that poetry enables makes it an expressive form especially well suited to unearthing the past. In fact, the word rhapsodic comes from the Greek word rhaptein, which means “to stitch.” As a fragment of the epic, a song that gets stitched into a larger whole, the rhapsody remains much more limited in its resonances and range of reference than the epos. Benjamin’s gaze into the past reveals a discrete series of unstitched fragments. To some extent, reconciling these oppositional tendencies, which locate revolutionary potential either in the future or the past, our modernist aesthetic of time distinguishes itself from other epochs by rendering the present as “an authentic moment seamlessly unified by both tradition and innovation” (Habermas, Discourses 11). In thinking of the present as the site on which past experiences simply unfold into futural expectations, we elide the incommensurate understandings of time that are held suspended in our sense of modernity. But as Loftis’s Black Anima makes us aware—as much through its limitations as its successes—the smoothed-over consciousness of time constantly needs to be reaffirmed through our struggle to contain these opposed impulses. To assess Loftis’s critique of Modernism, it seems important to stress Loftis’s overlooked critique of the way that we experience history. The most viable way around the modernist dilemma between recovering unsynthesized past fragments and the futural projection of an anticipated unity involves breaking up the present into fragmentary but meaningful units. And in order to recontextualize his work, readers should appreciate Loftis as someone who poetically perceived and lived the irreconcilable tasks of writing both a rhapsodic remembrance and a founding epic. Though traditional modernist thinkers engage and represent multiple cultures, they most often rely on this multiplicity to intensify the identity of the poet as oracle. While Pound’s syncretism consists of his attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought, Loftis is able to oppose the epic (syncretic, imperial, universalist) sensibility with the self-consciously sutured nature of the series poem (discontinuous and recombinatory). Loftis is torn, though, between these poetic forms as he is between the possibilities for poetic polytheism. In one sense, Loftis’s polytheism demands that readers imagine new connections between their own concerns and those of different social groups and time periods in order to unify these local worlds. In another sense, polytheism provides a linguistic


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and political challenge to all higher unities, and the poem calls for the ongoing process of unraveling given identities into plural worlds in order to appreciate a greater variety of ways to embody local commitments, to put worlds into flesh. In neither case is polytheism merely historiographic or ethnographic, though, but political and dialectical: poetically deep-pluralist.


Chapter 4

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Nat h aniel Mack ey’s Agno stic History and “ The Cre aking of the Wheel” None of these concepts were incongruous to the Egyptian. He could believe in an afterlife in which he would spend eternity in the company of the circumpolar stars as a blessed akh [the crested ibis, embodiment of competence], yet also be restricted to the burial chamber and offering chapel of the tomb as a ka [shadow self], but also visit the world of the living, inhabit the Field of Reed, and travel across the sky and through the underworld as a ba [a falcon, embodiment of the spiritual self] with the sun-god. —Marie Parson, The Book of the Dead: An Introduction In general, ancient Near Eastern religion does not attempt to codify a single correct mythology or liturgy; in fact, three distinct creation myths coexisted peacefully during the historical period in Egypt. —Zahi Hawass, Cradle and Crucible

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n a question-and-answer session held during the 2002 convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), experimental poet and literary critic Nathaniel Mackey invoked the well-established cultural sense that “grand narratives” have given way to a sort of cultural pluralism.1 “These days,” Mackey offered, “there seems to be a greater openness to openness.” At the same time, Mackey implied that the literary-critical potential for cultural pluralism is not yet aware of itself— in other words, pluralist possibilities for expression and, especially, as modes of intervention into hegemony, have not yet been explicitly theorized. As a political and aesthetic goal, an undertheorized, unreigned pluralism is no pluralism at all, since differences that merely get put into circulation can be evacuated of their authority over people for whom they matter. For example, the poetry of particular racial

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experience can be deployed either by neoliberal interests, as diversions for consumption, or be conjured as evidence that (bureaucratic) multiculturalism has finally been achieved. In either case—as monism or relativism—“do your own thing” pluralisms construct differences as alternative facets of a singular, unified cultural understanding and play into the neoliberal system already in place. Such unified understandings as marketable multiculturalism, which allocate experience into preselected categories, are among the narratives into which poetry can creatively intervene. As an African American writer who teaches American literatures, including the literatures of the African diaspora, and as a poet who embraces experimental writing, Mackey admits the influences of poets as different as Robert Duncan, Amiri Baraka, George Oppen, and Kamau Brathwaite in his poetry and teaching. Also, as editor of Hambone since 1982, Mackey has published work by Sun Ra, Clarence Major, Wilson Harris, Susan Howe, and Beverly Dahlen. Both his teaching and his critical writing, then, approach experimental poets who pit the impossibility of identity against its necessity. His literary critical study, Discrepant Engagement, subtitled “Dissonance, CrossCulturality, and Experimental Writing,” takes as its twin topics “the experimental writing of the Black Mountain School and black writers from the United States and the Caribbean” (1), and to bring these topics together already seems to invite disharmony. But as discrepant as Mackey’s literary engagements may seem— with political-expressivist and linguistic-experimental poetries, jazz music and ethnopoetic writing—Mackey points out that only “outsiders” find these discrepancies “noisy.” For Mackey, literary-analytic rigor and historical expertise give the critic with an ear for deep resonances the ability to parse a plurality of internally consistent differences. In analyzing the discrepant historical worlds of ancient African and Caribbean myth, European history and African American culture, Mackey allows the integrity of each world to arise against the background of “noise.” The source of noisy cacophony is grand narrative itself, the imposed singularity of the category called “History,” a category into which incommensurate worlds and modes of organizing knowledge have been forced. As a poet who gathers socially marginalized practices and redirects them into new, coherent styles—for example, “mixing” obscure musical performances from Mali, Africa and experimental poetic technique— Mackey is a “reconfigurer,” according to Juliana Spahr. A co-panelist of Mackey’s during his MLA presentation, Spahr asks, “Where are the discrepant engagements going?” And in response, Mackey notes,

Nathaniel Mackey’s Agnostic History

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“They’re getting more and less discrepant.” He then curiously qualifies this statement, explaining that the engagements between worlds and categories seem “less discrepant” in the present than they did in the 1980s, for example, because “there seems a greater openness to openness, or plurality.” And by Mackey’s account, Paul Naylor’s 1999 book, Singing the Holes in History, agrees with this notion of diminished discrepancy. Naylor’s book, which is about Mackey as well as four other contemporary poets, asserts that formerly established aesthetic and disciplinary categories are “creaking,” giving way as they become subject to more rigor and less preconception. Mackey explains that his engagements have become “more discrepant,” however, insofar as he fears that poetic dissonance might “lose its edge” or fail to defy the system. He asks, “If the system is set up to hear noise, how do you continue to make noise?” This statement leads in a strange direction. In scientific discourse, as well as in music, noise refers to a seemingly chaotic system from which a higher order may emerge. In terms of aesthetics, at least since Coleridge, poetic innovation is framed as a kind of writing from the edges of the status quo and, if successful, the innovative poet sets a new standard that articulates the style of a new status quo. The margins move into the center. An admittedly strange bedfellow for Coleridge, Thomas Kuhn offers a similar model for scientific advances in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In Kuhn, paradigms for “normal science” yield to new paradigms through a revolutionary process that occurs when “anomalous,” marginalized accounts of reality unify into a new exemplary method, which opens a new web of relationships and a field of study. These theoretical lines seem similar to those traced by Naylor’s view of Mackey’s work as a “tactical” insertion of the real into our contemporary simulated history. Naylor’s Mackey “sings the holes,” or reveals the anomalies, in the paradigm of Western official history. Clearly this center-margin model of change has itself become a paradigm (the paradigm-paradigm) for cultural evolution, and it lingers insistently and invisibly “in the air” of popular as well as literary culture. But it seems odd that Mackey would use a metaphorics of edges and edginess to discuss his poetry, if only because of the singular center that this metaphorics implies. Such language suggests an arrangement of culture that remains centered around a dominant disciplinary model and surrounded by the clamoring of perceived noises at its margins (caused by the barbarians at the gates). Of course, for Mackey, history is a category that needs to be pluralized, but he seems to suggest in conversation, at least in passing, that once the margins have been reconfigured into a new center, the poet will have lost his

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or her edge. Mackey’s poetic practice, however, moves in an importantly different direction: his poetic series, Song of the Andoumboulou, for example, does not disarticulate one hegemonic logic in order to suture together another one, drawn from the margins, but instead this series fragments all centers into discrepant engagements that share family resemblances rather than an essence. Along the model of an evolution toward liberal tolerance and civic humanism, it seems easily conceivable that cross-cultural openness and plurality of the American multicultural sort might, or already has, come to occupy a cultural center in universities and popular culture. In a similar light, it makes sense that a musician or poet at the margins (or in the avant-garde) might find that he or she experiences a sense of diminishing returns, having to try increasingly hard to seem as noisy as they were previously. Mackey’s love of jazz, in fact, reveals that innovation takes on this evolutionary structure. As technologies develop and virtuosity becomes more and more specialized, the once “noisy” Scott Joplin becomes acceptable and then yields the aesthetic paradigm to the noisier Charlie Parker. Parker’s style comes to seem more sensible, though, eventually yielding, in its own time, to Davis’s Birth of the Cool, and to innovations by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and beyond. At each stage, an avant-garde integrates innovative differences into an increasingly complex unity as mainstream culture becomes more tolerant.2 In this connection, Mackey uses the example of the saxophone—which was, at one time, “the castaway of European instruments” but which came to orient bebop—as his example of a source of noise that has become an accepted, privileged instrument in jazz production (Mackey, MLA 2002). In contrast, in his short poetic series “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” Ishmael Reed refigures the saxophone as “the hawk behind Sonny Rollins’ head / or the ritual beard of his axe; / a longhorn winding its bells thru the Field of Reeds.” This poetic shape shifting draws attention to the numerous references that accompany the sax, more specifically to the way that the saxophone collects dispersed African practices: Egyptian spells and vignettes; the first cowboys in the New World—who were Africans; the movement through the land of the dead; American jazz forms; and the black American contribution to American culture. The beard-saxophone collects those practices for which it can serve as an example, and various African and American worlds emerge and hang together in new ways, coordinated by Reed’s poetic rendering of the saxophone. Despite his apparent center/margins dialectic, Mackey’s poetry does ultimately draw from, and point back


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to, a horizon of radically contingent and weakly incommensurate sources as well as a plurality of references for the term history. In terms of Mackey’s own deep pluralism—evoking, among other ethnopoetic sources, gods, myths, and songs from ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Mali, Caribbean, and Yoruba cultures as well as North American poetry, contemporary music, and past European theories of cultural contact—the center-margin model will not hold. By setting up plural discourses that internally fragment, overlap, and refract dominant discourses, while they challenge and resonate with each other, Mackey suggests that what is being pluralized in his poetry and prose is both a particular culture and the center-margin model for culture itself. Mackey meets Hayden White’s criteria for historical pluralism insofar as Mackey presupposes “a number of equally plausible accounts of the historical past” and “a number of different but equally meaningful constructions of that indeterminate field of past occurrences that by convention we call ‘history’” (White 484). Mackey’s experimentalism reveals all experience as woven out of a plurality of views of reality. The threat of forgetting the materiality (mediating nature) of language and historical experience comes from a tendency toward singularity, I believe, contra Naylor, for whom the threat to concrete experience comes from its official, simulated nature. For Naylor, the real is figured as a neutral, all-encompassing space that has been occluded by official, mass-mediatized accounts of history, and Mackey reveals the tears in the veil. But, as Slavoj Zizek believes, “hegemony is the struggle” over how this cultural space called history “will be overdetermined by some particular signification,” that either comes from within or without (Zizek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism” 113). And the point of Mackey’s pluralism is to reveal history as a grand narrative that obscures the struggle between discrepant, local ways of engaging experience. In fact, for Mackey, the sense that current humanity is prehistorical, a “rough draft,” vitiates the lofty claims of any particular signification, or local narrative, to the status of grand narrative: Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude birth, Song of the Andoumboulou [tracks] interweavings of lore and lived apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of [g]rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kalapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology are a “rough draft of human being,” that “the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we’re the rough draft.” The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration’s putative angel itself. (Eroding Witness 34)

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In a poem from Eroding Witness (1985) called “Passing Thru,” Mackey explores the theory (officially discredited) that Africans discovered the New World in the fourteenth century. But rather than prosaically incorporate this theory into his poetic series—in the form of a collaged scientific fragment, like Williams does with fragments in Paterson—Mackey resituates this westward journey from Africa within a number of more encompassing myths. He figures the journey as a quasi-religious voyage to hell (“past the Western Gates”), alluding to his earlier image of the Caribbean figure of Ghede (a god of death). This polyphony of reference also suggests the Andoumboulou song (a funeral ritual), even while it evokes the Dogon myth of human origins, and the poem traces a series of branching allusions to cultures whose gods of death are also gods of fertility. To this complex of almost impossibly overdetermined conceptual categories, add Mackey’s translations of concepts into sounds and his repetition of similar sounds across different words, and a sense emerges that, to quote Ira Livingston, “the margins are everywhere” (Autopoesis 20). “Passing Thru” begins by displacing the authority of history with local, traditional speculation: Some say the waters washing Mali’s western edge are not the end of the world, that the world is like a bottle gourd. That a finger put at any point on a bottlegourd and pulled across its surface comes at the end of its path to the point where it started from, that so it is with the world. . . And so it is with the sea they say, plunge in, be carried west by currents, Kouro-Siwo’s black stream. . . in search of whose pull I see them launching their boats, my jaws locked around a noise none of us hears but me.

As has been jokingly remarked, by the end of the fifteenth century, everyone but Columbus seemed to have known that the Earth was round. Dante’s Earth is spherical, despite its significant pit-and-pyramid


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features, and the ancient Greeks could see the round shadow of the Earth on the moon. So what seems interesting in these stanzas, then, is not that Mackey’s Mali entertain a kind of pretheoretical grasp of the cosmos or that they understand global circumnavigation, but that the theoretical attitude is only one of many forms of representation—and, in the case of this poem, the objective historical attitude is also one of many—that are passing through, in the poet’s background. While the Earth is “gourd-shaped,” time, too, is rendered as cyclical— the ocean marks a boundary at both the end and the beginning of the “black stream.” The river ends (or begins) at roughly the same area that the ocean begins (or ends). Both death and life, it seems, are also intuited by the lone explorer in the stream’s pull. The “western edges” are typically the threshold of the afterlife in Mali ethnopoetics, but they are also figured as a source of renewal. As readers will learn later, the waters might return the traveler whom the poet awaits. Mackey’s persona as poet, religious philosopher, historian, and theorist is the only one to hear “the noise,” and this sets the poet apart from others as well as in another liminal position “between two waters.” But despite the isolation that the poet’s reverie requires, the poet understands the cosmos, time, and space, in local, social terms. And the fact that the noise is located in the poet’s jaws suggests that the source of the noise may be speakable but not yet spoken. What the poet knows at present is an urge to bring word back from the boundary of the unknown. Poetics is theorized as a matter of spanning worlds. “Between two waters,” the poet “rests, awaiting word of Abubakari’s voyage” and, in this state, the poet will hear whispers of the future, specifically the voices of the inhabitants of the New World as they struggle to name the Spanish conquistadors and the catastrophe that has befallen them. They will name Cortes, metonym for their catastrophe, “plumed snake.” Of course, every poem proves generatively ambiguous and multilayered, in a word, overdetermined; but this poem is overdetermined by a series of interlocking, contradictory, alternative-cultural, and selflimiting resonances. In the poem, the discourse of history is made to do more than simply to show its tears, holes, and suture marks. History is not enriched by incorporating more of its margins, but, rather, as the poet unravels accepted historical discourse, he shows its warp and woof to run in nonaligned directions, revealing not just history’s elisions or the impossibility of its unity, but the endlessly generative practice of pluralizing formerly-universal accounts of conceptual worlds. It is not simply that physics, religious cosmology, Western history, African history, and other hegemonic structures are essentially

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“poetic,” constructed unities. Deconstruction has already established this point (without exploring the cultural plurality at the heart of constructed unity). Instead, images come in waves and eddies to the poet, and Mackey reveals that discursive unity admits the same chaotic noisiness, indeterminacy, and unrepresentability as nature does. If the world of everyday experience reveals far too many impulses ever to unify into one theory, official discourses, too, suture too many incommensurate sources together ever to set the generative partiality of the self or of events free to enter into new patterns. Our unrepresentable, dimly perceptible background—which is made up of an irreducible plurality of experiences and which embodies multiple, incommensurate interpretations—makes every particular interpretation possible but also renders any final, discursive understanding unattainable. For Mackey, this noisy plurality provides a positive launching point toward a future poetics. From it, the poetic impulse can bring forth any number of limited, temporarily abiding resonances, ad infinitum. This poetic process equates to the ongoing process of music arising from noise, but not to an evolution of music to the point that noise disappears. So noise does not become increasingly orchestrated over time until no conceivable noise remains. To riff on Langston Hughes, the musician should not sacrifice “the journey to Mecca” and settle “for the contract with Decca.” For Mackey, as noise is a condition of possibility for order, chiaroscuro is the condition for light. The absence of a foundational system of relations among experiences does not imply randomness but cross-hatching. Temporarily abiding centers of meaning can orient and provide limited goal directedness to practices before dissolving again. It can be said that almost all of Mackey’s poetry, in addition to offering lyrical meditations and exciting linguistic play, embodies what Paul Valéry in 1919 phrased as the essential struggle between the “two dangers that never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.” For Mackey, in Song of the Andoumboulou 4, from Eroding Witness, The light arrives wrapped in shadows The light arrives wrapped in drums, in drawn curtains. . . Remember this: that all ascent moves up a stairway of shattered light. (42)


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As short as this excerpt is—and possibly misleading in its rhetorical appearance as a propositional statement—the poem ultimately strikes readers as generatively ambiguous on the levels of direct presentation as well as metapoetic reflection. Conceptually, readers are told that what matters most is never revealed clearly, explicitly, as a falsifiable claim, for example, but that the sources of meaningful commitments are only partially visible, embodied in practice as a vision more grounding than foregrounded. The poem also operates on the reader’s embodied sense of sound and rhythm, alliterating “light” and “arrival,” “drums” and “drawn,” “shattered” and “shadowed,” “shattered and ascent.” Further, the poem moves from visuality to aurality as the word “drums” becomes a pivot. The drums originally work as a visual, partly lit object and concept, but they turn into the commencement of an actual drumming sound, repeated in “In drums, in drawn.” Then, moving to the word “drawn,” the poem connects the sound of a drum and the idea of curtains drawn, giving readers a sound while taking away a sight (of whatever lie behind the curtains), even while rendering the world of writing and literacy (the “drawn” world) in terms of sound and orality. The materiality of language asserts itself in the form of both sign and substance. As sign, the fact that signification is necessarily linked in a chain prevents the fixity of any particular signifier; and in terms of substance, particular sounds create a “stuttering” that interrupts claims to self-evidence.3 But even more compelling, in addition to talking about the irreducibility of necessarily plural experience, the poem enacts its own guiding theory of plurality. As the reader’s eye moves down the page, the mind ascends the stair but not toward context-free truth—what Nietzsche calls “immaculate perception.” Instead, the evolutionary or developmental progress toward increased clarity shatters into alternative experiences. But this explosion of light places the reader right back at the beginning of the poem, which does not make complete (propositional) sense but which still holds the reader’s attention nonetheless. As the poem itself unfolds, curtains, drums, light, dark, and the poem’s entire semiotic field, along with its phonemes, will gather into temporarily abiding resonance patterns without ever grounding one final reading of the poem. This is only one example of Mackey’s poetry about/as poetic plurality, which reveals experience as dissonant whenever singular and resonant when plural. Meanwhile, the plurality of experience enables poetic language, which in turn draws connections among previously unrelated experiences and allocates these experiences into worlds.

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Poetry points toward the unrepresentable vastness of possibilities for language and the indeterminate grounds on which multiple, temporary, but determinate, meanings can be founded. For Mackey, the practice of weaving provides a doubly useful metaphor for the process of sense arising out of nonsense: “The weaving reveals dreamt articulation, dreamt wordless / rapport. . . / Dreamt entanglement, torn at the / roots” (Song 18, in Whatsaid 15). The loom itself is a noisy apparatus for weaving yarn or thread, from which a patterned fabric emerges. And by interlacing differently colored threads in divergent arrangements, a patterned complexity comes to light. Similarly, meaningful experience does not occur as whole cloth but as a matter of disparate but gathered--in a word, sutured—experiences. Even so-called facts—held up as the Western ideal for truth as self-evident, atomistic, and contextless—can only be made sense of by reference to other facts and values and by being woven into a specific (i.e., Western) “form of life,” as Wittgenstein says. In fact, Wittgenstein even takes his metaphors for the way that sensible patterns interact from weaving.4 In Discrepant Engagements, Mackey describes the outline of his weaving metaphor: “The name the Dogon of West Africa give their weaving block, the base on which the loom they weave upon sits is the ‘creaking of the word.’ It is the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords. Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its anti-foundational acknowledgement of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings ‘base,’ voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend” (19). Mackey’s “discrepant engagement” relates to, among other things, the usually unrelated categories of experimental writing and identity-based writing, the first of which privileges creaking, the second, the intelligible nature of the word. The discursive, disciplinary consequences of this poetic method involve “creaking” existing categories of thought, as Mackey instructs his readers throughout Engagements, and the political repercussions of exploring alternative versions of history remain profound. Roland Greene, another of Mackey’s co-panelists at the MLA panel, finds that Mackey’s study of particular discrepant engagements suggests an “alternative literary history of the poetry of the Americas.” In “Passing Thru,” Mackey bases one of modern Western nationalism’s most enduring “facts”—the account of the European “discovery” of the New World—on its “founding noise.” After establishing the poet’s position on the shore, Mackey continues narrativizing history in


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discrepant images. These images disarticulate Western supremacist theories of civilization and developmental history while foregrounding alternative sources that have been systematically excluded from world history: Black pull of currents off the Gambia coast, black sea of sweat. . . Black flock of birds behind a blackbearded feathered snake, whatever lies to the west. . . Between two waters I rest awaiting word of Abubakari’s voyage. . . And they’ve each come forth and whispered words in my ear, these weathered bathers, watery dead up to their necks in cloth. “Snake’s lift,” I say, wetting my feet, and one says back to me, “Two slaves toast a pirate’s blood.” “Snake’s glyph,” to which, me braiding my beard, the eldest answers, “Reef Bay virgin rockpool worded rock.” “Or snake’s lip,” to which what else can they say but that its head goes under, tailfeathers twitch whose twitchings quicken the wind, what’s around it shakes, what else but what inchlong ovoid nuts off a palmtree say? The impatient dead go out announcing their immersions, dots and doublespiraling crescents etched

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry eventually as far north as Nova Scotia. . . The advancing dead grope their way up the shoreline of Amentet. (Eroding Witness 77–79)

Readers who want an optimal grip on this poem are invited or required to look up the unknown “sources” for this alternative, mythic account of History. From Caroline Seawright, we learn that “Amentet was the Egyptian goddess and friend of the dead, and the personification of the Land of the West. It was she who welcomed the deceased to their new dwelling place in the netherworld” (“Amentet”). And the notion of the West as the land of death is not new to Euro-American readers. In the poem, Mackey alludes to genocidal Spanish, French, and English excursions to North America and Mesoamerica as well as to the Middle Passage, which meant death at sea or living-death in the New World. Cortes is one source of snake and “serpent” references, as he would be considered “the plumed serpent,” the “black bearded,” “feathered serpent,” and Quetzalcoatl, by the Aztec. But the return of the historically repressed is also life giving. Amentet is also the goddess of food, water, and rebirth. And the “snake glyphs” and “worded rocks” refer to the complex cultures that built the Cahokia Mounds, near present-day St. Louis, the major preColumbian earthworks that snake along the Mississippi. Glyphs and “worded rocks” additionally suggest the petroglyphs drawn on rocks by Native American tribes in the Southwest United States. The poem’s dedication, “for Ivan Van Sertima,” teaches readers that van Sertima was a Guyanese scholar teaching at Rutgers who argued—in They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America— that Abubakari II traveled to the New World. But this source has been academically discredited. While proponents of pre-Columbian AfricaAmericas contact theories have claimed that Abubakari reached the Americas some time in the early fourteenth century, pre-Columbian scholars argue that there are insufficient grounds to suppose contact between Africa and the New World during the pre-Columbian era. And yet, this categorical assertion creaks, at least insofar as African descendants had reached the New World by 12,000 BCE. Nonencounter notwithstanding, Mackey’s point is not to redeem the reputation of Ivan van Sertima, as this would involve simply offering a different, similarly factual account of history. Instead, Mackey reveals van Sertima’s Guyanese account as poetic and situates it within a pluralist range of African, Mesoamerican, and European accounts


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of the voyage into the unknown. Mackey’s newfound indeterminacy reveals not only that the academically approved account is founded on the exclusion of some stories and the inclusion of others, but that all singular accounts depend on an indeterminately vast array of source material. True or false, singular facts derive from multiple other modes of arranging information, including poetic modes. And not only are facts always already a part of a value system, but every value system has been constructed poetically. The unrepresentable background of numerous alternative modes of history telling and time-reckoning allows richer, more inclusive, and less enduring, accounts to consolidate themselves against this background. But past a point, the articulation of practices, equipment, skills, and identities into a unity (i.e., the process of hegemony) becomes an exclusive power move, motivated by a willful or negligent (or most often colonialist) kind of forgetting. As Benedict Anderson points out in Imagined Communities, the concept of the nation emerged out of a gradual articulation among new publishing technologies and different modes of telling time, as well as out of a failure of traditional, religious social links. And for Raymond Williams, modernism arose from a “structure of feeling” that abstracted from and fed back into dawning practices for coping with urban life, which confused traditional experience with a regular “series of shocks.” As Ira Livingston shows in Autopoesis, both the terms “fictional” and “factual” mean “made (up),” and the difference between these terms fades to insignificance in the shadow of hegemony and the desire for a fabricated account of reality as a whole. Nationalism provides this unitary, imaginative matrix, complete with its own history. But the assumption that the nation concept should have inevitably come to be naturalized is not as “natural” as is usually supposed. To a point, a citizen might take the idea of the nation as important, even crucial, in organizing all citizen practice without becoming a staunch nationalist. Civic mindedness might even lead people to assume the heaven-descendedness of nation. But once established as a comprehensive world (a closed category), the nation became more resonant the more that it was privileged over the plurality of alternative social links, which themselves were thrust to the margins. The discursive effects of historical exclusion—impenetrable identity, nativist certainty, chauvinism—are not simply driven by blind nationalistic impulses, then, but by an affectively charged force of appropriation that enables the rejection of one’s own experience of one’s self, certainty, commitments, and values as divided, partial and in flux.

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Every act of naming reality (e.g., the geopolitical act of naming the globe as a set of sovereign nations) consolidates that reality further. In terms of their resonances, alternative histories remain at the margins because they do not intercoordinate and hang together with each other as well as linguistically established accounts that claim to leave no ambiguities. In response, Mackey’s is a poetic history rather than a scholarly account of discovery, and Mackey does not use poetry to advance another theory. Instead, the Euro-American sources of history are shown to found their (founding) words on a creaking wheel. For Vadén and Hannula, engagements between worlds should always be discrepant or, in their words, agonistic. And in fact, the sense of discrepancy itself becomes a positive phenomenon, suggesting to participants in the encounter between worlds that they are acting in good faith. In contrast to N. J. Loftis’s perspective—which Mackey discusses in Discrepant Engagement—Mackey begins his poetry in the world of Dogon mythology rather than in the poet’s subconscious or the Western literary tradition. Where Loftis often acts as a gatherer in search of universal syncretism, Mackey resists offering any higher unity than a series of engagements. By beginning his account of history in a discussion of its exclusions, Mackey decontains history. In part, Song draws on a history that most Americans do not know (e.g., African myths of New World contacts), but this is not a remote, hidden, singular, and comprehensive account of history, what Mackey calls a “Gnostic history” (MLA). Mackey provides plural, local histories, and he bridles at Pound’s goal of providing the poem that contains history. One of Mackey’s stated goals, in response to Pound, is to resituate or relativize the Poundian Cantos, to assure readers that Pound is “humbled by history,” specifically by the irreducible complexity of history. Song of the Andoumboulou, by contrast to the goal of historical containment, is written “in friction, tending to rub up against, show continuing exasperation with history,” says Mackey. When talking about “what happened,” says Mackey, “You can’t know what you’re talking about” because to order facts within one discourse ignores facts, frictions, and other modes of ordering from another. Like Foucault’s approach (offering “an ethnography of the present”), the point of Mackey’s ethnopoetics is not to explain the past but to render the present increasingly strange. This leaves Mackey with a view toward history that he calls “agnostic”: “you cannot know what you are talking about,” he says, but not for the reason that there is too much to know; rather, history is agnostic because knowledge in one field—no matter how comprehensive—remains irreconcilable with equally valid, alternative knowledges. Speaking of Pound’s project to contain history in the


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Cantos, Mackey notes, “the inability to make history’s contradictions cohere is one of the ways that history shows up in the poem.” In advancing his own method, which involves humbling the epic desire to contain history, Mackey quotes Ishmael Reed’s poem, “Dualism in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’”: I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry in there in its cage i am inside of history. its hungrier than i thot. (Reed Reader 336)

The desire to contain history remarks a control for mastery that remains dangerous—for both the student of history and for history— and naïve to the irreducibility and wildly raging contradictions contained by such unified accounts. In Reed’s poem, the objective impulse to stand outside of history remains an illusion, as the poet discovers immediately that every attempt to read history is an historical act—the poet has always already been devoured in advance by historical forces. One way that a sense of a limited, shared history arises is as an agonistic encounter between synchronic and diachronically arranged worlds. In the preface to Whatsaid Serif, Mackey describes the whatsayer, quoting Ellen Basso’s A Musical View of the Universe: “In order for the story to be told at all, it must be received by a responder or ‘what-sayer,’ who is a crucial actor in the situation. The what-sayer may be someone who asked to be given the narrative [or someone] needing clarification.”5 Plurality introduces itself into every logic. Even within internal consciousness, where many experiences might resonate and seem “syntonic,” there appears what Freud calls the “Ego-alien” or “Ego-dystonic,” the what-sayer within the internal monologue, or a perception of otherness that leads consciousness to keep talking. For Mackey, the telling of history should be modeled on conversation—on a “rapport to the Other, as Derrida calls it—rather than on the display of hegemonic power. Mackey’s poet is the “what-sayer” to history. The what-sayer, readers learn, is a member of the ritual reader’s audience who asks for clarification during reports on the Dogon. Mackey’s source is the Mali ethnographer-informant, Ogotemmêli,

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as reported in Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (1965). The Dogon do not offer a comprehensive or, at any rate, closed account of history. Mackey’s agnosticism regarding stories applies to them, since the history of the Andoumboulou is a self-consciously fictional history set before official history begins. The Dogon stories have their foundations in “creaking,” “rasping” sounds, rough drafting, uncertainty, and plurality. Mackey responds to the storyteller’s account of history with the repeated question, “what?” At the same time, he also questions stories told (or called) by the authorities, Griaule and Ogotemmêli, revealing the creaking, the contradictions and the polyphonies that reveal the fundamentally pluralist, open, self-critical and reflective characteristic of language. Language mediates intentionality—even the alleged purity and transparency of self-reflection—alienates subjectivity, and heterogenizes experience; language seems, in a word, “unnatural.” And among other projects of Mackey’s, a return to this mediating and pluralizing sense of language forms a crucial part of his agnostic approach to history. Mackey uses the repetition of words to provide an experience that limits its own coherence. Properly poetic words, he says, “catch you but change over time.” In the poem, “words find a place for themselves,” as Mackey says—or carve out a number of places for themselves within webs of relationships—before the reader has a chance to understand the poem within familiar categories. And “repetition alienates the language,” as words “bump up against each other in close proximity.” The words “don’t settle.” He finds, too, that in describing his use of rhetorical emphasis, “insistence is a better concept than that of repetition.” Sounds—only partially integrated into words—and concepts and images only partially integrated into narrative play the social role of the what-sayer, who both invites and draws boundaries around, coherent discourse.6 What this agnosticism means in terms of pluralism becomes clearer through a comparison of Mackey’s agnosticism toward history and William James’s “radical empiricism.” For James, discourses are empirical so long as they remain “contented to regard [their] most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience” and the radicalism of James’s method consists in its wariness to “dogmatically affirm” any “more unity than experiences yield” (“Radical” 97). While empiricism reflects on actual experience and practices—as opposed to idealism, which takes a metaphysical unity, arche or principle as a starting point—the method of radical empiricism also undermines Marxian


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historical materialism. This account of experience squares with Chantal Mouffe’s account of “Radical Democracy.” Democracy depends upon breaking up histories and kinds of history in order to stage strategic interventions in hegemony. While Laclau and Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), do not acknowledge a link to the first generation of pluralists like William James, they do attempt to reclaim the term pluralism, or at least “plural democracy.” Plurality, they argue, should be the starting point of political analysis. For David Schlosberg, “asserting the need to examine the profusion of different social responses to various oppressions is Laclau and Mouffe’s key break from past theories—unitary Marxist or liberal pluralist—based as these past theories are on the singular experience of labor or economic self-interest” (New Pluralism 59). More recently, Mouffe has argued that pluralism “gives a positive status to difference and refuses the objective of unanimity and homogeneity that is based on acts of exclusion” (Mouffe, “Democracy” 246). In this, Mouffe’s strategy parallels Mackey’s agnosticism toward history quite closely.

Wo u n ds Made of Words : Mac k ey’s Po etic s o f Ethnogenes i s In evidence of Mackey’s democratic impulse to reveal worlds as local and open, Mackey says, “conversations with voices beyond one’s boundaries are necessary and healthy” (MLA). And Vadén and Hannula would agree that, “a minimal condition for openness is that the criteria by which the negotiation is going to be handled cannot be set in advance by either party. An open encounter implies that we re-evaluate and reformulate our criteria—and their criteria as well” (Rocking the Boat 13). As an instance of such generative, yet humbling, encounters with other cultural worlds, the ethnopoetics of the 1970s—as manifest in Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha’s work, America: A Prophecy—charted a new course. For Dennis Tedlock, ethnopoetics originated among poets with an interest in anthropology and linguistics and “among anthropologists and linguists with an interest in poetry, such as David Antin, Stanley Diamond, Dell Hymes, Jerome Rothenberg, Gary Snyder, Nathaniel Tarn” and Tedlock himself (Tedlock). “Ethnopoetics is a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now” (Tedlock). But as part of the local-dialectical feedback loop inherent in any open encounter, the main interest of ethnopoetics “will indeed be the poetries of people

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who are ethnically distant from ourselves, but it is precisely by the effort to reach into distances that we bring our own ethnicity, and the poetics that goes with it, into fuller consciousness” (Tedlock). And as far as it goes, this poetic ethics proves voluminous and uniquely relativist, especially in foregrounding the fact that everyone, everywhere is “ethnic.” At the same time, though, room for intervention remains in this formation, since criteria that are set in advance remain: the ethnos as shared tradition, for example, and poetry as a mode of expression rather than invention and refocusing of local concerns. Mackey was “excited about ethnopoetics in the 1970s” (MLA). And in many ways, Song of the Andoumboulou offers a new ethnolinguistics, or a cross-cultural poetics that seems to follow a traditional ethnopoetic approach. Mackey lauds ethnopoetics for having eschewed models of the museum, the “white men’s club,” and the exotic mirror (for Western spiritual epiphanies) and for avoiding 1960s-styled ethnic nationalisms. Rather than criticize it, Mackey advances the ethnopoem by focusing less on the ethnic identity of particular groups than on the process of ethnogenesis as contemporary and ongoing, situated in local, dynamically interacting and postcontemporary worlds. An alternative form of possible ethno-creation story appears in Song of the Andoumboulou 7—“ntsikana’s bell”: [i] A dark head sits brooding its image. Where the light breaks our need evolves. All those other earlier entrances of light it now wants to recollect come crashing to the floor, so many repeats of an incumbent loss. ... Awaiting birth, by which or in which a potter-god could wet what clay would catch the flow of our endangered blood.


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Here where the feuds root some unsunned angel of loss ekes out its plunder. Possessed, we lick the salt of each infected wound’s unyielding rhythm’s wordings. (52)

“Primal”sounding and yet decidedly contemporary, the dimly conceptualized beginning of the poem (its “dark head”) “awaits birth,” although within an atmosphere of loss. As an ethnopoetics that collects the customs of non-Western cultures, this creation story roots creation in a postdeconstruction age of localness, materiality, and highly-mediated wording. At the complex ending of this poem lies a deliberately missed epiphany that would frustrate ethnopoetic analysts of a past generation. The meditative discovery or the surreal image that a reader might expect to find in a deep-image poem—by James Wright or W. S. Merwin, for example—instead arrives in three indirect objects, each less directly related to the stanza’s subject than the previous: “salt” may or may not be the grammatical object of the poem, but it is connected and restrained by the genitive, “of,” suggesting that it either belongs to, or is identical with, the “wordings.” Wordings, meanwhile, have been deferred for an unusually long time by the poem’s rhythm, and, grammatically, they belong to the “unyielding rhythm”; this rhythm belongs to a “wound”; and this wound made of words produces salt. In addition to the strained categorization of Mackey’s wordings within the tradition of the ethnopoem (or even grammatical parsing), the series itself introduces the Andoumboulou as “a rough draft for human beings,” not as an actual ethnic group. Humanity itself rests, for its foundation on the failure of the human prototypes that make up the subject of the poem. Implied, then, in the success of the Song as a creation story is its dual role as an eschatology. Mackey’s poem is a fictional ethnography, though not fictional in the sense that Carlos Castañeda’s Don Juan quasi-anthropology was fictional. While Castañeda retained anthropology’s criteria of verifiable ethnic study and added a spiritual component to it, Mackey rewrites ethnic history to make humanity itself secondary, epiphenomenal, transitive—rather than substantive. In fact, during his MLA presentation, Mackey even jokingly suggested that he may have made up the Andoumboulou. So Mackey decontains ethnography as well as history by suggesting that both are “poetic”—in the sense of providing local, self-limiting

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patterns of sense. The aesthetic moment, for Mackey, unfolds in the uniqueness of the encounter between poetry and history, ego-alien and ego-syntonic. The only way that this encounter can be closed is “through pretending that [one] understanding is correct” (Vadén and Hannula 120). Since there exists no grand muse or master discourse (standing outside of poetry and history) by whose lights these discourses might be ranked, both remain equally valid modes of telling. Plural worlds arise from the demise of metanarrative, of course, but they also require positive sources—cultural impulses from new political movements, rituals, sagas, music, stories, and gods. Selfhood arises out of language as it gathers into resonance in any of these forms. Mackey suggests that the separateness of various languages, myths, and speaking subjects presupposes a more “fundamental” field without a subject, but this field seems more like a stream, and the presubjectivized subject seems in flux. In this stream of thought, words, things, and speakers respond to an urge to cohere. The acoustic image of the loom and differences amid repetitions serve as the source of identity in various worlds. In Eroding Witness, the singularity of the subject is thrown back into the stream of experience, especially the experience of the ways that time seems to flow: Whipped on, preached at, kicked. Made a christ of. Whipped on, preached at, kicked. Made a christ of. Whipped on, preached at, kicked. Made a christ of. . . (Eroding Witness 52)

In these three stanzas, a tendency toward salvation in a singular source is deferred and attenuated by Mackey’s technique of sentence-parsing line breaks. In the first stanza, the subordinate clause that runs from “whipped” to “kicked” seems to anticipate the next subordinate clause, so that to be whipped and kicked is what will be involved in being made into a christ. In the second stanza, one clause identifies with the next, so that both transitive verbs “kicked” and “made a” are of equal significance in having become a christ. And the ellipses of the third stanza, as well as the tendency of its clauses to include “made a


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christ” among other events, leads to a sense of suspense over what it is in the future that will be “made a christ of.” This short series progressively turns the messianic revelation from a foregone conclusion into an uncertainly awaited event. Taking the advent of a christ to represent the embodiment of the Logos—the singular, intelligible structure of reality—this poem displaces the advent and instead emphasizes the act of “making” by naming—a matter of poesis or myth. But a sea change appears in the following statement: “What was wanted least but now comes to be missed is that very absence, an unlikely Other whose inconceivable occupancy glimpses of ocean beg access to” (Whatsaid 52). Glimpses—at the vastness of nature, the ocean—beg access to, or seem to require, the inconceivable advent. The fact that the unlikely other is now perceived as an absence suggests that after plurality has been recovered, the unified subject or super“other” will be missed. “Absence” is the subject of the sentence, and the ultimate substance remains unobtainable. But this poem does not address loss. Rather, from both cases—of a present advent (christ) and of an absent occupant—a temporary pattern emerges, abides for a short time, and then falls back into vastness (of language and of ocean). Both absences do a lot of work in organizing a pattern. A similar pattern—of arising and abiding, followed by oblivion— appears in another of the creation myths that Mackey invokes—the Babylonian “enuma elish,” which Mackey names “enuma elish 2,” to signify a second round of creation: waters the colors of mud, thick bush of hairs my bed of stars. Stored-up aromas the odors of incense, entrances of unsought light. (Yet arrived at the waters we rubbed off our ointments, the soft insides of our shells When above, the wet flesh, the white flash whose One Thigh, the wet sun, turned its milk in our throats. (Eroding Witness 58)

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“Enuma elish” means “when above” in ancient Babylonian, and this creation epic, David Leeming notes, is based on first millennium BCE tablet texts found at Ashur, Nineveh, Kish, and Uruk. According to Leeming, “the epic is primarily a celebration of the Mesopotamian city of Babylon and its city god Marduk.” It was recited at New Year festivals in Babylon. But the political conditions and the cultural role of the epic as a form of hegemony are what must strike Mackey. “The composition of the epic probably coincides with and is intended to justify the rise of Marduk from his status as a minor Sumerian deity to chief of the Babylonian pantheon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I in the twelfth century BCE” (“Enuma elish”). The story continues: For several millennia, Mesopotamia had generally accepted the old Sumerian creation story, in which the female aspect is positive and important, basic to the fertility and irrigation principles so necessary for the agricultural practices of the Sumerians and Akkadians. But now the storm god Marduk, the all-dominant male, would create a world out of the dead body of the defeated feminine power that had been Tiamat. . . In the context of new Babylonian [state] priorities, his victory and creation signify strong hierarchical power and male reason, as opposed to a kind of irrational watery chaos represented by the female Tiamat and the old ways.

In the act of re-creation as redemption, in his homage to Tiamat, Mackey descends back into the “watery” element. The sun suggests clarity, top-down authority, the ranking of goods, and the singularity of worldview that rational absolutism (and hierarchical power) requires. And yet, this light is “unsought,” seen from under water and pluralized, broken into waves and into the light of the stars. The hegemonic authority of the god-king is not so much challenged as recontextuaized in terms of the female power that offers imagery of eroticism and birth. Mackey does not praise “the old ways,” necessarily, or “irrationality.” But he does reveal that all determinations of the irrational take their bearings from an implied rational order, and in Mackey’s plural logic, no such ahistorical system can naturally exist.7 This mythic re-creation recalls another creation story that Mackey references, to wit the Dogon creation story in which Amma, as fertilizing rain, mates with Earth, creating the Nummo (water) twins, who brought order and fertility to the world. Rather typically, “enuma elish 2” suggests repetitions, (accidental) metonymic connections, and family resemblances to other poems in Mackey’s serial poems but no shared essence unites his serial poem or musical “set.” In his role as disc jockey, in addition to postmodern ethnopoet, Mackey is interested in “the art


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of the set,” the suite as a form of “anthology,” and his method involves “splicing” and, as he says, “finding segues.” If serial work lets new passages emerge, as Mackey says that it does, then the creative work of poets consists in “allowing and inviting echoes to come into the work” (MLA). Such echoes appear in his “Ghede Poem”: On this the edge of love’s disappearance you sit enthroned before an unsuspected dinner of thorns. As you go down you wake to see yourself marooned off the coast of Georgia, captive singers in the Moving Star Hall still averse to what hurts your heart swells to encompass, a soot-faced boatman in the Peacock’s house, hands heavy with mud. Hands heavy with the mist of your own belated breath, as you come up you feel your mouth fill with graveyard dirt, the skinny fingers of dawn thump a funky piano, the tune three parts honky-tonk, two parts church. Yes, they call me Ghede of the Many-Colored Cap, the Rising Sun. I make the hanged man supply his own rope, I gargle rum, the points of knives grow more and more sharp underneath your skin. My name is Ghede-Who-Gets-Under-Your-Skin, Ghede-Whose-Heart-Sits-Elsewhere-Shrouded-In-Dew. “You love, I love, he love, she love. . .” (Eroding Witness 25–27)

The poem introduces themes of death, rebirth, boundaries, western lands, and alternative histories. Concerning Ghede, “as the guardian of the dead, the cross of Baron Samedi, as Ghede is sometimes called, is in every cemetery, while the graves that are under the protection of his female counterpart, Maman Brigitte, are marked by a pile of stones. As the lord of love, Ghede is noted for his unpredictable obscenity and his inordinate desire for strong rum. He is liable to arrive at a ceremony for another loa and outrageously disrupt the proceedings.

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His possession of devotees cannot be controlled by the hougans, spirit masters” (Cotterell). Despite the repetition of sounds and themes, the sum of Mackey’s localities does not add up to any one, larger unity; in fact, they contradict each other. Ghede is responsible for death and sexual regeneration, the heap of boundary stones represents different boundaries, and the western lands represent death, the end of history, and events that have been left out of Western colonial history. The weaving of these echoes is itself, in fact, life-giving. In Mackey, “creaking” images of the loom and the “unyielding rhythms” of sound all form the background in terms of which the word makes sense, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation. Taking personal identity as the primary way of getting one’s purchase on the world, Mackey points out that belonging to a world is not given in advance of language and socially connective involvement. Identity, for the Dogon and for many postconfessional U.S. writers, is given in the act of collaborative creation. For Vadén and Hannula, “the colonial attitude” arises from recourse to a world other than the worlds that are “experientially present” (118–19). The “deception of foundationalism” or the colonialist appeal to an ultimate language outside of experience, from which to talk about and negotiate experience, is at the same time “contentless” and violent (119). But in a poetic gesture that restores the vernacular and experiential nearness (the worldhood of a world), Mackey articulates and reconfigures tradition and “makes history” in a local sense, for the sake of grounding poetic knowledges and disempowering global statements.

Em erg ent Sty les as M ak i ng H i story Mackey’s alternative histories remain self-consciously creative rather than discursive. He gets readers to consider the metatopic of literary history-making itself, drawing attention to the ways that writers make history by taking up, redirecting, and imaginatively appropriating marginal possibilities from numerous cultures, or from their cultural pasts, in ways that enable them to change their current self-interpretations. Mackey’s readers are left to appreciate literary history-making as an exercise in building communities across various traditions and among social groups. Readers tend to see themselves as at least capable of participating in this practice and generating personal identity in relational transactions rather than expressing an isolated self. The “creaking of the word” that reveals “the noise upon which the word is based” recalls Mackey’s sense of broken fragments, shattered light, and the divine gathering and attuning activity that exists before the word. Mackey


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does not simply refer coherence and articulation to discrepancy and groundlessness, but Mackey rather deliberately indicates “the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation” in noise. Locating the “creaking of the word” does not only fragment given identities, but it points to the tendency of unrelated elements to articulate themselves into abiding local styles. Speaking of poetry, and specifically of the world-poem, Hubert Dreyfus remarks that an artwork (founded in poetic language) “can perform at least one of three ontological functions. It either manifests, articulates or reconfigures the style of a culture from within the world of that culture” (Dreyfus, personal communication). Following his earlier notion that worlds are “the whole contexts of shared equipment, roles, and practices on the basis of which one can encounter entities and other people as intelligible” (Disclosing 17), Dreyfus, Fernando Flores, and Charles Spinosa allow that worlds tend toward a state of becoming consistent, coherent, and coordinated. Specifically, worlds tend to coordinate their composite practices and to align themselves on the basis of a shared style. Style, we learn, “serves as the basis upon which old practices are conserved and new practices are developed. A style opens a disclosive space and does so in a threefold manner: (1) by coordinating actions; (2) by determining how things and people matter; and (3) by being what is transferred from situation to situation. These three functions of style determine the way anything makes sense for us” (Disclosing 17). In Mackey, creaking belongs to the word, and the ungrounded tendency toward naming gives minimal coherence or a style to the pattern of creaking. But at the same time, the creaking is something that happens to the word, the rasp and remainder that serve as reminders that the signifier is rooted to a local system and cannot belong to a comprehensive, unchanging structure. What is abstractible from each singular instance of creaking is a tendency to wordhood; but that tendency does not escape its material conditions, and in fact constantly reminds listeners of that materiality by rasping, drumming, repeating, and slipping into other networks of relations. Categorization depends on invisible criteria of similarity and difference, a power structure that remains outside of categorization itself, but noise as the source of all differences disables categorization. So, the opposition Western history/African history is itself policed by an outside category called history. When this category is analyzed, the poet finds that the Western idea of history manages this opposition and so it is no opposition at all. What counts as historical fact and the ordering of knowledge within African history is determined in advance against the paradigm of Western history. To locate historical unity at

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some source within history seems to fail to do justice to its continuing identity through the stream of alternative worlds. To locate it outside indicates an unverifiable dialectical agent. But in contrast to either project, Mackey focuses on the white spaces and the white noise at the connectives among words, foregrounding transitive, relational events and sonic echoes. After discussing style, Dreyfus, Spinosa and Flores go on to say that, “one can best see these functions of style in another culture” rather than one’s own, largely because one’s own worlds seem so obviously given, invisible, and global. A style is invisible both because it is in our comportment, not in our minds, and because it is manifest in everything we do and is therefore too pervasive to notice. Following Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus, Spinosa, and Flores indicate that style refers to embodiment, specifically to a specific mode of “singing the world.” And another word for this style of pluralistic play or style is “jazz.” Without going into the origins of jazz music in the slave- and Reconstruction-era practice of the cakewalk, which broke up and syncopated (reconfigured) European marching music, it can be said that, for Mackey, names like Archie Shepp, John Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie stand for a high level of virtuosity and a refined style that remains defiant of mainstream musical culture. In fact, in his most recent “jazz fiction,” Bass Cathedral (2008), Mackey “speaks to an audience definable not by its size or even by its color but by its intellectual jazzhead zeal” (Hajdu). The mainstream of popular culture, like the stream of consciousness, remains overdetermined. It consists of numerous styles that tend toward different goals, but any style that emerges and gathers resonance has the ability to orient many others, to “give the illusion of some safety to be found,” to quote Audre Lorde’s poetic lines. But categories generate subcategories as they organize themselves, and they threaten to fly apart as they gain in complexity. Insofar as an avant-garde begins again and “makes it new,” experimental artists return to and explore the possibilities of their artistic material, rearticulating rather than coordinating practices, and, as a way of keeping a single style from appropriating others, artists let noise enter into the system as a product of that system itself, setting the limits on its selforganizing function. Avant-garde jazz formed Mackey’s musical coming of age (he cites the later work of John Coltrane for an example), and he thinks about his poetics as a matter of “introducing deliberate cacophony into acceptable sound.” In political terms, Mackey finds a similar logic: “African-Americans are faced with policing their own expression as acceptable and intelligible and not finding a place for oneself within that prescribed means of articulation. That looks like


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noise. But African-Americans are on speaking terms with noise, novel sounds. . .and ‘Andoumboulou’ is one of the new sounds that facilitate new expressions” (MLA). Mackey takes a detour from the modernist dictum. He admonishes, “don’t ‘make it new’; make it noisy,” for the sake of “getting a different sound,” in an ever-ongoing practice. Tere Vadén notes a fundamental level of our “practical dealings with the world in which things are not yet thematized as objects and in which the individual is not yet thematized as a subject (what Dreyfus calls ‘absorbed coping’)” (“Ethics” 414). This is the zone of the dialectic between subject and object, the presubjective level or partial subjectivity that is capable of identifying in many worlds. Mackey envisions a form of language for this presubjectivity that is precommunicative. Here language is not something divided into word-objects used in mediating contents between subjects, but a skillful, embodied way of participating in collective experience and influencing it. For Vadén, “Language in this poetic and collective sense is tied to the phonetic, morphological and grammatical as well as etymological particularities of a given way of speaking and writing” (414). Furthermore, such language cannot be separated from the background (a way of life) that makes it meaningful and intelligible. Therefore, “it cannot be translated without residue” (“Ethics” 415). This could, with equal validity, be said about Mackey’s stylistic obsession with new sounds in and across words as well as his admiration of the avant-garde in jazz music. Concerning this strange, decidedly un-Derridean concept of the presubjective self, Mackey searches for “the promiscuous word,” which will “not reduce to us. . .opaque pronouns” (Whatsaid Serif 14). So, in much of his poetry, the word “we,” for example, proliferates and does not “literalize” any one group. As the Song unfolds, meaning does not accrue, so much as it is refracted into numerous voices and styles. Even in the case of the what-sayer, whose role is singular and plural—the role “need not even be taken by the same person” over the course of the call-and-response session. Mackey’s refusal to literalize reminds readers that, in the words of James Hillman, “literalism prevents mystery by narrowing the multiple ambiguity of meaning into one definition. Literalism is the natural concomitant of monotheistic consciousness. . .which deepens singleness of meaning. . .it also hardens the heart, preventing deeper penetration of the imagination” (Re-Visioning Psychology 149). For Mackey, even when we greet the other in person, we do not necessarily interact with others in propria persona but as pronouns, the trace that appears in place of certainty: “we” are “no nation’s / ‘we,’ collectivity’s wish. . . / Aberrant” (Whatsaid 15). The Andoumboulou themselves are unfinished and inhabit an unfinished world (like

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squatters), a “Squat world. . .failed creation, angels / at the root of it, inept” (15). The presubjective field—the collectivity pre-“we”—is ghostly and haunts all certainty. References to the “Adamant ghost” (Whatsaid 18) recall adamant forces, not as only the untamable, but as the legendary mineral to which many, often contradictory, properties were attributed, and the “adamant arrow / Remnant of an alternative / life. . .” (18). If the “I” is always incomplete, the mind is always elsewhere, in flow: “mind unremittingly elsewhere, words meaning more than the world they pointed at asymptotic tangent” (22). Words approaching each other but not meeting fixed reference, touching but not intersecting, forestall literal meaning, become nomadic, and exceed experience rather than reducing it. Mackey’s nonce word, “Ythmic” at once means both and neither rhythmic and mythic (Whatsaid 34). In a series of missed connections, Mackey taunts the reader: “Gnostic is mythic, but sway is rhythmic.” The Gnostic, mythic truth and the singular “I” are located within a chain of other references, that is, they receive a rhythmic and mythic association with “swaying,” “bruiting,” and “murmuring.” If the Andoumboulou are “a rough draft of human being,” this is also in the sense that while humanoid, they are not reducible to a being, object, or name. Similarly, the word serif in Whatsaid Serif comes from the Dutch word, Schreef, meaning a dash—a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter, the tangent (and asymptote) that clarifies signification but that cannot eliminate ambiguity. As a supplement, which is intended to reduce ambiguity but which instead adds complexity, the serif functions much like the role of the what-sayer, as well as the role of the sign that Mackey mentions in an epigraph: “an obliquely laid arc with a straight segment on the bottom forming a hook. This is the sign of the earth in its incompleteness” (Whatsaid). Language may proceed to unify worlds up to a certain point, but increasing sense comes at the cost of diminished diversity. So to remind readers of the flow of experience reminds readers of radical instability. While these reminders prevent both strong identity politics and gratuitous experimentalism, Mackey’s goal is even more worthwhile: to provide a poetics in which worlds can reconfigure themselves. If weaving, creaking, music, and ritual, rather than the book and the monologue—if skills and songs, rather than information and speech— become the exemplars for communication and connectivity, then this new mode of saying may be primarily intersubjective and plural. And by sustained practice of pluralization, Mackey models an alternative form of practice for readers.

Chapter 5

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A Br i dge Over Worlds Jam es Tho ma s St evens’s Plu r al- Wo rld Pa rt i cu l a r i sm God requireth not an uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity, sooner or later, is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls. —Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for the Cause of Conscience, Discussed in a Conference Between Truth and Peace

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rossing into the globalist twenty-first century, contemporary poetry anthologies in English remain curiously anchored by the category of the nation. As Jahan Ramazani points out, studies in cultural transnationalism “have recently proliferated in a variety of humanistic subfields, but in studies of modern and contemporary poetry in English, single-nation genealogies remain surprisingly entrenched” (332). Ramazani seems struck by the fact that, even as contemporary poetries originating in the United States increasingly speak in languages other than English and tie the particularity of ethnic difference to other groups around the globe, nonetheless, “books, articles, and annotations reterritorialize the cross-national mobility of modern and contemporary poetry under the banner of the single-nation norm” (332). For Tim Brennan, this nation-centrism owes to the twin birth of nation and literary studies, and even though he refers to the categories of nation and narration, the citizenship of its author most often allocates poetry to national categories. Ironically, though, the “sub-national” poetry of racial, ethnic, tribal, and otherwise particularist character (or “localist,” understood broadly) often qualifies

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innovative, localist poetry as transnational, even if guided by dissent against globalism. “Leaking” over national borders, particularist, experimental poetry that is written in what Juliana Spahr calls “the language of empire” and “the language of the colonized” as well as “dead” and “at risk” languages challenge the container metaphor of the nation. Since the 1970s, tribal, transfrontier, and multiethnic poetries by writers as distinct as Alfred Arteaga, James Thomas Stevens, Nathaniel Mackey, and Gloria Anzaldúa have drawn from, and contextualized themselves within, a corpus of world literature, provided that “world” not be understood as metropolitan in its aesthetic values (irony, sophistication, etc.) but rather guided by an openness to dwelling in many worlds and a capacity to move among them. In contemporary literature surveys, in “radical protest” literature as well as in poetry classes, mainstream U.S. audiences find their literary choices preselected: readers find compelling lyric poems like “The Exaggeration of Despair” by Sherman Alexie easily categorized as Native American, representing either a distinct ethnic voice or a nation-building “literature of resistance,” for example. In addition to resistance literature, multicultural poetries that enlist non-Anglo sources in the service of their poetic, liberal-tolerant vision of a “MultiAmerica” are prolific as well. Visions of lyrical sameness—amid differences of setting—appear in poetry by authors as different as Gary Soto, Wendy Rose, Simon Ortiz, and Garrett Hongo. Though these poets cast new, perhaps unfamiliar, characters to address familiar themes, as it turns out, “diversity has become a best-selling product” (Vadén and Hannula 156), and the danger inherent in the rhetoric of the multicultural anthology is that “the demand of cultural and postcolonial critics, feminist and postmodern writers for greater acknowledgement of diversity has been met with open arms” from the side of capitalist opportunism (156). Also listed under national genealogies, “cosmopolitan” poets like Eliot, Pound, HD, and Denise Levertov appear in American literature categories, despite the international trajectories of their careers and lives. Meanwhile, the American poet Francisco X Alarcón, writing about the Aztec as well as Spain and contemporary North America, seems to slip through categorical cracks—as an experimental poet who identifies as Chicano and who writes politically oriented poetry in vernacular “Spanglish” as well as colonized, “dead” languages like Nahuatl. Insofar as nation remains the conceptual axis for the poetry anthology, then, the supercategories of U.S. poetry remain the big

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four: traditional lyric; identity-particularist resistance; market-driven multicultural American-ness; or “cosmopolitan” experimentation. On the other hand, within (ethno-specific) collections of Native American literature, or collections dedicated to (both formal and political) innovators, like Diane Glancy’s Visit Teepee Town (1999), readers find poets like James Thomas Stevens—who lives, writes, and teaches in the United States—identifies as Akwesasne Mohawk and Welsh-American and evokes the history of European colonialism in Native Canadian, Native American, and Chinese history. The fact that many of today’s most influential members of the multiethnic avantgarde are both too general (experimental) and too specific (plural and local) to find a place in the multicultural canon may not be as surprising as it seems. Such poetry as Stevens’s remains nameless insofar as it resists current categories from within. What is missing from “the single nation norm,” according to Spahr, is an account of the “diverse poetry that has yet had no obvious name foisted upon it by critics.” This poetry speaks in languages that do not holistically intertranslate or reduce one language into the terms and values of another. In her Poets House talk on “Literary Predecessors” (during the fall of 2005), Spahr refers to Kamau Brathwaite’s writing as providing an example of poetry “that can be characterized by a local attentiveness in the face of globalization, by an attention to how the local shapes the language, by a political and formal attention (not one or the other but both) to experimentalism, by a respect for culture combined with a well-honed critique.” While she half-jokingly (but, to my mind, quite accurately) refers to such poetry as “cosmopolitan vernacular,” another way of thinking about poetry that is at once global and local, as well as necessarily political and innovative, is as “plural worlded”: writing out of plural, disparate localities. Locality means more than physical space that can be defined by a GPS device. Rather, the local, understood as a web of abiding commitments seems more in line with what Spahr means when she refers to Brathwaite’s “local attentiveness”—his focus on numerous webs of linguistic connectivity. (And I would add that this sort of existential locality in fact gives shape even to physical locality.) To Spahr, the fact that Brathwaite credits T. S. Eliot with modeling the use of the vernacular in poetry demonstrates that the widely disparate local worlds of Caribbean poetry and British Modernism can coexist at each others’ margins, so long as one form of nearness does not pretend to universal insight. And the emerging deep-pluralist poetry writes against the vision of a one-world system that speaks in one homogeneous voice—a vision that emboldens the spread of American English worldwide.

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As a candidate for a more generous concept of world literature, plural-world writing increasingly comes to show its particularity, its only partial translatability into standard English, and its irreducibly local nature. And in fact, it is just this partial translatability and localness that allow deep-pluralist poetries to resonate across geopolitical borders. Plural-world literature remains too complex at too many levels to speak for the American personality—the “voice” so often sought in poetry—even as “American” consumer values vie to set the standard for a world-system. In response to Alain Badiou’s question, “what kind of politics is really heterogeneous to what capital demands?” a distinctly contemporary answer is, “a local, open politics”—as manifest in a poetics of messy engagements among plural worlds. This chapter and the remainder of the book discuss contemporary poetry by multiethnic avant-garde writers within the context of the emerging field of innovative transnationalism. I focus on Akwesasne Mohawk poet James Thomas Stevens, owing to his engagements across plural worlds of personal, tribal, national, and global concerns as well as his formal and political engagements with expressivist and experimental poetries. For Stevens—also named Aronhiotas—local identities have been unmade and remade by imperial forces, especially language politics, often acting through the never-neutral agency of the book. Stevens’s own books, Combing the Snakes from his Hair (2002) and A Bridge Dead in the Water (2007), investigate the hegemonic links among language, missionary colonialism, and military industrial incorporation that naturalize English as the language of economic globalism. But more than acting as poet-detective who investigates past and present imperial rhetoric of all sorts, Stevens also remakes identity by offering innovative methods of cross-world communication, writing in terms more amenable to the local worlds among which he moves, ranging from interpersonal to intertribal. In his long poem, Tokinish, a series written in 1994, which appears in Combing the Snakes from his Hair, Stevens revisits Puritan missionary Roger Williams’s 1643 linguistic guide to Narragansett terms, Key Into the Languages of America in order to explore Williams’s original multilingual study in contact linguistics. In providing his own “key” by which to translate increasingly disparate localities, Stevens will question global-developmental accounts of the inevitability of the loss of language to recover and preserve what remains of Native American languages. In the process, Stevens particularizes and pluralizes the Puritanical view of America’s exceptionalist self-image.


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In distinction to Snyder’s Turtle Island, which westernizes native creation myths, Stevens’s series, Tokinish and A Bridge Dead in the Water, move among numerous worlds, exploring the use and abuse of language within them: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The world of seventeenth-century French Jesuit explorers The Iroquois and Huron tribes whom the Jesuits tried to convert The Chinese whom the Jesuits tried to convert The language education offered by eighteenth-century British Puritanism 5. American language primers used to convey imperial propaganda to Mohawk children, and 6. The corporate-speak of contemporary American English as it euphemizes corporate interventionism around the world and attempts the appropriation (privatization) of language In the course of his investigations, Stevens recovers elements of at risk and “dead” languages as well as the forms of life that these languages articulate. As English moves from its former status of an imperial language into “its new role as a vector for global expansion” (Spahr), Stevens’s critique of imperial rhetorics also offers a locally situated, pluralized mode of global dissent. For Stevens, what Euro-American techniques of domination overlook are not only the numerous traces of plural worlds that escape their leveling gaze but a crucial dimension of language itself. If language is misconceived as merely a matter of getting increased clarity and mastery over a finished world—for example, if global, neoimperial practices use language to consolidate themselves through various telecommunications and culture industries—then alternative forms of relational identities and alternative kinds of locality drop out of the story. This loss can never merely be “written off,” though—as acceptable in the hegemonic march of “development” and “modernization.” To the extent that identity becomes fully “preselected” and a singular order of reason emerges, forms of life and language at the margins are trivialized, innovation diminishes, and increasingly numerous aspects of reality become unintelligible, even among the colonizers. Beginning with the European colonial encounter, and ongoing today, the world has been “shrinking” for those who own it and who negotiate it in the language of the market. But alternative worlds— worlds that do not fit into the accounts—are required even to preserve the languages of empire, to keep them from becoming the nonlanguage of information exchange. As M. NourbeSe Philip points

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out in her poetry and prose series, Zong! (2008), “our language—in the wider sense of that word—is. . .preselected for us, simply by virtue of who we understand ourselves to be, and where we allow ourselves to be placed. This, indeed, is also the story that cannot be told, yet must be told” (205). As a political goal, to defy the status quo through localized innovation and linguistic complication is to restore the unassimilability of the colonized, and this amounts to “getting revenge on ‘this / fuck-mother motherfuckin language’ of the colonizer” (205). But as a philosophical goal, innovation also restores a plurality inherent in the structure of language itself: to innovate on given identity is to coordinate and rearticulate practices from numerous marginalized worlds. As Stevens’s poetry will point out, local worlds remain as traces never entirely erased from world-systemic economic globalism. Local worlds reveal “the leakages in the purportedly universal structures and uses of language. These impurities live in languages, habits and practices” (Vadén and Hannula 86). In response to worn-out, civic humanist calls for a Western civil order than can only survive if cultures are given a common language and a common social experience, Stevens undermines this already failing conceptual bridge. Stevens shifts the ground beneath the bridge by foregrounding the “idea of the local as vernacular, as dialect or subculture” that Vadén and Hannula think of as a fruitful “mess” (86); and this mess assures the open, radically democratic encounter among worlds. Openness and the democratic ethos consist not in the act of imposing bridges across localities and leveling cultural differences. As Ishmael Reed says, “America, I don’t want to melt in your pot!” Rather, openness involves the practice of reclaiming and sharing locality by innovating upon the concept of self that articulates each locality, so that many localities may communicate more openly and spontaneously. Stevens’s writing is transnational in both prenational and postnational sense. It is pre-national insofar as it restages the encounter between European and indigenous languages, as though in an effort to begin the encounter again (from a less naïve, more contemporary, and radical democratic point of view). And it is post-national in that, rather than being spoken for or sourced by a core power, the poem’s personae speak among particular ethnic worlds and global peripheries that have been silenced by European forms of nationalism and (“big”) history.

P h il a delphi a: The S pi r i t of ’0 6 At the 121st convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA; 2006), held in Philadelphia, James Thomas Stevens offered what


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Francisco X. Alarcón might consider a traditional ritual bearing-taking ceremony, similar to the Nahuatl, before he began his presentation on the conference theme, “Orality in Poetry.”1 The Nahuatl-Chicano ceremony involves locating the tlacuilo or ritual speaker in social space. The teller faces the cardinal directions, yells a salute, “Tahui” (here), to each point, and orients his listeners within a self-contained space of shared concerns. The poet builds locality in the act of invocation. Stevens began by addressing a sense of unfamiliarity with his space, one that would have to be made familiar in the forthcoming talk about poetry. He, like his subsequent speakers, M. NourbeSe Philip and Jena Osman, would invent a shared concern or local world with his audience. Stevens confessed that Philadelphia was in many ways an unfamiliar, marginal, or not-yet-gathered world to him. Though he has lived in many regions of the United States and in Canada, as a member of the Mohawk tribe, he admitted feeling strange appearing in this particular new locality—“The land of Ben Franklin,” as he put it. In this poetic performance, Stevens brought the world of the Iroquois Confederacy into contact with the artisanal world of “the Middle Colonies,” making each weakly appropriate to each other by foregrounding their unsuspected similarities without negating their profound differences. The Iroquois, Stevens reminded his listeners, provided native tribal inspiration for the U.S. Constitution. Equally interesting are the similarities between Franklin’s picaresque journeys as a writer and Stevens’s own negotiations of plural worlds. Stevens’s biography updates Franklin’s peripatetic persona—Stevens himself having lived and worked among First Peoples at schools across the United States in the interest of preserving indigenous languages. As a Hermes or coyote figure (in Haraway’s appropriation), the picaro-trickster transports and translates (often “tricks”) people over from their familiar worlds into new worlds. And in this capacity, it seemed fitting that Stevens next told a story about the way that, when he was younger, he used to enjoy transporting stones and branches from one geographical location to another (in effect, “translating” found natural objects). Though not obviously “poetic” in a purely aesthetic sense, Stevens’s fascinating phenomenological account of poesis seems intelligible in terms of a desire to restore a sense of rich plurality to local experience. Stevens’s ultimately “poetic” act of object relocation shows that the experiential nearness and the familiar feel of a thing ironically emerges most clearly from its intelligibility in more than one context. To bring a rock, say, “molded on the scarp” (quoting from Tokinish), from a river and to replace it on a beach, where other rocks have been

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eroded by the surf, is to enrich the look, feel, and experience of both that rock and that beach, by allowing the perceiver-poet to undergo an experience of plurality and renewal. The look of a thing depends on its world and the possible worlds in which it can appear, but no one world can ultimately fix the perception of a thing. No thing is ever fundamentally “proper,” that is, to just one environment, and yet no thing is universally intelligible as atomistic, or contextless, either.2 This intuition seems clear enough, but as NourbeSe Philip indicates, philosophers from Descartes (in the seventeenth century) to Husserl (and Searle, further into the present) represent objects as un-worlded, or meaningless, before the act of subjective interpretation, which is the work of intentionality. The relation among objects is governed only by the subject on this view, and the pure perception of an object is an ultimately contextless, empty experience. For Philip, “the European Project” consists in providing just such an empty, universally valid concept of “Law,” conceived as an ordered relation among entities and between subjects and objects. This European concept of law, according to Philip, “attempts to extinguish be-ing,” or the particularity, localness, or enworlded character of experience, “as happened for 400 years” up to the present (Zong! 200). At the end of this Cartesian project, Edmund Husserl claimed in his 1931 Cartesian Meditations that mere (world-less) physical things are encountered by subjective consciousness and then given meaning as cultural objects. The split between word and thing is absolute, given by the Word of Law. Particularity and locality, in this way, are made subservient to the law of reason. And this project still guides one-world accounts of experience and identity, as well as the project of literary Realism, both of which ignore the mediating (proto-)agency of language and enworlded experience. In contrast, later twentieth-century phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who saves the notion of world), and analytic philosophers like the later Wittgenstein (who grounds meaning in forms of life), contend that we do not normally experience bare physical objects and then secondarily interpret them in terms of what we can do with them. That is, we do not first experience objects on the basis of the physical input to our perceptual system and then assign each bare object a predicate, as Descartes thought. Or, to take Wittgenstein’s example, the same physical input to the visual system from the same lines on a page can look like (and not just be interpreted, secondarily as) as a duck or a rabbit. And, as Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus point out in their essay “Existential Phenomenology and The Brave New World of The Matrix,” “if a change in our understanding of things changes how they


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look, then we must take account of what they will solicit one to do with them, and that means they will have to look different in alternative practical contexts,” which the authors call “worlds” (92). This essay notes that, “if you want to simulate the experience of something, you will have [also] to simulate all of the different ways that something looks in different cultures,” in different moods, across cultures, and to different generations (93). Such global experiencesimulation seems to be an impossible project. Though it is possible to simulate the narrow world of the expert, in which objects always look overwhelmingly familiar, plural-world simulation cannot be achieved without eliminating the spontaneous, unpredictable changes in the look of things as the perceiver moves from one local world into another. These changes engage human experiential and linguistic spontaneity by soliciting a range of “free,” unpredictable responses.3 Further, new interactions among things occasioned by rearranging a world can change the disposition of that world. The changing look of a river rock also marks a change in world (say, the world of the beach). If attended to, this process also changes the poet’s sense of the way that worlds work. The nuanced, “thick” appearance of things shows that worlds are made up of the look and the belonging-together of things within each world and the traces of their possible resonance within other worlds. A world is not a given domain of objects nor is it reducible to a matrix of subjective interpretation. In poetically changing, worlds show their contingent, self-limiting nature. Local, “open” worlds, then, inspire the same sense of rooted unfamiliarity or flexible familiarity that things do in their movement between localities. This describes a key feature of James Stevens’s poetic method. Stevens’s composition technique involves generating a poem out of interactions between a heritage language, personal experiences, and an imposed language—that is, his individual talent emerges from, and reinscribes, plural linguistic traditions at the same time. In Combing the Snakes from His Hair, Stevens develops this technique, which he calls elsewhere “Sui-translation,” or “translations for the self.”4 These translations “are executed in a way that allows for the words to change, in order to create relevancy in one’s own life” (Mind 154). In an essay called “Iah Enionkwatewennahton’Se: We Will Not Lose Our Words,” he cites his poem, “Three Translations from the Mohawk,” which appears in Combing the Snakes from his Hair, by way of example: Teiohonwa:ka ne’ei akhonwe:ia. Kon’tatieshon iohnekotatie. Wakkawehatie, wakkawehatie.

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry The canoe is very fast. It is mine. All day I hit the water. I paddle along. I paddle along. I am the hull—rapid against your stream. Birch beneath the ribs circumnavigating your body. Endless propeller of my arm as it circles to find the flow. I move this way against you. I move this way. (Combing 96)

As Stevens prescribes, and as this poem demonstrates, the song “can and should change” in order “to become relevant to my life” and to the lives of readers (Mind 154). As a mode of political action, this poetic style of accommodating present concerns “goes against what ethnographers and anthropologists have imposed on us since they began to study us. . .That it is one of the tenets of the oral tradition that stories must evolve to create relevancy was never even considered by anthropologists” (155). Where the canoe song becomes relevant to Stevens’s life is at the level of the verbal conceit. He says, “every day I move against a stream of other lives, currents of emotion, eddies of fear or pain. Each day my arms reach for another, birch ribs under skin, trying to find a flow of unity” (156). This innovation upon the language of tribal identity, Stevens remarks, “is how a canoe song helps me. This is what I am trying to show in my work, specifically in the work that relies on Mohawk language for imagery and meaning” (156). The point of this poetic experimentation is neither “merely” innovative nor traditionally lyrical; rather, Stevens’s goal is to consolidate, enrich, and politically activate the experience of local nearness by putting plural worlds in contact and allowing each to resist, test, overlap, and change the other, all while appealing, as little as possible, to any preconceived notions about any particular world. Stevens remains suspicious of the way that locally relevant poetic improvisation is fossilized by the rationality of anthropological discourse—which tries to take the receptivity, resourceful adaptability, and flexibility out of local expression. He seems equally suspicious of what Charles Bernstein calls “official verse culture”—which looks for an easily identifiable, humanist expression of epiphany. Finally, Stevens retains some critical distance from experimental poetry as well. In the “language” poetry, for instance, any form of locality comes under


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suspicion, since, in light of twentieth-century theories, all forms of locality appear finally to emerge out of the indeterminacy of language. In this case, no linguistic (or practical) resonances can in good faith be considered more resonant than others. But, ironically, because his sense of locality leads Stevens to suspect the universal translatability of experience, his writing is mistaken for an already institutionalized form of experimental poetry: “By the time I reached graduate school at Brown University’s Creative Writing Program, I was working on poetic forms that involved direct translation from Mohawk, meaning instead of translating a word like A’kohsa:tens as horse, I translated it as its linguistic parts, ‘the that aside.’ This alludes to the way Mohawk people first saw this animal, as reined together, pulling wagons and plows. Ironically, everyone thought I was deeply influenced by ‘language’ poetry” (Mind 153–54). When Stevens renames horses, he translates native culture into English in an attempt to evolve an alternative constellation of meanings in both worlds. A poetic process— that modernism took as the “yoking together” of ideas by the gifted mind of the poetic subject—becomes, in Stevens’s compositional practice, a poetic response to difference, to the way that words and things fall into, and hang together differently within, more than one particular world. And this solicits readers’ attention to the generative impurity, or the “be-ing” (M. NourbeSe Philip) of other people, words, things, and worlds. In his 1919 essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” T. S. Eliot—borrowing the term “Metaphysical” from Dr. Johnson’s 1779 discussion of Cowley—cites examples of poetry that demonstrates how “the extended comparison is used with perfect success” (Eliot 61). But in Stevens’s “Half-breed’s Guide to the Use of Native Plants,” the rhetorical conceit, the extended comparison (the “yoking together”) is broken apart by a deliberate translation failure. Here Stevens makes the attempt at the universal translation of experience stutter. Rather than analogizing the traits of plants to the human features they possess in order to synthesize disparate experiences, the poet enacts a complicated series of Ovidian metamorphoses, to bring plants to life in several different kinds of world. In the table of contents for the “Half-Breed’s Guide,” plants are gathered in the series by their Latin taxonomy, for example, Eryngium yuccifolium Asclepias sullivantii Cacalia plantaginea Aster sericeaus

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But as the series of poems unfolds, the reader is gathered into alternative organizational schemes and competing narratives. Stevens’s forty-one page series, which treats nineteen Midwestern prairie plant species, arises out of a sense of divided ground—inspiration divided between worlds: Stevens, like the tribes of Haudenosaunee and the Kahniakehaka before him, “looks to plants for inspiration. Not the flora of [his] native northeast, but displaced, [he] looks to the plants of the Midwest prairie. [He] looks to them for a key to surviving this new old world—a world that half [his] blood fought to obtain and the other half struggled to hold” (Combing 5; emphasis in the original).5 In the poem, Stevens’s rhetorical worlds are Latin-taxonomical (the colonial father tongue), vernacular English, and tribal, as well as personal-lyrical: Eryngium yuccifolium RATTLESNAKE MASTER If I clasp my arms in solitary and unreaching who will come to me on this droughted plain? Like veins in anger thickening, strong cords running along the margins. I frighten all and attract none but him who would bite me on the thigh and leave me for dead in the morning. (Combing 7)

These images unfold into a sui-translation, featuring aspects of the homoerotic personal lyric as well as the Latin rage for taxonomical order. As readers are gathered in, the silent call to draw references together into story foregrounds the poet’s personal reflections against the background of tribal and Midwestern Anglo-American regional practices of naming plants. Throughout the series, what begins as an attempt at classical analysis—an attempt to unveil a universal ratio or underlying principle governing the systematic placement of the plant—instead reveals local references. A local resemblance—rather than a shared essence—begins to emerge, linking the plant and the poet’s mood. In this way, local existence or “be-ing” supersedes law, essence or “Being.” The plant seems impersonal in both Latin and vernacular. The local name is


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“rattlesnake master,” a name that the poet has not selected. But in sui-translational form, the poet will personalize it by figuring himself as rattlesnake master and then unfold a story of his own metamorphosis from a plant into lonely lover. The lonely mood occasioned by the poet’s displacement from his native soil (he is a “transplant”) gives the plant and the prairie a look of lonely, individualist defiance. Then, in carrying this trait of the plant (back) over into the human social world, the poet’s concern seems to revolve around ways to retain his self-possession while inviting and reaching out to another. Plant and human worlds unhealthily align in seeming to echo the poet’s narcissistic identity. By the time that the poet has been found “dead in the morning,” the poem has meditated on a special feature of mortality: to be mortal means not to be rooted to any singular, whole identity. The defensive urge to isolation and solitary self-possession, the formation of a singular identity, acts as a “strong-corded” defense against specific threats; but strong identity invites a more total form of vulnerability, too. To the extent that the poet defends against contact, he creates and defends his “proper element” and “roots” his identity. But the more rooted to a singular element he remains, the greater the threat that that element may be taken away. If selfhood is defined by melancholic desire to turn inward, then to let someone else “in” (to direct the libido outward, in Freud’s language) is to see that strong, melancholic, subjective self threatened. The defining feature of the rattlesnake master, plant and man, is its inability to relinquish a fixed identity. And as defensively effective as such invulnerability may seem, it also levels all human interaction to the status of a threat. The master ensures against physical death by way of turning selfhood into an imperishable ideal, anonymous and personally unfulfilling, but safe insofar as an ideal cannot die. Leaving out particular worlds, the price for a universal vision (in this case, of invulnerable selfhood) leads to a severely diminished social and experiential life. On the other hand, people who move among numerous worlds (each of which world soliciting a different response) ultimately live a more open relation to locality. Of course, this remains a goal that is itself marginalized by universalist, foundational views of the self, commodified as a reliable consumer or fetishized as a psychological agent. Though each world remains at risk of being taken away, outgrown, or closed off, the poet capable of mortality, of surrendering self to different forms of community, remains innovative, flexible, and responsive to unique situations. In Stevens’s series, as one identity fades into the background, another emerges, contoured and enriched by former

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identities. According to Hubert Dreyfus, one can only innovate upon the given world by appreciating that fixed identity does not exist and that “we must be ready to relinquish current identity in order to assume the identity that our practices next call us into attunement with” (Romanticism 275). Identity should be understood neither as set in stone nor as freely chosen, but as conditioned by a local world. Such identity abides “so long as that local world lasts” (275). In his appeal to a mixed-blood poetic treatment of plural worlds, Stevens repeats, on a personal, lyrical level, the pattern that he had set in speaking about objects: it is insofar as it is other, and other, and so on. Stevens’s larger political goal of localizing and pluralizing the transnational encounter is hinted at in his use of Latin to arrange the “HalfBreed” series. Latin taxonomical names add to the classical, rational nature of Stevens’s allusions, even while heritage, Anglo-vernacular, and personal languages accompany each plant as well. In what might be called Stevens’s “postcolonial botany,” language from different worlds—different modes of arranging knowledge—foreground and background each other, rather than “fusing their horizons” (to borrow a phrase from Jauss) into a singular revelation. To the extent that it functions as an “-ology,” every scientific study, such as anthropology, serves as an attempt to locate its subject within the single, intelligible structure of a rationally organized universe. As the study of traditional knowledge and customs as well as the medical and cultural uses of plants, ethnobotany poses challenge to the usually transparent relation between names and things—showing that the way names and objects are coordinated has everything to do with their respective worlds. Jamaica Kincaid reflects on the role of botany in colonization in her 1997 Callaloo essay, “In History”: “To have knowledge of things, one must first give them a name. The plants [in the New World], all of them and they were hundreds, had two names: they had a common name, that is the name assigned to them by people for whom these plants have value, and then they have a proper name, or a Latin name assigned to them by an agreed-upon group of botanists” (Kincaid 3). Of course, Kincaid’s distinction between “common” and “proper” must be heard in at least two registers. This phrasing is toned in the voice of one particular value system—that of the botanists. And in this dry voice, Kincaid would appear to diminish the value of “common” New World insight. But this voice thickens with irony when she points out that it is not the Latin name that is “agreed upon,” but the group of people called “botanists.” Vocational worlds, selves, and values have to be given in advance of any


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particular facts that will be found within those worlds, by those selves, who hold those values. Both the words “common” and “proper” are themselves Latin, and so the common/proper distinction would not be familiar, common, or proper to New World peoples. No thing has a truly proper name—in the sense of a word that organically accompanies it—and if the definition of “botanists” is commonly agreed upon, then botany, as well as what is revealed by it, remains decisively “common,” that is, decided by a community. The plants are coordinated by their use in a practice, be it religion or science, and it is only the colonial use of science that would hierarchize “the proper” over “the common.” Colonial claims to universal insights, situated outside of any particular world, are staked by asserting that science has discovered the fundamental rootedness of the name within a comprehensive rational field: “The botanists are like that man who sailed on the ships [Columbus] in a way, too: they emptied the worlds of things, animals, mineral and vegetable, of their names, and replaced these names with names pleasing to them; the recognized names are now reasonable, as reason is a pleasure to them” (Kincaid 3). Stevens’s ethnobotany of North American flora is of another order than that of the ethnobotanists. Rather than emptying, delocalizing, or unworlding plants, “Half-breed’s Guide” overdetermines names by using each name as a pivot, or as one point that is common to the worlds of the people who use the plants, each to different ends. The best that scientific discourse can do is to suggest a new method of ordering and arranging, which amounts to an alternative locality. But in this sense, scientific discourse is nothing more than another (very dry) form of poetry.

We Wil l Not L os e O ur Words During his presentation to the MLA in Philadelphia, Stevens drew on and departed from his earlier essay, “Iah Enionkwatewennahton’Se: We Will Not Lose Our Words,” which he wrote for Vine Deloria and MariJo Moore’s 2003 collection of creative “Essays by First Peoples,” Genocide of the Mind. While his 2006 talk began with a linguistically oriented discussion of his interests in poetry as a kind of transportation from one world into another, Stevens’s 2003 essay begins with a family history that situates and divides him among his Welsh and Iroquois ancestors. This genealogy proves empowering as well as debilitating: tracing a split ancestry situates the mover/traveler’s activity outside of debates between determinism and freedom. No one chooses which

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worlds one can belong to, nor can anyone meaningfully experience the freedom to choose or adopt an ethnicity, because in the act of choosing a world and its particular constellation of values, one takes away any authority that a world might have over one’s behavior. To the extent that locality is chosen, it ceases to act in a locally relevant way. Ironically, this powerlessness at self-invention is what seems empowering for Stevens. As a partial self, he is free to be claimed by multiple sources of affiliation, provided that he learn the language for each and that he become partially determined by several localities. But no one is determined by any one locality, either, since the capacity for language itself presupposes complex social behavior such as migration and the adoption of new worlds. The innovative capacity so central to language, that it can be mis-cited (what Derrida calls its “citationality” and “iterability”) depends on its ability to migrate across multiple contexts. So-called “expert worlds”—say, the world of surgeons—require only minimal language among participants, but these worlds remain notoriously narrow and inflexible, too—cut off from the messy interactions that people take for granted every day. Language use presupposes the ability to integrate radically new experience into established worlds (and words) of the familiar. In fact, to the extent that particular worlds are closed, either by tradition, specialization, or reactionary politics, language and innovation become less necessary, even as the world of the everyday seems increasingly alienated. What is disabling for Stevens at a protopolitical level is that while he may be empowered by local rootedness in more than one world, the people with whom he would communicate remain accustomed to perceiving their worlds in only one way. That all worlds are arranged according to only one given, hierarchical arrangement of values is among the first thing that students within the Western epistemological tradition learn, and it is one of the first obstacles that Stevens’s poetic project must overcome. Since one aspect of poesis is to preserve the sense of experiential nearness unique to locally authoritative worlds, Stevens achieves at least two goals by teaching heritage language to Mohawk children: he can restore an alternative way of coordinating experience for his students and, at the same time, he can subject what remains of the colonial pedagogical system to a radical critique that pluralizes given worldviews. Every act of asking “why?” grounds out in some form or other of the statement, “that is just the way that we do it.” But the act of pluralization and localization crucially shifts the emphasis of this response to, “that is just the way that we do it.”


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Z ea lo us Li ngui s ti c s Immanuel Wallerstein notes, in remarking the connection between Western knowledge and colonial expansionism, “social science emerged in response to European problems [in basically five countries, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States], at a point in history when Europe dominated the whole world-system. It was virtually inevitable that its choice of subject matter, its theorizing, its methodology, and its epistemology all reflected the constraints of the crucible within which it was born” (Wallerstein, “Avatars” 93). The origins of early European ethnography are located in its attempts to make sense of non-European others, and, as a latecomer in this process, linguistics in the United States begins with “missionary linguistics.” The early European settlers on the American continents brought with them a book-based religion, and “as in other parts of the globe, the first serious attempts by Europeans to learn and describe indigenous languages had a religious motivation” (Harris, Linguistics vi). As Roy Harris notices in his 1997 Origins of American Linguistics, “conversion of the heathen required communication with them and, if possible, translation of the Bible into their language” (vii). But in an “educational” process lasting over three hundred years—that involved burning Mayan documents that demonstrated native “idolatry,” for example, and decimating the native population—European settlers underwent a reaction formation in response to the increasingly dubious universality of their conceptual schemes. Threatened by an undeniable plurality of religious practices and cultural values, with no universal principle against which to rank them, the colonial attitude amounted to denying plurality—largely by reducing various tribes to ethnological and linguistic specimens. “That reduction,” according to Harris, “went hand in hand with the professionalization of ethnology and ethnography in the United States.” And this, in turn, “marked a watershed in linguistic studies” (viii). As Harris, Wallerstein, José Rabasa, and others demonstrate, the human and social sciences were born out of the modern European contact with the incommensurable worlds of irreducible “others.” (In a similar argument, it is sometimes maintained that American ethnopoetics emerged out of the Jesuits’ encounter with the foreign script of Chinese, leading to Ernest Fenollosa’s writing, and therefore directly to Pound’s 1915 Cathay.) A self-consciously revised version of this encounter characterizes Tokinish. In Stevens, poetic translation activates the poet’s ability to align practices in numerous directions in the act of preserving them. In Tokinish, Stevens takes up and redirects

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Puritan missionary Roger Williams’s practice of translating the worlds of Puritan and Narragansett practice into each other’s terms. Stevens restages Williams’s contact poem in specific because the encounter between Williams and the Narragansett approaches a kind of open, plural-world encounter that respects the integrity of each world, while allowing knowledge to grow from (rather than to dictate) the terms of the encounter. Williams’s encounter was transatlantic, but an (admittedly limited) attempt to let the “trans” of knowledge move both ways. The response poem that Stevens will generate is nonnational and transnational (insofar as it stages both a prenational and a transatlantic dialogue between imperial and threatened languages), and it envisions a particularist, enworlded, and antiglobal mode of connectivity. Stevens introduces his poem with a title page reminiscent of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century missionary texts like those of John Eliot, Jonathan Edwards, and Roger Williams himself. His half-title translates the Narragansett word “Tokinish” into the loose English equivalent: “command, meaning: ‘Wake him.’” Stevens then quotes a passage from John Donne’s “The Ecstacy” (1635) on the theme of wakefulness. On the poem’s first page, Stevens provides as epigraph Donne’s “conceit” of the body: “But yet the body is his book.”6 And as his last in this series of epigraphs, Stevens puts in dialogue Narragansett and English, using Williams’s twin-column catechismal question-and-answer (educational) method of translation: Awaunkeesitteoúwincohòk?

Who made you?

Wússuckwheke.

The book

This brief imitation of Williams revises the encounter that Williams had with the Narragansett. In A Key into the Language of America, Williams devotes his twenty-first chapter to a discourse “Of their Religion,” in which he translates “Awaunkeesitteoúwincohòk?” as “Who made you?” This question initiates a longer series of questions asked by the Narragansett, including “Whither goes your Soule when you die?” “Who made the Heavens? / The Earth, the Sea? / The World?” and “How many Gods bee there?” Although Williams’s goal is to convert the Narragansett, his “heresy” against the Protestant church consists in believing the Narragansett capable of coming to the revelations of Christianity by their own lights. And while Williams’s catechism dialogue still goads his interlocutors toward perceiving the power of the universal “Word,” instruction in God’s text often sidetracks into


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dialogue, which issues in Williams’s descriptions of local practice and his quasi-anthropological reflections on the clothing, foodways, and daily rituals of Narragansett life. In fact, to the extent that Williams provides a dialogue rather than a litany, he proves heretical, and to that same extent, the Key proves useful for trade, allowing smoother communication in language and practice between the English and the Narragansett. Williams’s pluralism (to the extent that it can be called that) not only embodies a fragmentary literary-serial form, but it informs his democratic practice of buying rather than “appropriating” land from the natives. His expulsion from New England, though phrased in terms of his doctrinal unorthodoxy, was more clearly motivated by his respect for a heterodoxy of practice, which might prove galling to any Puritan who suddenly found himself conscience-bound to buy land rather than to “remove” the Narragansett. In his introductory quote, Stevens rehearses Williams’s response to the Narragansett, to wit repeating Williams’s Protestant myth that “the book” (the Bible as revealed word) made the Puritans. (In Williams, this response appears elsewhere in the Key.) When the subject of the book does arise in Williams, he takes the opportunity to reflect on the broader cultural goals of his own book, which “(by God’s good providence) may come into the hand of many fearing God, who may also have many an opportunity of occasionall discourse with some of their wild brethren and Sisters, and may speak a word for their and our glorious Maker, which may also prove some preparatory Mercy to their Soules” (qtd. in Harris 123). In addition to serving as a protoethnography and a catechism meant to instruct both native and European, the Key is also a meditative poetic series (Williams often provides a short set of rhymed “observations” within each chapter) and a contact narrative (each set of translations forms a minimal, suggestive story line). Roger Williams’s stated intent for his book is that it serve as a key to “open a box full of other keys.” That is, underwriting his project is the hope that he might compose a pluralist guidebook that other colonists might use to enter into an open, democratic, and ongoing dialogue. But the invitation to dialogue expressed in Williams’s book is inhibited somewhat by the teachings of another book—the natural world conceived of as God’s text. Even though Williams teaches tolerance, he makes a series of cognitive mistakes, as do Stevens’s readers, in assuming the self-containment of objects: as a result of his banishment, Stevens says, “Roger Williams set foot in what would become Providence, Rhode Island in 1636” (Combing 111). And “because

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he saw water on all sides he wrongly assumed the land to be island. Although the Native he saw standing before him was certainly isolated in isolated surroundings, he did not call him island.” It is not Williams’s ignorance or (mistaken) concept of Narragansett geography that Stevens highlights in this passage but his particular European practice of conceptualization itself. Stevens intuits the Puritans’ vision of the book of nature as reflecting God’s design and singular mode of ordering experience. And Stevens’s entire poem, in fact, works as an extended meditation on the theme of isolation, relying heavily on images of islands. The Puritan vision of the book of nature, into which God has inscribed his design, idealizes a comprehensive set of types that divides reality into objects (Descartes’s res extensa) and subjects (the res cogitans) and also divides each among themselves. In the god-given design and cramped ontology of subjects and objects that is revealed to the Puritan mind, the grammatical arrangement and order of language bears witness to the ordered relations among self-standing entities. But the world unfolds otherwise for Stevens’s imagined native. Embodied local experience, since it contours a world presubjectively, reveals that people and things interpenetrate. Stevens foregrounds language as what Ira Livingston calls a “bearing-withness” to the world (Autopoesis 4). One of the results of this change in poetic focus is that the relations among beings come to seem just as “thingly” as the things themselves. And since it mediates between things, language itself can be considered thing-like. Meanwhile, things are word-like because things themselves tend to suggest other things to which they may be brought into relation. In the voice of the native whom Williams meets, Stevens remarks, Island. Look to a map to prove the concept mute. All waters have a source and this connections renders earth island. (109)

In a fascinating poetic orthography (and performance of self-reflexivity), Stevens bounds the subject of “waters” by two “islands,” which function as bookends to the stanza. To a viewer situated in an objective world of isolated positivities, whatever lies in between these entities, including the relations among them, fades to background. But a gestalt shift occurs when readers consider that the relation among islands (the ocean that links them) might itself appear foregrounded, bordered by land masses. By taking the island out of the center and putting it at the margins of the above stanza, Stevens enacts the


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cognitive shift that occurs as one foregrounded identity is displaced by a version of identity that had lingered in the background. From the point of view of the poem’s Narragansett natives, universal truth, or a correspondence between things and words, simply seems a cultural function of a particular grammar. For Stevens, To say it requires a boat or bridge to reach a true island is to simplify the question too much. A bridge or boat are simple movement. When the boat is not moving across, it ceases to be boat and a bridge is forever gerund. Spanning implies movement, as when the bridge no longer spans the gap, it ceases to be that bridge. (112)

To say, “it requires a boat or bridge” simplifies the question too much because to say such a thing presupposes that things appear only one way. Is spanning a human activity that bridges two separate beings and allows them to communicate, or does spanning refer to the selfgathering tendency of the river banks (and inherent to words and things)? The arrangement of the poem almost suggests that the relationships—bridging and spanning—act like things (emphasizing the gerund as the noun form of a verb), and that bridging is what things and words do, with some human assistance (called poesis). A bridging and a spanning are attributes that belong to things only so long as they “do their thing.” This presubjective solicitation from the world itself stands in marked contrast to the imposition of an puritanical extra-worldly design, which cuts a pattern into matter that it must necessarily perceive as inert. This passage speaks from two incommensurate worldviews and shows that spanning them through translation requires more work than it would seem. A bridge understood as “forever gerund” refers the rational concern with “what kind of thing it is” to the empirical concern with how it works. Translation is a bridging, too. And Stevens begins his poem by admonishing readers (and his imagined interlocutors) that the kind of translation governing communication across localities cannot be decided in advance but will have to arise from the contacts among them. To look to another language and find that the grammar of that language renders nouns as activities is to consider an entirely alternative cosmology. And under this new grammar, Tokinish

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asserts unfamiliar truth claims: the forest is “the vegetable earth on a mineral spine” (107), animals form “the skin of the earth” (114), trees “mend sky to earth” and “man to man” (114), a river “flows upward into sky” (114), “Fowl weave into winds” (115), and the symbol of a person or thing can be different from the name for that symbol. If the Puritans’ book organizes nature as a series of islands in communication, for Steven’s Narragansett, “the body is his book”: the substance of experience puts claims to abstract truth back into dialogue with material reality, absolute rationalism into dialogue with local worlds that admit radically different arrangements. What Stevens suggests in his strategic mistranslation of the book of nature is his rejection of the idea that the Puritans’ book of predestined design has already been written. Social interaction among the colonists—a people made of the book—involves rendering lived experience into analogies of biblical narrative and assumes an absolute confidence in the hermeneutic skills of the theocratic leadership. For Stevens, the Puritans’ world-book institutionalizes colonial violence. The Puritans tended to read colonization efforts as a pilgrim’s progress and indigenous peoples variously—as Canaanites to be driven out of the Promised Land; as Egyptians from whom to escape, as Mary Rowlandson tried to believe; or as children of Eden in need of education. And equally violent is the uncritical acceptance of a book as an authority—a book conceived generally as a singular means for turning disorder into order by infinite (alphabetic) rearrangements. The world of the one book is, in principle, reducible to a singular and ultimate ordering, and the “Word” refers to the original design— the ultimate intelligibility of creation—that will be revealed to the elect. Naturally, as privileged readers who have already had access to the Word, the elect assume a special position above the otherwise confusing details of history, reclaiming the American wilderness in order to build “a city upon a hill,” which will stand out as both exception to history and exemplar to the world in the proper ordering of all values. Meanwhile, as Stevens is aware, in a way that Williams could not be, the United States will conceive itself as an island of the chosen, radiating colonial zeal from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Contrary to the puritanical design of the book, Stevens’s book opens by opening up or multiplying, rather than bringing into alignment, alternative fields of resonance. What immediately emerges in Tokinish are a series of references to other books and to bodies, islands, signs, water, trees, boats, natural arrangements of the environment and forms of social ordering:


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To walk the periphery of islands, as if knowing the border of body. To mould the well-muscled curve of your back modeled of river weeds hanging red on the scarp. Water run down river rock, the combe beneath your arm. Skin shining stone as the sun settles into its own dumb orthodoxy. Hemlock shoreline, of trunks forced into silt’s precision. The vegetable earth on a mineral spine. How to write island, the weighty peninsula of extremities. The red of lichen on a head of stone. Weight is the catastrophe of what we don’t know, The unsleeping gravity drawing boat to shore. (107)

An irreducible polysemy enriches without drowning out the poem’s reference bases as meanings tend to cohere and recombine but to render any one reading impossible. Stevens artfully composes geography erotically as one body wandering the border of another.7 The muscled curve of the lover’s back—which is modeled on elements of the natural landscape, including river rocks from which hang weeds— is itself modeled on the “combe” of hair under the lover’s arm—skin looks like stone or stone resembles skin: the geo-logic8 and the erotic logic so interpenetrate each other as to shed almost immediately any distinction between original and copy. Coappearing with images of the interplay between erotic and New World exploration is Stevens’s metacommentary on reading. The “vegetable earth on a mineral spine,” an image that appears in both Tokinish and Bridge, refers to the hemlock, the weeds, and tree trunks that grow on the geological spine, and hair and skin that grow on the anatomical spine, as well as to the book itself, which is made up of a “spine” and pages—inorganic matter that binds skin. In Tokinish, meanings grow and proliferate, and patterns form themselves (hearing “vegetable” to mean active, growing) against a background that itself shifts, though much more slowly (cultural history as mineral spine). Against what may appear to be Stevens’s sophistication and gratuitous postmodern “difficulty,” the point is not that the poet establishes a play of signification for its own sake, for the sake of a postmodern experimentalism, but that a plurality of equally weighted resonances can coexist and coordinate themselves in the reader’s consciousness,

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and that the proliferation—not the reduction—of new sensibilities is the point of the erotic encounter, the encounter with the other, and the point of Stevens’s book. If the Puritans’ closed worldview appeared in their desire to inscribe God’s eternal design into nature, then Stevens’s open encounter tries to render the manifold design of nature into the increasingly plurality of meanings in his book. Stevens’s tendency to frame the book in terms of bodies, matter, and nature foregrounds the materiality of language, not only its oral or written character but also its tendency to resist reduction into ideological schemata. Stevens’s method involves questioning what kind of overlapping of worlds is appropriate. Uncertainty and materiality appear in the poem as explicit themes, and appropriately so, since in an open encounter like the kind that Williams and Stevens both envision, the results are not predictable in advance. Christianity’s “golden rule,” that requires Williams to treat the Narragansett as he would be treated, for example, fails as an ultimate rational principle for ranking values because this principle itself assumes that the natives desire the same treatment that Williams would and that this is an encounter between homogenous societies. The localist claim, however, is better put in terms of another rule: “treat others as they want to be treated,” and “when in doubt” of what that might look like, “Ask. Communicate” (Vadén and Hannula 113). Through a complex overlap of historical, religious and literary sources—Narragansett, English metaphysical (poetic), and puritanical—Stevens unfolds a series of abortive attempts to transcend language, followed by a series of fortunate falls back into it. The body, lettering in the book, Native American “picture writing,” and natural things are all images for plurality and the materiality of language, writing, the body, and experience. Stevens’s use of Donne and the metaphysical conceit serves this purpose, since, as Roland Greene says, “by this route [Donne makes], that which is above sense [fall] into the world of sense” (Post-Petrarchism 122). David Tracy suggests that the “recognition of the materiality of writing,” empowers poets by calling into question all claims of totality; and this focus conduces to “the unveiling of the silences, conflicts, and power realities in all religious and cultural traditions” (384). For Basem Ra’ad, the recognition of materiality “in probing criticism and insightful analysis of material cultures, in exposures of hierarchies and repressions, can avoid the weight and futility of a writing tradition” (Ra’ad 103). And as Stevens’s sees, paradoxically, “it is in writing that we must generate models of how to transmit knowledge,” among which knowledge must be included a way “to avoid the fate of


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writing” in its tendency to totalize experience and to singularize and hierarchically arrange conflicting arrangements of social values (Ra’ad 103). In Stevens, abstractions (such as the concept and consequences of the book) become concrete and specific in the labor of concentration that the form of the poem calls forth in the reader. For Juliana Spahr, “The multilingualism of marginal languages works with the specific, with an interest in reclaiming and reconnection with heritage, and with a faith that clear poetry can sway and convince” (BREV). For Stevens’s teacher, Rosmarie Waldrop, who also wrote a contemporary (2000) version of Williams, called A Key into the Language of America, Roger Williams is the first American geologist of language, finding rich intensities of meaning in the Narragansett that would be covered over with the arrival of the English. It remains unclear, however, whether Waldrop herself is more interested in studying the agonistic encounter between worlds or in privileging Narragansett as a somehow more “pure,” even Edenic, world that was corrupted by English. Stevens, though, takes his bearings as a poet by rooting his language in the experience of crossing worlds more generally in examining the limits to appropriate articulations across worlds. For Stevens, neither established poetic form nor experimental composition preexist the encounter with the other. One of the dominant discourses that Stevens sought to complicate in his presentation belongs to Bernstein’s “official verse culture”: the allegedly universal aesthetic criteria for poetry as these values are transmitted through classrooms within the United States. For Stevens, even when its multilingualism consists in translating marginalized languages, the American poetic tradition tends to place native expressive practice onto a procrustean bed “by imposing line breaks, enjambment, and (necessarily) unfamiliar sounds onto Mohawk expression” (Mind 153). In addition, Stevens notes that “Mohawk tradition” is itself a discursive invention, just like the category of “Mohawk poetry,” furthered by numerous anthologies that force native chants into the poetic genre. He mentions Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder in this connection, but any number of anthologies take this established categorization as the starting point. As well, Stevens mourns the not incidental, material loss of sound and meaning (or the loss of their relation) in the carrying over of translation. Just as Stevens questions the adequacy of established form (if not the definition of poetry), he also distances himself from the kind of experimental writing in which unexpected meaning consolidates itself out of the play of signifiers within the field of language. Stevens’s poetry does not indulge postmodernism’s “unending design” (the

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title of Joe Conte’s book on the postmodern series poem) in the play of pure difference, but rather his poetics establishes cross-world connectivity, appreciating both the at-home-ness of heritage and its flexibility. At the same time that Stevens recognizes the violence perpetrated against native languages by English, he insists that his own, most personal expressions come from an English-speaking world. Stevens recognizes that, in the genuinely open (essentially nonviolent), agonistic encounter between worlds, each world must change in the encounter. Laclau and Mouffe theorize the agonistic interplay among worlds by noticing that “radical democracy” emerges and enacts itself in a genuine encounter between particular worlds, and the encounter limits the tendency toward hegemony: “Between the logic of complete identity and that of pure difference, the experience of democracy should consist of the recognition of the multiplicity of social logics along with the necessity of their articulation. But this articulation should be constantly recreated and renegotiated, and there is no final point at which a balance will be definitively achieved” (Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony 188). Essentially, the poetic encounter involves permanent revolution in language. Only closed, undemocratic worlds envision the other as either identical or “other.” Even while Stevens admonishes readers to remain alert to the discursivity (the en-worldedness) of our own categories, he himself moves across numerous traditions, languages, and cultures without destabilizing any culture except for those that seek holistic, hegemonic closure.

Bou nda ry Sto n es and Br i dg es : The Her mes Fig u re in C ontempo r ary Poetry In Tokinish, Stevens draws liberally from numerous transatlantic traditions: late Elizabethan “metaphysical” poet John Donne; Donne’s contemporary, Roger Williams; Stevens’s own contemporary, Rosmarie Waldrop; modernist American poets; the inland Native American peoples with whom he has worked (in the Midwest as well as upstate New York) and coastal-insular peoples. These groups represent a transatlantic network that also traverses centuries, a network whose survivance disrupts every form of linguistic hegemony that seeks to control language—from Puritan missionary zeal to English-only U.S. nativism, to the “oneworlded” globalization of English as the language of neoliberal social policy. His interventions in hegemony situate Stevens awkwardly in a number of discourses. Stevens belongs to a tradition of experimental poets who would rescue at-risk languages through the use of contemporary


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experimental poetry, twin categories that he shares with poets like Diane Glancy, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Francisco Alarcón. And many contemporary avant-garde poets teach Stevens’s work, including Joan Retallack, Tonya Foster, Juliana Spahr, and Jena Osman. Stevens’s writing also bears a “family resemblance” to modernist poets who employ what might be called “hermeneutic personae.” Like Pound in his Cantos, Stevens’s poetic voice tests various traditions by traversing numerous cultural pasts in the hope of articulating emergent self-interpretations. As a Hermes figure that spans cultures, Stevens can appropriate and redirect marginal possibilities from numerous cultures and from his own cultural pasts, in ways that enable him to reconfigure cultural values. Sharing Pound’s hope that his readers would be human “and not destroyers,” Stevens also yearns for language that would serve “as toward a bridge over worlds.”9 But Stevens rejects Pound’s (ultimately frustrated) attempt to suture all of culture into one abiding mythos. Stevens requires his audiences to see their worlds as comprised of overlapping, shared values that resist being reduced to one hierarchically arranged set of concerns. Hermeneutic personae strive for an appropriation of practices from one world into the next. In Western mythology, Hermes is the gobetween and guide, and as a figure for the poet, he is also the one who bridges worlds. A god of thieves (and tricks and language), Hermes steals from one world and transports to another. In the Greek, “Ermes” literally means a “pile of marker stones,” and Hermes is the god of boundaries and travelers as well as the messenger from the gods to humans. As a translator, Hermes is an interpreter who bridges the boundaries among strangers. The Homeric hymn to Hermes invokes him as “one of many shifts [polutropos], blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates, one who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods.”10 And the similar description of Odysseus as polutropos connects the world-crossing spirit of poetry with a wandering across worlds. In fact, what Hugh Kenner says of Pound’s famous 1912 poem, “The Return,” one may also, mutatis mutandis, say of Tokinish: that among other things it is a poem about “the mode of divine apparitions in poetry” (Kenner 190). The divine (called “imagination,” “the necessary angel” in Wallace Stevens) provides the lenses through which we perceive the world. And these lenses are necessary for any perception at all, even while they remain necessarily tendentious and plural. James Thomas Stevens focuses on the necessarily multiple modes of apparition, or ways of attuning people to their locality, each

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appartition determining the look of things. The Homeric hero conforms to the authority of the gods, which means that characters act out of inspiration from the worlds that particular gods represent. But certain gods (specifically Hermes, Athena, and Zeus) admire the ability to move between worlds. People carry aspects of one world with them as they move into others, and there are always other stories in the background, which means that the series of worlds that we move among always inter-refer to each other. In different worlds, a different light shines on people and things. Memory helps in this process: new meaning arises in particular worlds through that world’s pointing to— that is, evoking the memory of—other worlds.11 Stevens’s particular kind of border crossing celebrates a committed pluralism of perceptual and moral experience and describes a life that is unified but nonjudgmental, aware that there are many other worlds around. Stevens can build a bridge over worlds, but not with the same goal that motivates Pound to make “Paradiso / Terrestre.” Roger Williams’s life was intriguing in his ability to inhabit and move among plural worlds, and Stevens’s also suggests that coherence among worlds, but not universal comprehensiveness, should be the limits of an ethical poetics.12 Whereas for Dreyfus, Spinosa, and Flores, political activity usually “amounts to advocating for one or another ordering of [cultural] concerns,” appreciating “a collection of concerns” (Disclosing 132) with no greater unity or scale of aggregation allows different political opinions to coexist openly and democratically.

Chapter 6

4

“A Br idge Is Simple Movement” The “Euro-centrism” of social sciences has been under attack, severe attack. The attack is of course fundamentally justified, and there is no question that we must overcome the Eurocentric heritage, which has distorted analyses and the capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world. —Immanuel Wallerstein

J

ames Thomas Stevens introduces his 2007 collection of three series and lyrics, called A Bridge Dead in the Water, by submitting to poetic investigation the anthropological theory of the land bridge that spanned the Bering Strait during the last ice age, across which Homo sapiens migrated from Asian to North American continents: “A dead bridge. A dead theory. The Bering Strait theory, dead to Native peoples, whose hundreds of creation accounts dispel those of anthropologists.”1 Stevens is not concerned with the empirical validity of the theory, but demonstrates that, in applying it, anthropologists make sense of the world and of non-European others “objectively,” allocating populations within taxonomies and subjecting unknown historical worlds to their discursive control. If Western colonial activity is obsessed with the location of borders, the bridge theory nicely extends the boundary of the colonizer’s world across the boundary of another, making both appear familiar. The colonial desire for a universal discourse preempts plural, local worlds and their values by alleging already to share the ultimate value of scientific truth-claims with all peoples. In this light, and only in these terms, does anthropological discourse understand the origin of indigenous peoples. Together, science and colonialism bridge incommensurate worlds, guided by a deductive theoretical approach to indigenous populations, rather than inducing from particular worlds the shared elements and conflicting values that open one world to another.

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Stevens’s first series in Bridge, called (dis)Orient, meditates on “the seduction of delineation” (7), shifting frames between a series of French Jesuit explorers’ descriptions of the New World and lyrical monologues on the poet’s personal relationship, which is interrupted by accounts of the different histories of the lovers. In this way, the poem establishes its twin concerns—with delineation (and who gets to draw borders that silence others) and with seduction (a focus on who communicates with an “other”). The series begins with a fragment of Father Charles Albanel’s Jesuit Relations, which shows the ground plan that the Jesuit missionaries brought to their encounter with the Iroquois: “At length all our journeyings, which were made only by paths all strewn with Crosses, came to an end very fittingly at a lake bearing the name of the Cross, from its having the perfect shape of one” (in Stevens 1). To this, Stevens’s persona responds, “How quickly we prescribe / the shape of all things. / In the instant of disorientation” (1). When faced with the unfamiliar, as Albanel was in 1649, the colonial mindset imposed significations familiar from the European world to their experience of the New World. Already, in commencing the series, a key theme emerges: the priests prescribe— literally, write in advance—what will count as real. The poem at large has much to do with vision and envisioning the found world as mirroring back already-expected images. In an 1888 article, “Lake Mistassini,” about the large lake in present-day Québec (situated between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Hudson Bay), George Hurlbut translates one account provided by Father Albanel: “I asked our people if it was towards that place that we were to go? ‘Hush!’ said our guide to me, ‘do not look at it, if thou wouldst not perish.’ The Savages of all those regions imagine that whoever wishes to cross this Lake must carefully avoid any curiosity in looking at this course and, in particular, at the place where he is to land” (469). In contrast to the visual practice that guides colonial exploration, Stevens offers a logic guided by “the text of touch” and other ways of knowing. One of his most poignant images of empathy and the open encounter comes from his references to bats, surprisingly: the first image is of “a bat / etched into a charred canyon wall” (15) in North America, the second, a similar image, “carved on a beam above / the canal’s east gate” in China (15). In both cases, the bat represents “an empathetic creature. // Charting solely by / what is returned.” The image of echolocation resonates through the series, and here it is framed by the poet’s call to the lover, who is also colonizer (and also the poem’s “you”), to “locate me” (14).


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The image of communication in the dark—as a matter of attempting to locate the other by way of communication amid uncertainty— bridges the worlds of the Chinese and the Mohawk victims of French Jesuit exploration as well as the worlds of the contemporary lover and the absent partner (who, in a later series within Bridge, calls by phone from Europe). Meanwhile, images of the colonial obsession with maps and the Northwest Passage envision North America as a land bridge to Asia, facilitating expansion. In contrast to locating the native through direct, unmediated vision and “mapping,” the poet projects an image through the experience he has shared with the explorer. The poet’s alternative image (and paradigm for knowledge) is thoroughly mediated by local experience, “bounced off your bias” (15), in contrast to the leveling gaze of the colonizer. Echolocation as an alternative mode of locality extends beyond the confines of the book, too, as the reader as well is cautioned against understanding too quickly the experience of either the colonizer or the colonized. What the reader needs is a new model for communication. Readers receive this caution, in fact, before even entering the text proper. Preceding Father Albanel’s quote from his Jesuit Relations, Stevens places a quote from Wilfred R. Bion’s psychoanalytic fiction in four volumes (written between 1975 and 1991), A Memoir of the Future. The epigraph notes that “meaning is revealed by the pattern formed and the light thus trapped—not by the structure.” Whereas the meaning of a picture is revealed through its mood and atmosphere, the structure or form details only the objects within and the relations among them. So an epigraph that refers to vision as a process of complex seeing—the subject of the gaze as reflected in heterogeneous form—directly precedes the formal prescription offered by the church, which sees crosses everywhere. As an admonition to readers, Stevens lets us know in advance that we are entering a different kind of locality, one from which meaning will emerge (if at all) through engagement by following traces and apprehending a local atmosphere. In a similar pattern, modeled on a different sense, the poet also suggests to the reader/audience, Do not listen to me But to yourself listening to me. (2)

In dialogue, it may not be enough simply to listen to the other because one or both speakers may assume that they share a world already. True listening, instead, requires examining what kind of assertions each partner takes for granted and whether these assertions belong to

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a shared understanding. The examples of listening to listening or of locating by indirection are not simply the poet’s elusive deferrals of meaning. The caution against too easy familiarity forms an enduring theme in the poem, which dedicates itself to investigating what kind of bridges span, and what kind do violence to, experience. While the priest and his guide paddle along the lake at night, disoriented and afraid, the missionary feels overcome with need to chart the waterlight. . . with reference to ourselves, its distance, and what tribes dwell on its shores. (1)

The colonial mindset concerned with mapping and knowing takes its bearings by inscribing what is known onto what is not yet known. Stevens’s use of Pere Marquette’s report shows that the latter was able to trace a map of the whole new country based on the natives’ reports. As readers learn, however, these reports are mythic, also containing stories of birds that bury explorers by shedding their feathers. Abstracting from the reports, Father Dalbon notes that maps ultimately shed “more light upon all these missions” than do any or all local descriptions, and Father Ricci notes that “the more intelligent [natives], seeing such an orderly arrangement of parallel lines of latitude and longitude, could not but believe that these crossing lines were true” (11). Concerns that occupy the forefront of the European mind (maps) are reflected back to them as background material (to the mythic stories), and this gesture relativizes the value of their own Jesuit project (bringing the cross) as well as the project of global exploration (crossing lines on the map). Bridge seems guided by its critique of Western rationalism, which, like Albrecht Dürer’s 1515 woodcut, “Rhinocerus,” would draw the creature unseen (based on a written report of an Indian rhinoceros) and impose mathematical “lines that transcend language” (7). In this view, the poem would seem either to reveal the loneliness that results from setting social relations within a wholly abstract system, or to show readers that no matter how rational attempts at global positioning, the geographical sense of location is ultimately based on a set of local desires. At the same time, the poem establishes the necessity of a new kind of dialogue. Stevens offers his model for a complex crossworld poetic in an early lyric:


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Orient or disorient Huronia & Cathay. The landbridge will not be forced to function by what you find familiar on either side. What is not familiar around us, more relevant than what is. (Bridge 6)

While maps provide a sense of mastery over fear, they sacrifice the productive disorder of social interaction. To teach its readers how to engage in local exchange, the poem orients the reader in several localities, even as it disorients more familiar modes of proprioception. Right after the poet asks, “whose truth, whose meridian / would show your proper placement?” (11), the poetic monologue rehearses a technique of scale change that Stevens uses with particular deftness: When seeing yourself so large, myself in a distant corner, or sometimes drawn so small, you are lost in the warm port beneath my arm. (11)

Here the poet begins with the implied perspective of the European lover, who is looking in a mirror at himself and falling prey to the optical illusion of centrality and greater size than his partner. But the poet could just as well be referring to maps, on which the mapmaker remains able to represent his interests by painting them in broader strokes than the interests of others. Finally, the colonist can take his epistemic position as viewer to provide a literal worldview that is nonpositional and all-comprehending. In any case, the world of the self-viewer appears the only world of note, and yet he is lost, disoriented, at sea in this position, anchored only by the embrace of the poet’s arm. This is the “Night anchorage / or the matrix of bodily awareness” (14). Despite the loneliness of the poem’s “you” and “I,” despite your/our tendency to “blur all distinction between actual, lived space and imaginary, idealized space” (17), both partners share space as “geomantic” (17), laid out by shared mythology. Although it would seem that the poet privileges tribal forms of local worlds, his poetry also intimately renders the French priests who were willing to die as martyrs at the hands of the Huron in “A Species

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of Martyrdom: The Huronia Series.” In this short set dedicated to seventeenth-century missionaries martyred in upstate New York, Stevens closely, even erotically, depicts the experience of the missionaries: “To kiss the stake / one’s bound to // fall to erotic postures,” he begins (67). And the Huron who has killed René Goupil (d. September 23, 1642), “you,” in Andagaron, New York, also sought your skull and lifting it to his lips, noted the tiny rattle of ecstasy. (70)

As Alan Gilbert notes in his review of Stevens’s Bridge for The Believer, “despite his obvious disapproval of the priests’ efforts to convert the local inhabitants to Christianity, Stevens—like the Christian saints themselves—revels in the ecstasies of their suffering, itself the product of religion, violence, and ritual’s reciprocating mix.” What seems important here is that religion and ritual are shown in these poems as embodied, not abstractly known, providing the kind of local authority that requires sacrifice. If Stevens’s empathy toward the religious martyrs seems disorienting, this is because he eschews the ontological privileging of native groups as well as the colonial attitude. To idealize the identity of the Huron or the Iroquois would amount to fixing that identity in time and ignoring the fact that political groupings continually emerge and evolve. And in the poem, both European and native localities are sometimes open to exchange: each can find relevance in the unfamiliar—or bridge to the other—but only for fleeting moments. In a figure of physical distance amidst personal closeness, the poet recalls missing the lover: And I hang pictures of you and I across the hostile void. Then comfort comes in recognition. (18)

While pictures suggest accuracy of representation, comfort comes from a deeper sense of recognition and personal familiarity. The poem’s opposed logics of sight and sound, light and dark, mapped space and lived space, remain strange, even violently disposed, toward one another, and yet often one world appears in terms of the other,


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seems grounded in the other, and moves from ground to figure and back against the other. Stevens’s poet does not imagine any particular world as ultimately more open to dialogue than any other, although he might seem to. He introduces the personae of several “orientalists” in (dis)Orient, who are misguided and ethically disoriented and therefore who reduce the Iroquois and the Chinese to the subjects of anthropological study, ultimately to find their “symbols similar / on both sides of the sea” (13). But immediately after offering this critique of the way that orientalists view his “native mind,” Stevens inserts a fragment in which Father Marquette expresses his fascination with the native artistic depiction of plurality. Stevens includes in its totality Marquette’s description of a painting of the interaction between “two monsters,” each with a deer head, tiger hair, a human face, and a fish tail. For this moment (which appears immediately after the description of the “orientalists” in the poem), Marquette appreciates the nuanced sense of plurality in the people whose symbols he has inappropriately generalized, and might even intuit that that same sense of complexity, and not actual, physical symbols, is what spans cultures. Stevens has arguably even contextualized Marquette’s narrative in advance, anticipating it before the orientalists appear. “Orientalist” is a category into which Marquette and the fathers move in and out. Before they make inappropriate generalizations about the Iroquois and the Chinese, the Jesuits’ identities intersect momentarily with the Iroquois and the Chinese, as all three groups use some form of echolocation and painted rock as (acoustic and visual) signs for artistic plurality: The sound of the oar returned by the tiled roofs of Han Shan Sì or here, the loon’s cry, resounding from painted rocks beside the Sault. (12)

For Stevens, the model for ethical communication and understanding between localities lies in a metalevel give-and-take among local styles rather than between people who share a uniform background. In fact, uniform communication—if engaged in unselfconsciously— can often lead to a more thoroughly, dangerously coordinated background against which its figures simply repeat long-familiar language. To the extent of its consolidation, a single style, religion, state, or other form of identity trivializes alternative styles or forgets local distinctions altogether. This form of bridging must be undermined. On

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the other hand, though, to find points of overlap between styles is to bridge two unfamiliar worlds and to occasion innovative responses to the newness of each. As Vadén and Hannula affirm in Rock the Boat, “language is certainly meaning-giving, but as part of an impure and shared community; it is something we must participate in rather than receive” (141). The act of poetic innovation, and even poetic difficulty, is what ensures the kind of productive misunderstanding that can lead to communication. While the “difficulty” of a multiethnic, experimental poem shows the otherness of the poet’s life-world, at the same time it requires active participation on the reader’s part in coming to understand that world. In the most fruitful instances, this give-and-take describes the function of teaching, too, but as Stevens points out, to use language pedagogy as a means of one-way communication (conversion and indoctrination) involves building a bridge by force—leveling important differences. If globalism takes up and reconfigures every particular locality through commodified language, as Hardt and Negri argue, then what Arundhati Roy calls “a politics of resistance” and “globalized dissent” (32–33) should also follow a guerilla tactics of intervening in global narratives from a plurality of local sites, “writing back” in marginalized languages. While capital increasingly brands, packages, and formalizes meanings and identity through mass-mediated messages and narratives, the pluralist poetry of local worlds highlights an array of alternative meanings and reveals that meanings come from specific motives, historical backgrounds, situations, and traditions. Stevens’s last series in Bridge, his most recent series, Alphabets of Letters, more directly than his earlier poetry criticizes colonialism, and more clearly undermines the bridges over which economic globalism travels as it forces every local sense of meaning to the periphery of a self-consolidating core. Stevens begins the series by focusing on “the propaganda found in Native American children’s primers from the time of our honored Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant, and the propaganda of rhetoric in general.” In this poem, occasioned by Stevens’s reflections on the United States and its allies’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, the poet bridges late eighteenth-century European colonial rhetoric with the language of mass-mediated events in the present. In the process, Stevens finds and laments “the rhetoric of empire and the short distance our world has moved toward understanding and communication in these past few centuries.” As he does in Tokinish, Stevens draws readers’ attention to the hegemonic functions of language instruction and the consequences of its uncritical acceptance.


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In Alphabets, Stevens foregrounds the way that “postcolonial emergencies,” like the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, are used to justify, among other things, a counterattack in language against on those who are “not-us.” Owing to its stated goals of American multicultural diversity, the Bush administration was required to abandon its original rhetoric—of launching a “crusade” against al Qaeda—before it even got off the ground. But less overt, possibly more destructive uses of language were legitimized after September 11, 2001, as new names started coding authority in the mass media. Suddenly, names like “Blackwater” (now XE), “Halliburton,” and “Lockheed Martin” were made public recurrently, instructing media viewers that private, global corporations would now ensure the public safety against vaguely defined threats and regularly recurring shocks.2 For Stevens, this process of media encoding shares an uncomfortable number of links with some very old methods of instructing the colonized in the rhetoric of empire. The cover page to Alphabets of Letters appears similar in detail to the kind of primers circulated throughout the British colonies, including the land of the Six Nations, which includes the Mohawk. Its full title is Alphabets of Letters, or A New Primer For The Use of Native or Confused Americans (Bridge 83), and in this series, Stevens makes explicit the ways that during the late eighteenth century and onward, Mohawk children were taught to speak and think “in mandate direction” (85), learning both a Protestant value system and their marginal roles within it by learning the European alphabet. But Stevens’s primer is only partially a re-creation of the missionary primers that Mohawk leader Chief Joseph Brant would learn from, then teach and then recoil against, foreseeing as he did a “missionary meltdown” (86). Like Roger Williams’s Key, the primer provides a frame, but into this particular series, Stevens reads present-day globalist violence: Stevens begins his list poem of British colonial necessities from July 1766, finding embedded in them the not-yet-explicit “corporate claims made on a country”: The lists. Of Supplies: Schenectady, 9th July, 1766 2 oz. Brass Wire 1 Dozn. Pipes 1 White Shirt to Huron Chief 1 B: Rum Tody to Do. 6 Bowld Tody

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Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry 5 Pints Wine 1 Qt. Spirits Cash for a Cow Do. Pd. The Butcher for Killing her 3 oz. thread 25 Needles 1 pint Maderia Wine to Pondiack 3 pair scizars 1/2 Gall:rum Rum to aid in the Celebration of their Infernal Pawaws. (93)

This poem moves immediately onward to a similar list poem, formed instead from a sampling of today’s global leaders in a developed form of capitalism that thrives on (and therefore perpetuates) disasters: Of Suppliers/Bid Contractors: Honeywell (R, K) Spectra Physics (K) Semetrex (R) TI Coating (A, K) Unisys (A, K) Sperry Corp. (R, K) Tektronix (R, A) Rockwell (K) Leybold Vacuum Systems (A) Finnigan-MAT-US (A) Hewlett-Packard (A, R, K) Dupont (A) Eastman Kodak (R) American Type Culture Collection (B) Alcolac International (C) Consarc (A) Carl Zeiss-US (K) Cerberus (LTD) (A) Electronic Associates (R) International Computer Systems (A, R, K) Legend: A = nuclear programs B = bioweapons program C = chemical weapons program R = rocket program K = conventional weapons, military logistics, supplies at the Iraqi Defense Ministry and the / building of military plants. Lucky (ARK)s beached on the slopes of Ararat. (94)


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Here Stevens draws a rich, complicated history out of an apparently simple list. In the case of the British grocery list, everyday stories (of English cattle rustling, stained shirts, and local goods) play out against the larger history of British attempts to induce alcoholism among native tribes, “as a solvent / to clean out places,” according to Diane Glancy. Stevens then focuses on the commercial nature of war and empire—a military-industrial complex that even Brant saw coming. References to Noah’s Ark are not coincidentally related to the coding system of multinational corporations. The encouraged link between religious destiny, recovering biblical lands, “gentle” imperialism, and global corporatism is a staple of today’s mass media rhetoric. Stevens finds this link being forged in the Anglo-American tradition of learning literacy through the primer, the medieval primarius liber, or primary book, and the primary manual, the primarium manuale. According to Patricia Crain, author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America (2000), “texts that teach the alphabet cross national and linguistic boundaries and span generations. Primers were first used in the fourteenth century as guides to daily prayer and church services; by the sixteenth century they regularly included the alphabet, becoming all-purpose first books. Only gradually did children become the primer’s explicit audience, and only gradually did reading instruction per se overtake prayer as the primer’s central purpose” (Crain 19). The point of the primer was to embody cues to oral performance in the material form of the books, the representations of the letters, and the stories that accompany each letter, but those material forms as well as their performance also link literacy to cultural values. As Stevens warns repeatedly, “no document is neutral,” and innovating upon the traditional model of the primer, Stevens’s Alphabets of Letters makes explicit the coded U.S. primer in historical violence. Stevens’s poem requires that readers acquire a new literacy and learn the history of the “French and Indian Wars” as well as the Iraq wars in order to negotiate his rhetorical bridge and make sense of the encounter that Stevens stages between them. Pontiac, we learn, was an Ottawa war leader by 1747, when he allied himself with New France against the English and the Huron. The British won a tenuous victory against Pontiac, and in order to assuage their one-time enemy, the British made a series of presents (read bribes) to the chief, while at the same time providing gifts to keep the peace with their allies, the Huron. The payment to the Iroquois and Huron aided in the colonial development of America

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and furthered the expansionist policies of the British Imperial Government, stifling insurgency so far as possible. War in the interest of expansion and trade, of course, becomes a theme again in history and in the poem. Both of Stevens’s lists link war and trade or think of intercontinental war as corporatism by other means. While the French and Indian War was fought on an international scale between the French and English (involving their intertribal “clients”), the second, contemporary example of the U.S. invasion of Iraq is transnational, financed by interests with only nominal ties to any particular nation-state. Stevens does not need to go to great lengths to forge links between the rhetoric of appeasing “insurgents” in 1766 and the rhetoric of multinational corporations—telecommunications, security, and infrastructure “providers”—in the present day. Stevens’s list of multinational corporations shows that just as religion was displaced by nationhood, so the concept of nation as a source of identity has now moved into the background, while global corporatism has come to occupy the foreground. And yet the links persist. In the United States, the resonances between worldviews guided by religion, nation, and economic globalism themselves are consistently taught in the culture industries of the contemporary multimedia. By taking over the naming role of Adamic man, Stevens parodies and—by making a parody—clarifies the way that the values of nation and corporate empire are conveyed in the teaching of language. Stevens highlights these hegemonic linkages, and emphasizes the early level at which they are instructed to children by using the device of the primer: Oi and Oy are generally hard; as in oil, &c. Let’s speak of oil. The import of brown children to learn the word Of GOD & OIL The indigen as obstacle. You will be removed. (88)

Following the pattern of the primer, Stevens conceptually bridges historical epochs with little turbulence, given that the rhetoric in both ages is so similar. In fact, the shock occurs as it dawns on readers how egregiously inhumane are the effects that the rhetoric enables (has enabled since European language instruction began in the New World, one generation after Columbus’s arrival):


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B

Heaven to find, The BIBLE mind. R A Brown man from our Tanks did RUN, Never more to See the Sun. C A traffic Jam in Baghdad, they did bar, By firing into a Civilian CAR.. . . G An Indian shot for holding a GLOVE, Mistook for a white child’s hand they Loved. (96)

The authority of the written word, specifically the Bible, the record of colonial violence, news headlines from the U.S. military invasion of Iraq, and the behind-the-scenes global privatization of war all seem to belong to distinct worlds that are merged together by the primer. The reader’s historical consciousness might be able to keep these worlds chronologically separate, though, until a revealing and confusing image appears under the heading of “L”: L

LOT fled to Zoar, Saw fiery Shower, On Sodom pour.

At this point Stevens’s readers lose their bearings for a moment, dazed by the unexpected, terrifying unity that has been constructed out of biblical judgment, the mission of colonial education, and the religious language of both corporate and military leaders. This apocalyptic image induces paranoia from a sense that distinctions among all existing and possible historical and cultural worlds has collapsed. In an example of what Jameson calls “weak historicity,” Stevens constructs a presentism that suggests the violence of all previous ages has merely been a dimly intuited version of history’s final realization in a oneworld, American, God-Military-Industrial-Educational complex. This simultaneity suggests not only a family resemblance among conspiracies, but one giant, Pynchonesque conspiracy, over 300 years in the unfolding. In fact, Stevens himself bolsters and even extends this view by suggesting that one central script underwrites the entire colonial encounter: that of turning the rhetoric of empire into the grounds of transnational (leveled) understanding and communication (as a mere exchange of slogans and logos). Johnson’s grocery list to the British admiralty adumbrates Stevens’s account of Chief Joseph Brant, who, in 1776, became the principal war chief of the confederacy of the Six Nations, but Stevens finds the chief’s acquisition of English literacy most important. In Stevens’s

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characterization of Brant as learned reader and military leader, colonial expansion is equated with literacy and with the purposes of pacification. In an apostrophe to Brant, Stevens says, lettered Chief you saw it in its infancy. opened the book and understood An Alphabet out of Order. . . It would never be the same. (107)

In this final long poem, Stevens puts the “alphabet out of order,” condemning attacks on language, the destruction of indigenous cultures, and the current war in Iraq by literally “spelling out beliefs,” in this case, in multinational corporate power. Tracing letters that form lists that cohere into ever-larger plots, unfolding over centuries on a global scale, Stevens’s poetry would seem to validate Emily Apter’s view that paranoia remains a key features in U.S. writing after World War II. An aesthetic of paranoia, the global conspiracy fuels America’s fear of transnationalism, which is itself guided by nativist impulses. But Stevens seeks to ward off paranoia as much as to intervene in the hegemonic sutures among literacy, nationalism, war, and transnational empire. While the paranoid thinks in terms of a singular ontology—what Peter Galison calls “the ontology of the enemy”—Stevens gives equal measure to the role of humble things and the way that they focus local, open worlds, even in the face of global expansionism. In a final lyric poem, Stevens foregrounds a wineglass, the arrival of the lover, the lover’s body, a shared bed, and shared terms of endearment to show how some of its parts are greater than any one whole context: The A of an Adam’s Apple against the lips. The B at the small of your back. The C of the clavicle, a hollow for the thumb. Too entangled in the naming of objects and the namer, to trust the word or the object. By any and every day’s end, I know not whether a wineglass is as strong as an iron. (106–7)


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Iron yields to wineglass, and speech as proposition yields to the source of speech in the body. This healthy, if temporary, line of communication is based in the poetic act of naming and the local, personal relationship to the namer, and warrings and warnings yield to the words for “kiss” and “hello,” which are taught the poet by the lover’s phone call from France. Everyday words and things, or better, naming and namers, generate sustainable worlds. And the possibility of intimacy and shared locality—even across an ocean—provides the model for a “bottom-up” version of globalization that beings with negotiated locality rather than the flows of capital. Localities remain more flexible and more plural than they get credit for, at once capable of rendering practices intelligible at levels as close as the family and as wide as the globe. Further, in a literary critical act of “reverse engineering,” plural-world poets generate an ethics out of the dynamic encounter between languages and local worlds, rather than beginning with global principles and their language politics. A proposed comparative model of poetics, then, no longer asks whether poetry cosmopolitanizes, deconstructs, or uncritically accepts the speaking subject, which had been the earlier preoccupation with multilingual and experimental writing. Instead, according to Juliana Spahr, criticism comes more to reflect on “the negotiating yet politicized gesture of multilingual works” insofar as these works challenge the spread of English as “the lingua franca of economic globalism” (“Connected” 76). So the question becomes whether poetry establishes or deconstructs identity, but whether and to what extent it “works to preserve, as well as recover and reinstitute particular cultures, languages, and concerns that are being overwritten as English expands” (Spahr 77). Poetry that stages contacts between local, particular worlds “makes history” (small “h”) by redirecting and coordinating marginal concerns in order to construct a new sense of the local “us” and “we.” And a particularist poetics focuses new, internally consistent and locally abiding constellations of values. Not only do poetic worlds challenge the notion of any singular source of recognition (outside of the encounter between worlds), but in addition to pluralizing history, literary particularism challenges the Western historical evolutionary scheme of global “development” altogether. Avant-garde multilingual poetry has, for some time, staged encounters between worlds, undermining social cores, and moving among peripheries across the world’s at risk languages and inside the languages of empire. Rather than transnational (and thinking past the “post-” in postnational), these writers might more appropriately be called value-pluralist,

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localist, radical empiricist, “plural world,” or even grassroots comparatist. In order to focus readers’ attention on simultaneously prenational and transnational forms of localness, as well as to preserve what local cultures it can, plural-world poetries open up closed worldviews at personal, ethnic, and national scales. Critical pluralization and particularization escapes “the regime of capitalized concepts and categories” (Dimock, “Scales” 220) such as history,3 without referring to a foundational arrangement of values.

Chapter 7

4

Fe ars of a One-World Language But what if there are worlds in the one world, each ticking to its own contradictory and contesting clock and pulsation? Why. . .can ethnicity not secede from the epistemic regime of transnationalism and seek its own salvation in History, or perhaps history? What if ethnicity calls into question the regime of capitalized concepts and categories? —R. Radhakrishnan, “Ethnic Studies in the Age of Transnationalism”

J

L o c a l Wor l ds in Glob al Studi es

osé Martí railed against the “provincialism” of national borders imposed on the Western hemisphere in “Our America” in 1891. And yet, only within the last thirty years—facing the deterritorialization and unprecedented migration of people, the flow of capital, and the movement of goods and ideas throughout the world—has U.S. literary studies adopted what might be called a “transnational” perspective. Some contemporary transnational methods of literary studies such as Wai Chee Dimock’s situate official state histories within the broader temporality of “deep time” while relativizing nationalism as a modern reaction against early colonial encounters with the (non-European) other. From this perspective, true comparatism traces networks of people, languages and ideas as they transcend national borders and nationalist discourses. As the 2001 edition of PMLA indicates, transnational methods of study (also known as “Global Studies”) trace the sources of creative expression within the world’s dominant languages to sources lying within the world’s at risk languages. As sociologists Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald demonstrate in their 2004 American Journal of Sociology article, “Transnationalism in Question,” at the turn of the twenty-first century, “globalization is the order of the day. With international migration bringing the alien

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‘other’ from third world to first, and worldwide trade and communications amplifying the feedbacks traveling in the opposite direction, the view that nation-state and society normally converge has waned” (Waldinger and Fitzgerald 1177). As transnationalism emerges as a discursive structure of experience, the global scale becomes the broadest intelligible category of locality and shared collectivity (and threat), while multicultural assertions of civil rights, for example, yield to a broader concern with human rights or, more generally, with new ways to be at home in the world. In aesthetic terms, transnationalism means that art arises from the exchange of energies and resistances that defy monocultural or mononational categories. And yet, transnationalism often remains a paradoxical extension of nationalism. If the imagined community of the nation emerged (at least in part) out of the colonial encounter with the inassimilable other, then nationalism often sustains itself by turning inward and appealing to paranoia and a felt need for a home (land, security) in the face of an ever-threatening globalization. Multiculturalism would seem opposed to transnationalism. The first discourse supposes a key term (the nation) that the other discourse seems to cancel out in cutting across or “trans-ing” it. But the problems vexing discourses of transnationalism seem similar to those that haunt the concept of the multicultural nation. According to Basem Ra’ad, only one large-scale history of the metropolis and “civilization” has been told. For this reason, the politics of recognition, even within a perfectly fair system (nation or globe), would still suppose some form of unalienated history or value system beyond critique to recognize (and manage) difference: “Since the past is distorted, we all live today on grounds undermined by selectivities [at every scale] and have little basis for mutual recognition. Current recognition politics in the West is a concept and product of its recent history and its political system. How much are discussions and concessions still mired (though they often shift) in the necessities, balances, even luxuries, of power?” (Ra’ad 94). Building its universal claims, transnationalism imports multiculturalism’s question—“who does the recognizing?”—past a national to a global scale of aggregation. Following a comparativist agenda, transnational literary studies assumes that exchange among cultures and languages is an original phenomenon, and that to imagine community at the level of nation is to indulge a relatively recent, even somewhat provincial, imposition. In Emily Apter, this comparatism trains its eye on recently reanimated, cold war–styled American “paranoia” in the face of new transnational forms of connectivity and community. Wai Chee Dimock considers


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“chilling” Apter’s conclusions that “transnational” is another name for “America,” and, by extension, that American national paranoia and its only apparent opposite, economic globalization, actually play twin roles in assimilating the world outside of the nation into America’s own imaginary. Other cultural critics envision the possibility of a more open society that might exist at transnational scales of aggregation, including the image of a “global commons” (Spivak) or “transnational civil society” (Singer). And among other things, poetry written in the improvised, hybrid languages of Gertrude Stein or Ann Tardos offers linguistic innovations that connect people across those borders formerly known as nations. Joan Retallack, in her book The Poethical Wager, notes that in contemporary poetry, “the model is no longer one of city or nation states of knowledge, each with separate allegiances and consequences, testy about property rights and ownership, but instead the more global patterns of ecology, environmentalism, bio-realism, the complex modelings of the non-linear sciences, chaos theory. You can see this now with more and more poets using multiple languages in their work— not as quotation, but as lively intersection, conversation. . .What better thing for poets to do right now than to begin in one language and end up in others?” (Retallack 39). Contemporary critique now traces poetic “translations” of experience not simply between the “core” and the “periphery” of a globalizing world (in both directions) but also among various peripheries with only passing reference to the metropolis, as occurs in Arteaga’s poetic encounters between the worlds of the Nahua and the Inca, for example. To this transperipheral form of translation, it seems telling to compare a more cosmopolitan poetics, like that of Eugene Jolas. Marjorie Perloff makes such a comparison between poets who theorize ethnicity and poets who theorize cosmopolitanism and leaves readers with the assertion that while the multilingual encounter between worlds that takes place in the languages of empire demonstrates a healthy poetic cosmopolitanism (and basis for mutual recognition), the multilingual encounter that does not involve European languages or that does not pass through the metropole is, in her terms, “separatist.” What the Narragansett, the Mexica, the Iroquois, the Afro-Caribbean, and the native Pacific Islander are separate from seems obvious. The apparent “simplicity” of vernacular language or identity politics does not write itself into the more “sophisticated” play of signification. And Perloff’s commentary illustrates a Eurocentrism that exists at the transnational level. Ultimately, though, whether one feels more at home in the nationstate or in the cosmopolitan world seems to make little difference.

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For Waldinger and Fitzgerald, “what scholars most often describe as ‘transnationalism’ is usually its opposite: highly particularistic attachments antithetical to those by-products of globalization denoted by the concept of ‘transnational civil society’” (Waldinger and Fitzgerald 1178). That is, according to Waldinger and Fitzgerald, what literary comparativists and transnational theorists most often “get right” is their rejection of the “container model” of the nation-state, according to which nationhood remains the background against which migration appears as an anomaly. This “folk understanding” has given way to a realization that networks of people, languages, and goods “have always, regularly spanned the boundaries of the state, leading transnational migration to consistently recur” (1178). Bridging worlds, bringing local practices into their own by gathering practices from other locales, and giving these composite practices a limited unity of style—this seems the condition of possibility for the derivative models of national and transnational studies. From globalism’s inability to translate transparently among local worlds it does not necessarily follow that regional styles remain completely incommensurate. Vadén and Hannula find that, “if there is something that globalization makes visible, easier to distinguish, then it is the local. Not only, not even mostly, as a harmonious entity, nor as a nostalgic hiding place, but as something without essence, without purity. Locality is the collision of stories, themes, thoughts and practices that make up our all-too-chaotic everyday existence” (12). World literature, or, more properly, plural-world literature, draws attention to local worlds that remain grounded in experience to the extent that they do not draw on an external, one-world vision of locality. “Of course,” Vadén and Hannula continue, “locality” and local worlds “can be closed, reified, purified, homogenized”—to which might be added “neo-liberalized” or “Americanized”—but then locality “turns into something else. It turns into universalism” (13). What much transnational theory misunderstands is the depth and binding power of regional pluralism, to wit, prenational or subnational particularism. In Balibar’s terms, the ethnos or “the people” tend to form abiding worlds or to aggregate at levels both more local and more geographically dispersed than the level of the demos. But as Robert Warrior notes, “because Native peoples continue to have political status as nations, at least in the United States and Canada, many Native scholars remain uncommitted to regarding their work in [transnational] terms” (PMLA 1684). Warrior quotes Dimock to frame his suspicions toward transnationality, particularly his suspicions of her account of the transnational as a “constellation of


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material realities.” “Transnationality,” he responds, “points not to the emergence of a new collective unit—a global civil society. . .but to the persistence of an old logic, the logic of capitalism. Market born and market driven, it is infinite in its geographical extension but all too finite in its aspirations. It offers no alternative politics, poses no threat to the sovereignty of the state” (Warrior, PMLA 1684). What is wanted, then, is a New World poetics that recovers and preserves threatened locales and a genuine sense of locality, even as it makes new local histories. This plural-localism would productively challenge even the most apparently generous models of global citizenship and transnational tolerance by providing a grassroots model for a global agon among local worlds, in place of a “top-down” globalism that theorizes the local on the basis of universal principles. Given the nature of human skills, which remain receptive and responsive to a variety of environmental solicitations, people occupy more than one local, particular world at the same time, often guided by tacit principles that remain incommensurate at all levels of social aggregation, not just the “trans-” and the national. So, for as long as the ultimate scale of meaningful collectivity is believed to remain at the level of the nation or the world—national multiculturalism or universalist cosmopolitanism—comparative studies of multilingual poetry that deduces from either of these principles ignores the particularism and the deep pluralism that characterize contemporary poetic encounters between local worlds. These poetic encounters restore a plural sense of nearness, and they decontain unities that have come to seem universal. In terms of contemporary poetics, to ask whether community might best (i.e., with the greatest amount of civility) be realized on either a national level or a world-systemic scale clearly puts discursive carts before poetic horses. Contemporary poets who stage encounters between incommensurate worlds defuse impulses to suppose a more comprehensive scale of aggregation than that which emerges out of the agonistic interplay among local, particular worlds that their poetry puts into play. If contemporary multilingual poetry written within and across various borders demonstrates any point that can be made generally, it is that following an age of grand narratives, plural, particular, and often incommensurate worlds emerge at their own, various scales of aggregation, each following its own timeline. Even during cosmopolitan modernism’s poetic search for luminous detail, other, contemporaneous examples of poetry written in English offered “a critique of globalism’s disrespect for the local and localized sovereignty” (Spahr, “Connection” 85). In this connection, Basem

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Ra’ad recalls D. H. Lawrence’s 1932 poem, “Cypresses,” from Etruscan Places, in which Lawrence criticizes Western History’s violence toward—and attempts to efface—the pre-Roman culture of Etruria. Early Rome (precursor to globalism’s imperial model) renamed the Etruscan people “evil” and “vicious” “pirates” in the interest of retroactively imposing its own traditions. This act of renaming provided official historical accounts meant to overwrite the very culture from which the Romans (and “we” Western writers) took the familiar figures of “our” (ultimately Canaanite) alphabet: Yet more I see you darkly concentrate, Tuscan cypresses, On one old thought:. . . Dusky, slim marrow-thought of slender, flickering men of Etruria, Whom Rome called vicious. ... Were they then vicious, the slender, tender-footed Long-nosed men of Etruria? Or was their way only evasive and different, dark, like cypress-trees in a wind? ... There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still.

The project of Lawrence’s persona—to hear again the historically marginalized voices of historically marginalized, progressive pre-Western civilizations (both Etruria and Canaan)—grates harshly against modernist poetic projects, whose cosmopolitan vision involves building a world-poem in the interest of amassing a universal cultural archive. The fact that Lawrence’s vision is “darkened” and “dim” is itself suggestive. From the Roman Empire down to the present, sight remains the privileged sense of actio, a subduing before one’s vision, in the sense that Caesar’s veni, vidi, vici makes conquest the inevitable outcome of having seen Gaul as a whole, in advance. But a truly comparative field of literary studies cannot afford to see in toto. As Ra’ad points out, the goal, rather, is to examine marginalized cultures “without following any paradigmatic predilection, to reconstruct them using the best interdisciplinary tools [and] to retrieve traces too subterranean for systemic transmission.” This course of study “would produce less exclusionary histories” (Ra’ad 94) and might even “create a mindset for including future paradigm-altering discoveries” (92). The direction that the agonistic, democratic, and open


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encounter between languages, worlds, and disciplines will take cannot be decided in advance. In fact, literary-critical recourse to the foundational values of the state or the globe characterizes what Vadén and Hannula call “the colonial attitude” (Rock the Boat 118): “This recourse to a world other than the one experientially present. . .arises from foundationalism and from the jump outside mixed, impure and conflictual experience.” In this light, appeals to global citizenship or cosmopolitan aesthetics could seem just as “colonial” as the beliefs of the tourist, or as hidebound as Martí’s famous “provincial” who acts like “the world outside of his window is the world” (“Our America”). In contrast, true locality exists in the fact that “an open, contentful encounter is not tied beforehand to any set criteria” (Vadén and Hannula 119). What does not exist in the world is a set of foundational criteria or ultimate principles that readers can use to adjudicate among agonistically opposed worlds. In contemporary poetics, when language is considered in its materiality—that is, in its resistance to accepted categories of thought— language itself often gets taken as an alternative kind of subject, “a subject without intentionality,” to use Foucault’s term for power, or even as a self-sufficient authority. Without reference to localities, language becomes a singular and comprehensive ground of meaning. And when language rather than subjectivity becomes the new, posthuman universal, globalism has little trouble dovetailing language with its ends (of further globalism).

Pa rtic u l ar Wor l ds and Thei r Tr a nsnatio nal “S ub j ec ts” It is sometimes remarked that readers of “difficult,” experimental modernist and contemporary poetry find no “voice” in the act of reading; and finding no resonance or reciprocity for their personal experience, readers feel absent from the poem’s meaning. Be it poetic modernism’s (imagist, objectivist) “impersonality” or postmodernism’s linguistic (antiessentialist) “turn” to a focus on language itself, the confessional “I” tends to give out a sense of having given way. According to Emily Apter, a similar sense of subject loss often conduces to conspiracy-theoretical structures of feeling (that she calls “oneworldedness”) on the part of writers and readers who feel powerless before large-scale, interconnected systems that seem to have left them behind (i.e., globalism).

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This paranoid reaction to globalization could also describe the style of some U.S. experimental writing, especially when its focus falls upon the corruption of language into its purely informational, bureaucratic function. Such a threat appears in recent work by Lisa Jarnot, for example, and appears ironically stated in Miranda Mellis, whose 2007 Calamari Press book, The Revisionist, enacts the way that linguistic structure has subsumed the historical event: “In the past, when something fell out of the sky, or there were collisions, men in jumpsuits arrived, sirens blaring, to erase all traces. Something was always done about something. Now nothing was done, except documentation. For every event, there were multiple documents and artifacts, until there were more documents and artifacts than events. Inevitably someone called a document an event, and people made documents of documents” (Mellis 57). Mellis’s text is itself a document detailing the way that our dread of a world system has yielded to a sense of dislocation and even to a nostalgia for old-fashioned paranoia. The Revisionist moves past the American literary trend of detecting global conspiracy and connecting the dots everywhere, into a new posthuman realm in which such conspiracies become a matter of indifference. Within a global matrix that vacates all human agency, people have become “docile bodies” (to quote Foucault again), “meat puppets” or “wetware”—information processors past even worrying about their loss of autonomy. Here Mellis strikes a figure similar to Borges’s librarian in Babel who senses and fears that “everything has been written,” or that every event and human experience has been or could be scripted in advance. The librarian’s fears of global totality manifest themselves specifically in response to the technology of writing (the homogenizing system of the Western alphabet), which uses a finite and limited system of symbols to encode in advance every possible event and expression. In the “Library of Babel,” and in Mellis’s Revisionist, writing itself (specifically the dossier) becomes the measure of all things, including “man,” and writing conveys the homogenizing, leveling force of a singular, comprehensive world-system. In Hardt and Negri as well, language in its materiality no longer represents a refuge from world systems ideology but instead becomes the medium for globalization. Mellis’s poetic warning of a one-world language—that merely records rather than internally gathering and innovating upon local worlds—theorizes the (erstwhile) self from the point of view of globalized (informationalized) language. The focus on language itself as a medium can disguise the appropriation of language into a global, decentralized information economy, the aesthetics of linguistic self-reflexivity becoming the


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cultural wing of neoliberal globalism. In his 1994 series Dark City, Charles Bernstein reveals that global corporate-speak itself has begun to appropriate the language into which subject and object have begun to dissolve, showing that even postnational, avant-garde writing can be repurposed and deployed to the ends of globalism. And in respect to earlier innovative poetries, many of today’s innovative poets “scale up” one level of complexity and now wonder whether languagecentered philosophies may have defeated their own most liberatory purposes and situated both language and speakers inside a new information economy. Meanwhile, other contemporary poetries criticize the corruption of language “from without,” that is, from the point of view of the humanist self. Wislawa Szymborska’s animated visual poem “Advertisement,” for example, disparages the language of global advertising from a perspective transcendent of that language: Sell me your soul. ... There is no other devil anymore.

Symborska’s poem cleverly casts advertising in a Mephistophelian role, and the poem gives this devil the characteristics of often-advertised products (soporific, anxiety-reducing, mind-numbing, etc.). But while it seems to criticize “the ownership society,” the poem’s appeal is ultimately to the universalist Enlightenment value of human maturity in the form of bourgeois self-ownership. In the poem, the trite language of the advertisement is nowhere near profound enough to express the depths of human expressive possibilities and needs. But if Szymborska’s Enlightenment subject can become the prime mover, judging accepted language from a position outside of it, then at some point that same subject is likely to wonder whether or to what extent the ideal humanist is herself a product of language or advertising. Paranoia redux. The poet’s possible defenses against the repurposing of English for economic globalism cannot locate defiance in the self or her language, as both have been appropriated at source. Although the traditional subject-centered, epiphanic lyric has understandably come under a suspicion of irrelevance in a global age, viable alternative forms of expression need not center on the estranged materiality of a language without speakers. There is a third way between identitarian power plays and postidentity decenteredness. One way out of paranoia is to experience a change of world, to move among many meaning-giving, local, and practically incommensurate

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worlds without referring outside of the encounter between worlds, either to a grounded subject or to any singular systemic description of the world. One of the most engaging critical responses to globalization and its mass-mediated language appears in Ammiel Alcalay’s book of poems, From the Warring Factions (2002). In Alcalay, powerful historical events are juxtaposed to mass-mediatized posters, propaganda, lists, and documents. As readers often lost in the language of media spin, we sense our loss of autonomy and identify with it in the poem, but we can also take a critical distance from that self-effacement by moving into other conceptual worlds and examining different modes of repression in one from the perspective of another. This enables readers to understand spin as a result of global corporatist power, and to realize that global media rob our local worlds of any particularly binding, local, or sedimented history. Readers leave Alcalay’s poem with no grounding in universal values, but only with a sense that incommensurate, particular forms of expression have been overgeneralized or inappropriately linked together: posters of Saddam whirl and spin stealth bombers drop TVs over Baghdad books burn in Sarajevo babies choke in clouds of evaporated milk the ghosts of industry dot this landscape. (Alcalay 8)

The simultaneity of Alcalay’s images suggests Benedict Anderson’s discussion of ways that the nation-state consolidates itself as a coherent “imagined community.” For Anderson, “the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically [and all of its parts simultaneously] through homogenous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” (Anderson 26). In Alcalay, crises that envelope the globe occur simultaneously, as do authentic experiences of loss and mass-mediatized unfeeling, bringing to mind the giddiness and terror of a world conceived as one concatenated community. It would seem that this poem appeals to a universal ethics that protects human rights and disparages violence. And of course, it does. But the transnational ethics that Alcalay’s readers intuit arises from


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the conflict among various languages and the poem’s conflicting kinds of images. Every media is suspect, as is every detached proposition, insofar as these kinds of representation evade the substance of experience. To restore this substance, Alcalay foregrounds the conflictual, only minimal translatability between terms from one world to those of another. The impossible scientific dream—the idea of an objective, empty space-time—ironically arrives only from a process of leaving out every form of local, particular world. But in Alcalay’s poem, techno-scientific weaponry seems less terrifying than the transnational unworld that arises from leaving out all markers and measures of difference, even as conflicting images are chained together by unsuspected similarities: ghosts and evaporated milk come from two different worlds, yet both are white; both are “vaporous.” His series continues: industrial repetition this tarred and feathered landscape this tarred and feathered history my neighbor found an arrowhead in his backyard 385 10th st. Brooklyn. (9)

The Warring Factions is a poem written by a Sarajevo expatriate living in Brooklyn, recounting atrocities committed on all sides of numerous warring factions: against Iraqis by the international community, at Srebrenica, and against aboriginal Americans like the Algonquians in New York (whose arrowhead is found). The Iraq Wars “happened” in the media before (and as a condition of) occurring in real life, and history has been tarred and feathered by the culture industry. In fact, burning books and political rhetoric achieve the same end: forgetting historical violence (bodily and discursive) by reenacting it—either after the fact or in advance. Alcalay shows that the global media does not represent and analyze distinct events, but it sutures them together into a repeated, oneworlded catastrophe cycle—fear of which keeps viewers tuned in. The multinational media’s facility at connecting the dots before actually encountering other worlds—a universalist gesture with a distinctly American flavor—levels over any possible sense of location. And it is exactly the oneworlded sensibility (paranoia) of this sort that is then deployed in order to justify curtailing civil rights nationwide, or human rights abroad, militarizing borders and information, and even legalizing war crimes, as occurred in the United States. In an interview with Benjamin Hollander, Alcalay notices an aporia in discussions of contemporary poetic form that arises from the unfruitful equation of impersonal poetry with cosmopolitan sophistication:

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“numerous poetry movements now in the forefront have attracted people who, in some sense, are trying to lose themselves. Or at least blur the boundaries of their own biographies, particularly in terms of class or cultural background.” He continues: “We still have this underlying rift between what gets represented as formal ‘sophisticated’ and often depersonalized work on the one hand and emotionally ‘genuine’ and personal, but formally ‘naïve’ work on the other. This only seems to be getting worse as professionalization and specialization proceed apace” (Factions 171). This distinction between voice-based and language-based poetries, for Alcalay (as well as the distinction between a national multiculture and a transnational monoculture), obscures the kind of compelling poetry that is being written all over the world, the efficacy of which should be measured in terms of its mode of engagement with both local history and globalism. And to make its mode of engagement with history a concern for criticism of transnational poetry prevents the reduction of such poetry to a mere question of aesthetic style or to a concern for institutional classification. Much of Alcalay’s work, like poetry by the late Mahmūd Darwish, Abdellatif Laabi, and Faraj Bayraqdar, either gets called “sentimental” for its emotional resonances, or it gets assimilated as “a poetry of exile,” appropriated easily in a multicultural “postmodern American literary context” (Alcalay 172). In fact, Darwish’s expression “I am not mine,” and his adopted title as an “expropriated poet,” as well as his book, The Adam of Two Edens, can be made to sound like Bruce Andrews’s “language” poetry motto: “think of yourself as a twin.” But Darwish does not treat selfhood as a linguistic cipher in circulation; he is caught, rather, between worlds. This complex situatedness remains at once more experimental than traditional lyric and yet more resonant than postmodern multiple subject positionalities. The challenge is not to be a “difficult poet,” on the one hand, or, on the other, to write an epiphanic poem that would appeal to already existing sentiment. The challenge is, rather, to complicate connections between particular and universal without diminishing the expressive power of those who identify with multiple affinity groups—to transnationalize speakers without washing out culturally specific voices and locally situated styles of practice. “The arrow of time is crucial here,” says Alcalay, since the terms of recognition must emerge out of encounters between worlds and not precede these encounters. Like Benjamin’s image of the angel of history, whose gaze reveals distinctions before they are leveled into wreckage, only by putting first principles behind it can historical analysis derive local worlds from a more uniform ideal of progress.


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In other contemporary poetry, utopianism may arise as the obverse of paranoia in response to a vision of global humanity. It would seem that this is the motivation behind Juliana Spahr’s breathy and expansive 2003 book of poems, thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs, whose title, among other things, suggests the Rastafarian idea of “the everliving.” Here Spahr’s sense of “connection” might seem universal, sublime, Whitmanic, all-feeling: the abstraction of a particular, sociable mood into a universal principle (including all creatures with lungs? At least including every person). But in Spahr, this level of generality always arises from the substance of local experience; it does not “ascend” to a level of abstraction “higher” than the frequently clashing, frequently affable, often spontaneous, and always surprising open and democratic encounter. Everyone with Lungs, Spahr’s “planetary love poem,” like Mellis’s Revisionist and Alcalay’s Warring Factions, uncovers the destructive politics of globalism without rooting an alternative politics of humanism. While Alcalay ponders the complex role that U.S. linguistic culture plays in globalization, as he breaks up its media version of history, in other contemporary multilingual work, localness is often restored through clashing and poignant accounts of language education in the fields of European languages and history. As Wai Chee Dimock notices, in crossing into the United States, immigrants trying to become citizens “have to be unmade and remade, as they are fed into a bureaucratic structure and lumped into a corporate unit” (“Aggregation” 220). And at the same time, the United States imports its own exceptionalism abroad in various forms, and the sense of a local “here” as well as a “there” is lost. And despite the promises of opportunity that come with the acquisition of a new language, facility with language does not always provide improved ways of coming to grips with unfamiliar experiences or communities. In fact, the alleged clarity of representation available to languages of empire is what makes the experience of being colonized incommunicable. Korean-American poet Myung Mi Kim writes her pluralworld poetry predominantly as series: Dura; Under Flag; The Bounty; and Commons. These series keep an eye to what kind of benefits an investigation of language might offer in terms of providing the grounds for local community. Conveying, in fragmented form, the partial representability of her experience puts Kim’s English-speaking readers themselves in the position of someone new to a language, and this newness to language and shared fractured experience is a result of, and response to, geopolitical displacement.

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In her essay, “Identities in Process: The Experimental Poetry of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim,” Jeannie Yu-Mei Chiu advances a belief that late capitalism renders language transparent and colonizes representation, giving the illusion that similar vocabularies master the ambiguities that obtain across different worlds. And in this context, Chiu finds ways that Berssenbrugge and Kim restore fullness to experience despite the socioeconomic flattening of psychic space effected by capitalist forms of imperialism. Tracing a common source of inspiration to influences like that of Gertrude Stein’s immigrant English, Berssenbrugge and Kim share many affinities, but central to explaining Myung Mi Kim’s fragmentary style is the form of the educational primer that she relies on. Kim highlights complex identity and perception through surreal simile and numerous other forms that trouble a leveling, deterritorializing “English-only” gaze. Kim attempts to localize language by using ideograms, editorial instructions, ellipses, and multilingual speech to fragment the clarity that “colonizes reading.” This technique of estrangement, be it drawn from Brecht or Schlovsky, proves immensely useful in making experience new. And by writing difficult, ethnically charged poetry, Kim attempts to make “the investigator’s own culture newly incomprehensible,” in James Clifford’s (128) terms. As Kim gets acquainted with the colonialist system, she uses the English primer as a parodic form of cultural mediation. Among her first published works is a poem called “Primer,” which appears in 1984. “Primer” reappears as the flagship poem in her 1991 book, Under Flag. In both places, hers is an antiprimer in the form of broken speech. Its intention is to teach students, young people, and immigrants how to read against the American institutional grain. One of Kim’s major themes is the question of what larger cultural and linguistic process was set in motion with the advent of colonial discovery, and any representation of this experience in language must include the fragmentation of biography, since colonialism broke up families and lives. Her own broken language and chants reflect symptoms of a culturally conditioned neurosis. What, for Kim, seems so obviously a drama that plays out the tensions between a language that strives for total clarity and repression, on the one hand, running into the unassimilated character of experience and the experience of failed assimilation, on the other, is classified, in clinical terms, as “hysteria.” But Kim pursues the symptoms of dissociative disorders, including multiple personality disorder and [historical] amnesia in the text. In a deliberate repetition compulsion, she enacts all of these symptoms in her how-to book for coming to


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an internal colony. Kim is aware of the connections between history, hysteria, and hysteresis as these play out inseparably in her poems, as in the lines, “Arms undraped sheep methodical graze” (The Bounty 52). “Arms undraped” can mean limbs unclothed or weapons unsheathed, as in bare arms and to bear arms. Sheep graze in a methodical way, meanwhile, because that is the way the pastoral literary method has taught readers how to perceive landscapes and to project their longings for precapitalist values onto them.1 And insofar as readers experience texts passively, as mere consumers, they remain sheepish in their unquestioning acceptance of reading methods. The innocence of bare arms is then shown to be founded on the violent image apparatus through which immigrants are taught to appreciate America as pastoral promise. Kim frames the issue of witnessing dislocation in the terms of multilingualism, revealing aspects of language in the terms of other landscapes, often hostile and only dimly intelligible. The imbrication of language as a censorious system and language as an imaginative and experiential field turned into a tension expose the myth of a transparent, “standardized language practice, divorced from socioeconomic or cultural forces” (Spahr, Everybody’s Autobiography 133). And setting this demystification and disaggregating into action marks Kim’s cultural work. For Kim, the forces of imperialist capitalist expansionism and language are concretely interwoven. Against a “transparency theory” of clarity, Trinh Minh-ha finds, in her Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, that “nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than. . .the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steepedin-convention language of “clarity”. . .Let us not forget that writers who advocate the instrumentality of language are often those who cannot or choose not to see the suchness of things—a language as language—and therefore continue to preach conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing” (Trinh Minh-ha 16). What seems ironic here is that “difficult” forms of expression actually best re-present the experience of migration, and difficult poetry serves as one of the best instruments for recreating this turbulence in readers. Standardized language, like idioms, can convey codes but cannot provide the rules for their own interpretation; rather, a familiarity-based background is implied with the transmission of each visual code. Kim finds words with violent references and makes explicit the assumed background against which they make sense. She focuses on reminders of coming to the United States to show how, to the extent that she was “recognized,” it was on the implied condition that she be assimilated

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into a vocabulary and conceptual scheme that would not recognize her experiences and that threatened her own self-recognition through language. Writing back, Kim’s remembered language expands to baffle the dominant conceptual scheme. In Kim’s Dura, ideograms play this disaggregating role. Here similar ideograms can mean – – – –

a short lyric poem or, the founder of a family an ancestral tablet a new world dried radish leaves (Myung Mi Kim, Dura 13)

These distinctions, appearing in the poem’s “Cosmology” section, suggest a form of memory that belongs to an alien cosmology locked away in fragmentary experiences. These experiences, metaphorized in ideograms, will not link within the familiar system of the dominant language, and the ideograms in their fragmentary similarity can apply a correcting mirror to dominant historical discourse by rendering it less instrumentally efficient. Kim’s work reveals poesis as the process of letting new worlds emerge and, in the process, reimagining current social conflicts. Poetry does not represent a delivery to a point of experience outside of language but a reterritorialization involving the restoration of experiential density through the distortion of traditional (translational/ transnational) clarity. Through her mobilization of experience against language, Kim gets her readers to appreciate a phenomenology of reading that imposes neither a given text on its reader nor a reader’s understanding onto the text, but moves along a model of relation in lines that are curved, meandering, and reciprocal between reader and text. This encourages entering into creative, self-reflexive relation with the poetic series. In Kim’s vision, poetry can give “voice” to experience without generating or implying a substantive self, and writing can still facilitate meaningful affective states without necessarily arousing easy sentiment in its readers.

Co s mo p o li tani sm, Now and Agai n In his 1997 study, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Tim Brennan notes that “as technical experts and humanities professors speak of deterritoriality, the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ makes a


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comeback, enjoying the positive overtones it has largely always had”2 (Brennan 34). In this book, Brennan protests the tendency in the postmodern humanities to translate clearly motivatied capitalistic desires into agentless systems, euphemized in such terms as the “flows” of economic and human resources. And the “positive overtones” to cosmopolitanism are taken advisedly. Brennan operates under the Jamesonian assumption that cultural postmodernism simply aestheticizes the real troubles of real human beings enduring forced migration under the aegis of terms like “geopolitical deterritorialization.” For Brennan, humanists embrace both phenomena—cosmopolitanism and deterritorialization—more or less uncritically, even blithely, in terms like “interwovenness, in-betweennness, overlap, and ambiguity.” “The cosmopolitans,” as a party to this euphemistic recoding, “reinforce and significantly extend already established aesthetic criteria—chief among them complexity, subtlety, irony, and understatement, in a word, sophistication” (Brennan, At Home 40). And what concerns Brennan is that such impersonal meta-agency, as manifest in theories of complexity and in subjectless intentionalities in terms like “capital shifts,” forecloses all modes of activism, solidarity, and actual political response to threats of globalization. But a multiscale, plural-world particularism—as appears in texts by the multiethnic experimental writers addressed in this book—enables voice while avoiding both the hypersophistication of the global metropolis and the separatism of ethnic nationalism. For Waldinger and Fitzgerald, the concepts of nation and worldsystem both remain far too attenuated, too obviously imposed, and too violently systematic to provide coherence to collective experience. For Vadén and Hannula, particularism and pluralism work under the right conditions of openness and locality. And for Dreyfus and Spinosa, interactions among, and translations across, worlds are most engaging when those worlds remain at least practically incommensurate. Incommensurability of this sort both guarantees lively exchange that remains internal to the encounter and vouches the need to search for shared concerns rather than to hierarchize values. One crucial role of multilingual, experimental poetry in a globalizing world-system is to preserve marginalized experiences, rituals, practices, and ways of being together. Multilingual poetry also preserves heritage languages and puts peripheral language and experiences into a translational encounter of their own. Poesis provides a sense of selfcontained but open, agonistically engaged local worldhood. And finally, as a challenge to unified accounts of history, poesis indicates the self-limiting nature of communal concerns. Multilingual versions

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of plural-world encounters confront cultural hegemony, wearing away at “the seams”—the myths of superiority and the manufactured consent that suture the seams—not by claiming to represent the universal interest, but by infiltrating and weakening claims to universality, since all such claims necessarily represent local, particular interests that misrepresent themselves as participating in a singular cultural-evolutionary scheme. Whether one considers globalization as a corporatist force importing class disparity as its by-products and using cosmopolitanism as its branch of cultural hegemony, as an uneasy translation for the concept of “America,” as shared civic form of planetarity, as the opportunity to extend European Enlightenment universalist ideas, or as emergent—itself a kind of superorganism—globalization itself cannot deliver on any promises of connectivity, instead providing only a means-ends instrumental model for language and human being. For Ra’ad, “cultural connectivity is not realized merely through mechanical, economic, electronic globality. An inclusive model that globalizes recognitions, that unshackles molds of knowledge, that redefines frameworks of interaction, recentering locales of transience, might overcome our various estrangements. It would reconcile us to what has been unfairly devalued—but has been part of us from the beginning” (105). Rather than appropriate and gather varieties of experience into the clear language of global English, contemporary poetry remains receptive and innovative, staging local encounters between abiding worlds. And rather than foreground language, on one hand, or the speaking subject, on the other, contemporary poetry can, and does, move in the realm in between, in which things and people will continue to appear under plural, meaningful aspects. One possible “wave of the future” involves refracting globalist currents into smaller, meaningful patterns that resonate at numerous wavelengths.

Notes

4 Introduction

1. Karen Cardozo-Kane, personal communication, March 2004. 2. Thanks to Ira Livingston, from whom I took this title. 3. Less familiar with existential thought of the 1940s, few students consider Sartre’s statement in The Transcendence of the Ego that “the body is the illusory fulfillment of the ‘I’ concept.” But many more students are familiar with Foucault and Barthes’s theories regarding the death of the author and the subject. 4. I will argue that even the sense of “own-ness” comes from a kind of poetic activity: the presubjective pull to perceive greater resonances among sensations is part of—and derives from—an overall process through which selves, others, words, and things tend to gather into greater, more abiding unities. 5. A discussion of this feature of Derrida’s writing appears in Charles Spinosa, “Derrida and Heidegger: Iterability and Ereignis,” quoted in Dreyfus, Heidegger: A Critical Reader. 6. What is left out in this citation is Dreyfus’s reliance on equipment as providing ways to open worlds. For example, “[A world] is a totality of interrelated pieces of equipment. . .each used to carry out a specific task. These tasks are undertaken so as to achieve certain purposes. . .Finally, this praxis enables those performing it to have identities. . .These identities are the meaning or point of engaging in these activities” (Disclosing 17). In order to focus on poetry, I have left out the crucial role of equipment, as thinking of language as an instrument is fraught with its own problems. Poesis is discussed as a condition of worldmaking elsewhere in Dreyfus. 7. In Disclosing New Worlds, Dreyfus, Spinosa, and Flores give the example of the Athenian polis before the ascendancy of Pericles, in addition to tribal populations of the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans to the New World. Later they discuss legal cases in which tribal law runs up against U.S. law. The authors then evaluate the ethics of those encounters based on the extent to which they are open-ended—in which case competing concerns may coexist—or closed—in which case values are ranked within a hierarchy. 8. Following Ira Livingston’s example, I will write the anglicized version of the Greek word Poiesis without italics and in its more accessible form—poesis. For a lively discussion of what counts as poesis, see Ira Livingston’s Autopoesis: Between Science and Literature. For Dreyfus and Spinosa’s discussion of the characteristics of a world, see “Two Kinds of Antiessentialism and Their Consequences.” For a discussion of poetry as Cary Nelson’s kind of manufacture or “making,” see Mike Chasar, Heidi R. Bean, and Adelaide Morris’s introduction to the “Poetries” issue of the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. See also Bruce Smith’s introduction to the PMLA issue “On Poetry,” called “Some Presuppositions.” Livingston’s notion of “Autopoesis” is closer to the Greek understanding of Poiesis, conceived in

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Notes continental philosophy as letting meaningful differences come into shared human awareness by way of the tendency to manifest those differences in words. For example, Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar,” as a prescription for art, has to do with letting the wilderness around the (poetically effective) thing be perceived for the first time as “slovenly,” or even as wilderness. Poesis is more a matter of letting a thing “surround” one with new impressions than a manufacturing procedure.

Chapter 1 1. “Codex,” taken from Latin, literally means “a block of wood.” The term would later denote a block split into leaves or tablets for writing on, hence, an early form of book. The Aztec codex would most often contain the Spanish conquistadors’ graphic and literary transcriptions of visual renderings from indigenous Mesoamerican life, painted by a cultural informant, usually the tlacuilo or priest-scribe. 2. Advertisement for the Disney Coronado Springs Resort, as posted in August 2007: http://www.intercot.com/resorts/disney/coronadosprings/default.asp. 3. A back-formation from the word “Aztlán” provides the source of the word “Aztec.” These tribes were also known as the Mexica, and they form a part of the Nahuatl group of the Uto-Aztecan languages. Aztlán itself (the word, in addition to the concept) hints at its own, rich etymologies. The word arises out of a form of signification-by-pairing (rather than signification-by-reference), called “difrasismo,” which Alfred Arteaga explores in his Chicano Poetics (1997). 4. From Malcolm Lowry’s 1946 letter to Jonathan Cape, in defense of his Under the Volcano. Selected Letters. Qtd. in Cooper Alarcón 39. 5. An NPR news account of U.S. immigration, for example, featured a story about what Chicano writers have jokingly come to call the “tour de Aztlán”—an unself-conscious send up of the Tour de France, in which undocumented immigrants, for several weeks, successfully crossed the U.S. border, riding borrowed bicycles and wearing team-racing Lycra uniforms. According to reports, their product endorsement allowed racers “to pass” as corporate-sponsored (and therefore citizens) and to remain invisible to the INS, at least for such time as commodified identity could trump race. 6. An interview with and reactionary commentary on Charles Truxillo appears in the article “New Mexico Professor Advocates Secession for Southwest,” online at the site for “Accuracy in Academia,” a conservative research or “watchdog” group at the following Web address: http://www.academia.org/campus_reports/2002/ april_2002_2.html. 7. In episode 3F24 of The Simpsons (February 5, 1997), called “El Viaje de Nuestro Jomer” (“The Mysterious Voyage of Homer”), a talking coyote god (voiced by the late Johnny Cash) leads Homer on an “infernal-paradisal” odyssey of self-discovery through a mise-en-scène at his once hometown of Springfield and a primal Purépecha plateau. Homer eventually (re-)discovers his soul mate (Marge), having set out on his hallucinogenic trip from a chili cook-off, after eating an especially strong poblano pepper grown by “Guatemalan mental patients,” confiscated, and cooked by chief Wiggum. Conventional themes of mystery and self-discovery characterize the episode, but hallucinogenic morphing is the main point. For Cheech and Chong’s first cannabis-comedy appropriation of the Aztec, see Lou Adler’s Up in Smoke (1978). One of Cheech’s “trips” takes him back to defile a preconquest Aztec scene of human sacrifice.

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8. This 2006 film is tellingly anachronistic, conflating the cultural demise of the Maya with the colonization and near genocide of the Aztec, events that are separated by at least 700 years. This confusion reveals the imagined, apocalyptic inevitability (to Gibson’s mind) of the Europeanization of the Americas. The pre-European cultural “particulars” are not as important to Gibson as the individualism of the film’s Mayan hero, who ultimately leaves his tribe and the conquistadors behind in order to realize a 1950s-style nuclear family with wife and child in the jungle. 9. To these figurations of Aztlán might be added the trope of mestizaje (miscegenation). 10. Qtd. in Cooper Alarcón 20. 11. Qtd. in Cooper Alarcón 236. 12. The reference to Rabasa appears in the description of his research, available on his homepage: [http://spanish-portuguese.berkeley.edu/2007/research/ jos-rabasa-current-research.] The reference to Kenneth Burke is to his famous essay, “Four Master Tropes,” which appears in the Appendix to his 1945 A Grammar of Motives. 13. As Daniel Cooper Alarcón admits, “attributing authorship to ‘El Plan Espiritual’ is a complicated matter” (195nn16, 20). For example, while Carlos Muñoz, Jr., attributes the language of the document to the four movement leaders mentioned below, one could also cite César Chávez’s use of the Aztec black eagle as a symbol for his earlier UFW cause. According to Leal’s In Search of Aztlán, “the goal of the eagle image and the concept of Aztlán were to symbolize the Chicano triumph over economic injustice by means of farm workers’ unions, land reclamation, and education reform, and through these improvements, to obtain a better standard of living and to achieve a more pronounced cultural identity,” a goal strikingly similar to the use of the concept of Aztlán. Jack D. Forbes’s 1962 manuscript, “The Mexican Heritage of Aztlán (the Southwest) to 1821,” introduced the legend and was circulated by members of the Movimiento Nativo-Americano to Chicanos in the Southwest but was not as freighted as the 1968 usage. The point is that Alurista is the one who gave it its contemporary mythopoetic and political resonances. See also Muñoz 97 and Gutiérrez 172. 14. The Spiritual Plan for Aztlán—“El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán”—is available in Anaya and Lomelí, Muñoz, and numerous other sources. Alurista also excerpts from it in the foreword to his 1972 serial poem, Nationchild Plumaroja. There are several versions of “The Plan,” but this chapter refers to the version delivered at the Denver youth conference. 15. Written after the farm workers’ 1965 Plan of Delano, Alurista’s plan follows in a long line of revolutionary-democratic plans: Zapata’s 1911 agrarian reform plan, the “Plan of Ayala,” which called for Mexican land to be redistributed among the Native Americans followed Francisco Madero’s “El Plan de San Luis Potosi,” which he pronounced after having escaped imprisonment in the state capital in 1910. This became the most important document proclaiming the political aims of the revolutionaries. Other revolutionary plans include the 1821 “Plan of Iguala,” which created an independent Mexican empire under the Creole General Agustín de Iturbide. 16. In “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin defines the chronotope: a “formally constitutive category of literature” expressing “the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space),” where

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17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

Notes “time. . .thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible,” and “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history” (Bakhtin FTC, 84–85). By the logic I hope to outline here, one chronotope can have several referents: Aztlán equals the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the mythic source of the Aztec. And one place can have more than one chronotope: California’s Imperial Valley is home to southern California agribusiness, and “northern Califas,” a province of the mythic Aztlán. Leal discusses this symbol at length. See Leal, In Search of Aztlán. Montoya does not rely on Nahuatl, one of the main essential contributions of the serial form to the political movement, which followed the composition of his lyric tribute, “El Louie.” I am indebted to Ira Livingston for this distinction between parallel and serial processing, as well as for its application to temporal and linear forms of literacy. Vadén and Hannula talk about “the difference between internal and external reason.” External reason, briefly, makes a claim for a neutral and objective viewpoint,” which is “a dangerous and unnecessary illusion” (Vadén and Hannula 12–13). A discussion of Eduard Glissant’s “rooted” and “relational” identities, besides forming the subject of his Poetics of Relation, is available online at the University of Massachusetts Web site: http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/ACLASyll.html.

Chapter 2 1. “Aztec,” in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed., 1992. 2. The story of the circular creation-destruction mythology appears in Aztec Thought and Culture by Miguel Léon-Portilla. 3. Perloff, Greene, Altieri, and Spivak all use Arteaga to bolster their theoretical stances. Perloff classifies postmodern poetry as grounded in the replicable but still recognizable concept of the “signature” (borrowing from Derrida’s “Signature, event, context”) rather than the essentialist, authentic bardic “voice.” 4. This in turn refers to a poem attributed to the Aztec King Nezahualcóyotl (1402– 72), who questions the possibility of finding satisfaction in earthly things: “where is your heart? / If you give your heart to each and every thing, / you lead it nowhere: you destroy your heart. / Can anything be found on earth?” (qtd. in León-Portilla 5).

Chapter 3 1. For example, academic discussions of Carlos Castañeda or Sun Ra often meet with criticism, largely because they offer a spiritual rather than a falsifiable study of the tribal Yaqui or the entire cosmos, in place of the expected anthropological account. 2. Of course the one exception to this rule would be a course in pluralism itself. But even such courses appear contained within the single-norm academic paradigm of truth (as its dissenting views). It would prove interesting, though, to conduct a course on empirical, political, and religious pluralism in which students would be invited to import material from other courses. Students might then be encouraged to find moments in the arrangement of cross-cultural values, literature, or radicalism when discontinuous worldviews were either sutured together into a hegemonic structure or were kept distinct and put into unreconciled agonistic relationships.

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3. Least helpful of all to understanding the possibilities for social activism inherent in polytheism are courses in “Contemporary Polytheism.” Though admittedly fascinating, such classes focus on cult revivals of antique paganism rather than the polytheism that poetic-political activists mobilize toward revolutionary social ends. 4. In terms of medical practice, William James even wanted to dispense with medical standardization in order to accommodate alternate modes of healing. Less surprisingly, he also opposed U.S. involvement in the Spanish-American War on the grounds of political pluralism. 5. Fanon launches a powerful critique of Sartre’s Orphée Noir, especially Sartre’s reflections on the social role of poetry, discounting Sartre’s claim that historical processes alone block or enable colonial revolution. Césaire’s revolutionary “cry with a force that will shake the pillars of the world,” for Sartre, must be enabled in advance “by a turn of history” (Fanon 134). Meanwhile, “The Fact of Blackness,” Fanon’s chapter title, proves that Sartre’s being-for-itself (pure, universal subject) is not a universal human condition (but is, in Sartre’s view, a structurally empty, “white” projection). Rather, the colonizer needs to imagine another human being as being-in-itself (object), locked into the facticity of its social conditions, and therefore “unfree.” Both Fanon and Glissant were influenced by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who, in opposition to Sartre, proposes that being in a world and being-with-others precedes and determines one’s choices, one’s psychology, and even one’s subjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is presubjective. 6. The emphasis here is on Modernism and modern imaginative appropriations of myth, ritual, and religion. One could provide numerous examples of cross-cultural appropriations in Emerson, Longfellow, Whitman, Melville, and others, but these are, for the most part, considered un-Modern in the sense that they are guided by (often self-consciously) sentimental, rather than impersonal or detached, poetic voice(s). 7. Divus himself errs: in a preliterate culture, or a culture characterized by dawning literacy, Odysseus’s fallen comrade Elpenor’s tomb would not have had written engraving on it, and yet, Elpenor instructs Odysseus, “Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed” (4). 8. This plot summary appears on the back cover of the cloth edition of Black Anima. 9. “Marjorie Perloff: On the Poetry and Politics of Ezra Pound,” an interview with Marjorie Perloff. Hosted by Robert Harrison. Recorded for the Stanford University series, “Entitled Opinions,” November 15, 2005. 10. Reyes Mate, La Razon de los Vencidos (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991) 204–8. Qtd. in Alfredo Lucero-Montano, “On Walter Benjamin’s Concept of History,” available online: http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_69.html. 11. Qtd. in Alfredo Lucero-Montano, “On Walter Benjamin’s Concept of History.” 12. Cf. Melville’s acoustic version of whiteness in “A Bower in the Arsacides,” where he comments on the weaving of life into the skeleton of a dead whale, and here he uses visual and acoustic images of the sounds from a loom: “The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

Notes spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements” (Melville 447–48). Adonis was a young man loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone. A boar killed Adonis, but Zeus decreed that he should spend the winter of each year in the underworld with Persephone and the summer months with Aphrodite. This is the press’s modus operandi, stated on the inside front cover of all Liveright editions. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996) 387. Stambaugh more or less concurs with Macquarrie and Robinson in translating Heidegger’s following, related assertions: “History has its essential importance neither in what is past nor in the ‘today’ and its connection with what is past, but in that historicizing that arises from the future” and “as a mode of human being, history has its roots. . .essentially in the future [which] first gives to the having-been its unique priority in what is historical” (Stambaugh 353; Macquarrie and Robinson 438). I have translated Heidegger’s Dasein as “human being” and, possibly even more controversially, sidestepped, through my ellipses, Heidegger’s discussion of “Being-toward death” and what he calls “fate” in the above. But my central purpose is to situate Heidegger’s prioritization of the future among Modernist notions of time. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (1971; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 150. Cf. “The Rhetoric of Temporality” for a related discussion of Paul de Man’s reading of allegory and time. For de Man, “the world of allegory” is one in which “time is the originary constitutive category,” as distinguished from the “world of the symbol,” in which image identifies with substance and “the intervention of time is merely a matter of contingency” (de Man 150). While de Man considers a temporal relationship to be the basis of allegorical signification, he stresses that this is not a historical relationship—the dialectic between subject and object is “located entirely in the temporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs.” The “reference to their respective meanings has become of secondary importance” in the world of allegory. The temporal element in de Man arises from the structural inevitability of the sign sequence: the allegorical sign necessarily refers to another sign that, temporally, precedes it. And the temporal relation is marked by inherent linguistic structures and ontological anxiety regarding our own finitude. By contrast, in Benjamin, the temporal displacement highlighted by allegory expresses a historical trauma born of urban modernity. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Cambridge: MIT P, 1985. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kinglsey Shorter. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in One-Way Street, 352. Ibid. In Benjamin’s famous—and famously “messianic”—phrase, from Illuminations, “Historicism [merely] contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.” From “Theses on the Philosophy of History, XVII A,” in Walter Benjamin:

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Illuminations, 263. Cf. Heidegger’s explicit repudiation of history conceived as a relatedness to the past. 22. This is reference is to Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, which Benjamin uses as his own allegory for our duty to the past, in Thesis IX of “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations. 23. Qtd. in Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981) 74. 24. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper, 1971) 75.

Chapter 4 1. “Conversations with Poets” panel, hosted by the MLA’s Division of Poetry, at the 118th annual MLA convention in Washington, DC, December 28, 2002. The host was Lorenzo Thomas, and the panel consisted of the featured poet Nathaniel Mackey, along with respondents Steve McCaffery, Adelaide Morris, Charles Bernstein, Juliana Spahr, and Roland Greene (Division of Poetry chair). 2. I include a very limited number of examples drawn exclusively from instrumental jazz, since vocal jazz orients instrumental innovation around the vocal performance. In this way, possibly, jazz virtuosity invites a comparison to Derrida’s notion of “arche-writing,” which can be opposed to vocal jazz as a kind of “phonocentrism” or self-present speech. But my discussion of jazz and its comparison to Derrida might be fundamentally misguided, since poetry by Tracie Morris, scat vocalizations in jazz singing, and experimental music by groups like John Zorn’s Naked City defy all of these categories. Naked City features musical techniques that involve speeding up tracks of Ornette Coleman’s instrumentals. 3. In this case, “the materiality of language” asserts itself in the form of both sign and substance. The materiality of language as a sign means that every sign is necessarily linked in a chain of signification, and this linkage liquidates the fixity of any particular signifier. In terms of language as a substance, particular sounds create a “stuttering” effect that interrupts claims to the self-evident clarity of accepted discourse. But as Laclau notices, one form of materiality does not reduce to another. The first case of materiality is formal: the necessity of reference is revealed in opposition to its impossibility. The second case is substantial: phonemes acquire in renewed form the fixity (and depth of voice, personality, etc.) that is deconstructed by slippage. These are incommensurate forms of materiality. 4. See Philosophical Investigations 5, 32. 5. Whatsaid Serif, introductory epithet page, not paginated. 6. All of the quotes in the paragraph above come from Mackey’s presentation to the 2002 MLA panel. 7. In The Book of the Dead, even if it were possible for a rational order to orient all human life for a time, that order would seem imposed rather than given, and destructible rather than fundamental. As Atum says to Osiris, “You will live more than millions of years, an era of millions. But in the end I will destroy everything that I have created. The earth will become again part of the Primeval Ocean.”

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Notes

Chapter 5 1. Stevens’s talk was titled “A’khosa:tens—The That Aside: An Aside on Mohawk Language.” The December 28, 2006, MLA presentation was titled “A’kohsa:tens— The That Aside: An Aside on Mohawk Language,” part of the panel on “Orality and Poetry” chaired by Juliana Spahr. This example also appears in his essay, “Iah Enionkwatewennahton’Se: We Will Not Lose Our Words,” in Vine Deloria and MariJo Moore’s 2003 Genocide of the Mind. “Orality in Poetry,” was part of the conference theme, “The Sound of Poetry.” Stevens’s contemporaries included the panel chair Juliana Spahr, and co-panelists Marlene Nourbese Philip and Jena Osman. 2. This discussion, of course, parallels similar discussions about the nature of signification, but in talking about things and worlds, rather than signifiers and signified, the discussion changes. 3. In fact, this felt sense of free response seems a better candidate for our felt sense of personal own-ness, mine-ness, or self-ownership than does William James’s “warmth and intimacy,” under which aspects “the stream of experience” can feel personal even though never singular. Put otherwise, no one is ever bound entirely to (or exhaustively defined by) one arrangement of values and intelligible possibilities, and a deep sense of self-ownership arises from an ability to cross contexts, and moving across languages that order experience differently creates an enriched sense of self. 4. Cf. “Language” in Moore, Genocide of the Mind 154. 5. Figuring the “new old world” as a land to be “obtained and held” stands in stark contrast to figurations of the land as the subject of conquest in William Carlos Williams: “No more had Columbus landed, the flower once ravished” from In the American Grain 7. 6. Donne says, “Much comfort is not in much sleep, when the most fearful and most irrevocable malediction is presented by thee in a perpetual sleep” (1624). He continues, “I will make their feasts, and I will make them drunk, and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake,” from Jeremiah 51:57, which reads, “And I will make drunk her princes and her wise men, her governors and her deputies, and her mighty men; and they shall sleep a perpetuall sleep, and not wake, saith the King, whose name is Jehovah of hosts.” The body provides a link with the soul. As souls to bodies, so apprehension to physical signs. But as with Anne Bradstreet’s “The Spirit and The Flesh,” the spirit gets lost in the rhetoric of substance, and specifically the substance of experience proves resistant. The opposition between spirit and substance cannot be managed by its master-term: Spirit. 7. In this connection, of course, see not only Donne, but also Alfred Arteaga and Edouard Glissant. 8. In a strictly literal, if arguable and even ultimately “poetic,” rendering, the term geology does not refer to the study of Earth (as the subject of an object of analysis) but to an enworlded understanding. An older reading of the terms suggests a combination of “geo” (meaning earth) and “logic” (which, at its source derives from the Greek verb, legein: gathering). This etymology reveals the Earth (or at least the biosphere) as a self-gathering system. Another name for a self-organizing system is “autopoesis,” and in their early forms, the words Poiesis and logos (as well as epos and mythos) were not separated into objective fields of poetics and logic (or epic and myth). According to phenomenological studies of ancient experience,

Notes

9. 10.

11.

12.

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these were all pre-Socratic names for the linguistic urge to make local worlds cohere into meaningful sets of relationships guided by a unified style. Pound, Cantos “Notes for CXVII et seq.,” 803. Hymn to Hermes, no. 13. The word polutropos (“of many shifts, turning many ways, of many devices, ingenious, or much wandering”) is also used to describe Odysseus in the first line of the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, Menelaus lives a life of ease telling stories of warlike times, while warriors fight so that they may be remembered at social gatherings; in literature, poetry juxtaposes the world of Odysseus the ranger with that of Odysseus the domestic king. In my view, the role of the hermeneutic hero is to juxtapose these worlds. Consider the note that Pound added to the dying Herakles’s speech in his translation of Sophocles’s The Women of Trachis: “what / SPLENDOUR / IT ALL COHERES.” For Pound, “this is the key phrase, for which the play exists” (endnote on the translation).

Chapter 6 1. This passage appears on the introductory page of A Bridge Dead in the Water. 2. For a detailed discussion on the use of recurrent shock in effecting economic policy, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. 3. These are Wai Chee Dimock’s terms. It is my belief that contemporary deep pluralist poets write from before, within, and yet beyond current debates over whether transnational identity and cosmopolitan writing extends or displaces the main concerns of multiculturalism. These poets practice an aesthetic of particularist meaning making.

Chapter 7 1. The notion of Romanticism as a manufactured image of precapitalist values comes from Ira Livingston, Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity. 2. Other, secondary reasons that this cosmopolitan emphasis may seem misguided involve an awareness that “rarely does [the discourse of] cosmopolitanism refer to the process of the United States going out into the world” (Brennan 34). In a sense, Brennan’s Cosmopolitanism Now “deterritorializes” the term “cosmopolitanism” itself, overdetermining its senses as well as its use: according to his analysis, it is sometimes, as here, a term of praise and at other times a term of abuse. He uses the term advisedly but ultimately finds in it an inauthentic phenomenon.


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Index

4 Abubakari II, 117–18 activism, 2, 4, 11, 14, 15, 16–17, 21, 25, 28, 37 Acuña, Rodolfo, 15 Adorno, Theodor W., 65–66 Aeneid, The, 82, 96 aesthetics, 1–2, 3, 5, 50, 55, 64, 95, 104, 109 African, 75, 77, 90, 92–95, 98, 100, 108, 131; diaspora, 108; history, 131; religion, 75, 77, 94 African Americans, 21, 82, 90, 108, 132–33; and culture, 108; and noise, 132–33 African Religion courses, 75 Africans, 16, 97, 112, 118, 120 Afrocentric, 95, 101 “Afrosporic” writing, 75 Ajens, Andre, 64 Akwesasne Mohawk nation, 18–19, 137–38, 141, 145, 150, 159, 165, 170 al Qaeda, 171 Alarcón, Daniel Cooper, 29–30 Alarcón, Francisco X., 5, 14, 15, 16, 18, 28, 49, 55, 64–71, 136, 140–41, 161. See Snake Poems Albanel, Charles, 164–65 Alcalay, Ammiel, 188–91 Alexie, Sherman, 136 Alfaro, Luis, 30, 46–47 Alighieri, Dante, 24, 34, 44, 82–83, 85, 90, 96, 112–13 Alphabets of Letters, 170–76 Altieri, Charles, 63 Alurista, 5, 14–15, 28, 32–47, 49, 52, 56. See Florícanto en Aztlán

de Alva, J. Jorge Klor, 32 Amaru, Tupac, 57 Amenhotep IV, 93 Amentet, 118 America: A Prophecy, 123 American Journal of Sociology, 179 American literature, 108, 136 “American multiculturalism,” 76, 110, 136, 171 Anaya, Rudolfo, 32 Anderson, Benedict, 119, 188 anima, 81–82, 85, 92, 95 animus, 91–92 anthropology, 123, 144, 148, 163, 169 Antin, David, 123 Antony and Cleopatra, 91 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 5, 14, 15, 26–28, 35, 46–47, 52, 136, 161. See Borderlands/La Frontera Aphrodite, 90, 98–99, 101 Apocalypto, 31 Apollo, 92 Apollo Theater, 92 Apter, Emily, 176, 180–81, 185 Ares, 51–52 Arnold, Matthew, 85 Arteaga, Alfred, 5, 14, 15, 16, 28, 33, 45, 49–64, 71, 136, 181; crossing lines, 61–62. See also Cantos (Arteaga) “at home,” 65 At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, 194–95 Athena, 92–93, 162 Auden, W. H., 92 Auerbach, Erich, 51–52 Augenblick, 102

220

Index

Austin, John, 7 Autopoesis, 119 avant-garde poetry. See experimental poetry Aztec culture, 14–15, 24–32, 37–39, 42–44, 49–51, 55–58, 62–70, 118, 136; calendar, 57, 62–64; codex, 25, 28; cosmology, 58, 62–63; Fifth Sun (Quinto Sol), 44, 62; mythology, 15, 25, 39; snake wheel, 64–70; and the sun, 25–26, 37, 39, 44; symbolism, 31. See also tlacuilo Aztlán, 14, 15, 26–27, 31–46, 49–50, 55, 71; avatars of, 32–42, 49; translating, 42–45 “automatic writing,” 2, 10 Babylon, 128 Badiou, Alain, 138 Balibar, Étienne, 182 Baraka, Amiri, 98, 108 Bass Cathedral, 132 Basso, Ellen, 121 Baudelaire, Charles, 62 Baudrillard, Jean, 18 Beach, Chris, 5, 84 bearing-taking ceremony, 55, 141, 154 Benjamin, Walter, 37, 85, 96–97, 103–4, 190 Bernal, Martin, 80–81 Bernstein, Charles, 3, 4, 63, 144, 159, 187 Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei, 192 Bible, 153, 175 “Bilingual in a Cardboard Box,” 36 Bion, Wilfred R., 165 Bird, G. H., 7, 8 “Birth and Rebirth,” 98 Black Aesthetic (1960s and 1970s), 95 Black Anima, 16, 17, 81–104; “Changes,” 84–85; four modes of the sacred, 100 Black Arts Movement, 16 Black Athena, 80–81 Black Mountain School, 108 Black Skin, White Masks, 76 Blackwater (XE), 171 Blake, William, 86 Bloom, Harold, 63

Borderlands/La Frontera, 26–28, 35 borders, 34–36, 40–43, 45, 47, 51, 55–56, 59, 63, 136, 162, 163–64, 179, 181 Borges, Jorge Luis, 58, 186 Brant, Joseph, 170–71, 173, 175–76 Brathwaite, Kamau, 76, 108, 137 Brennan, Tim, 135, 194–95 Bridge Dead in the Water, A, 19, 138– 39, 163–70; (dis)Orient, 164–69 bridges, 50–51, 140, 155–57, 160–70, 174, 182 British Empire, 75–76, 171–76 British Modernism, 137 British Museum, 101, 103 “Brown and Serve,” 4 Browning, Robert, 84 Burke, Kenneth, 33, 51 Bush, George W., 171 Caliban, 94 Callaloo, 148 Candelaria, Cordelia, 33, 47 Cantos (Arteaga), 5, 15, 33–35, 50, 52–64; “Cantos Primeros,” 55–57 Cantos (Pound), 14–15, 61–62, 78–79, 82–84, 120–21, 161 capitalism. See global capitalism; multinationals Caribbean, 91, 108, 112, 137 Castañeda, Carlos, 27, 125 Cathay, 151 Catullus, 60 center-margin model, 109–11 Ceremony, 75 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 47 Cervantes, Yreina, 62 Césaire, Aimé, 94 Chain, 64 Chavez, César, 2, 38 Cheech and Chong, 15, 31 Chicanismo, 36, 47, 53 Chicano, 2, 14–16, 21, 25–26, 28, 30–32, 45–47, 52, 55, 63, 71, 136; activists, 14–16, 28; concept of, 2; cultural politics, 31; poetry, 45–47, 52, 55, 71; as term, 26, 32; timespace, 63; writers, 15–16 Chicano Movement (1965–75), 2, 5, 15, 25, 28–33, 36, 42, 47, 61

Index Chicano Poetics, 50 China, 137, 139, 151, 164–65, 169 Chinese language, 151 Chiu, Jeannie Yu-Mei, 192 Christianity, 44, 56, 67, 74–75, 93–95, 151–53, 158, 168 civil rights movement (1960s), 14, 26, 28–29, 35, 39, 45, 81, 102 Clifford, James, 192 “code-shifting,” 5, 33 codex, 15, 24–25, 28, 34, 41, 70 Codex Telleriano-Remensis, 24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 109 “colonial attitude,” 130 colonialism, 6, 14, 16, 24, 28, 42, 56, 59, 65, 74–77, 80, 94, 103, 119, 130, 138–39, 148–51, 156, 163–67, 170–77, 179–80, 192; and exploration, 164; and violence, 156. See also language: imperialism; mapping; Spanish colonialism Colorado Springs Resort on Lago Dorado, 29 Coltrane, John, 132 Columbus, Christopher, 58, 112, 174 Combing the Snakes from His Hair, 19, 138, 143, 146, 153 comic book (modern-day), 28 commodity fetish, 29, 97–98 comparative literature, 78–79 confessional style, 3, 7, 10, 130, 185 Conrad, Joseph, 90 Conte, Joseph, 27–28, 35, 45, 57, 63, 84, 159–60 continental philosophy, 2, 3, 7 conventional poetry, 2–3 Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas, 122 Cortés, Hernán, 113, 118 cosmopolitanism, 181, 183–85, 189–90, 194–96 coyote, 141 Crain, Patricia, 173 Crane, Hart, 102 creation myths, 56, 127–29, 139, 156, 163 Culture and Imperialism, 12, 65 cummings, e. e., 102 “Cypresses,” 184

221

Dahlen, Beverly, 108 Dana, R. H., 30 Dangerous Border Crossers, 53 Dark City, 187 Darwish, Mahmūd, 190 Davidson, Donald, 7, 44 de la Campa, Román, 31 de la Cruz, Sor Juana, 58–59 decolonization, 6, 80 deep pluralism, 46, 52, 70, 74, 77, 105, 111, 137–38, 183 “Deep River,” 88–91 Deleuze, Gilles, 20, 88 Deloria, Vine, 73–75, 149 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 6, 7, 8, 29, 121, 150 Descartes, René, 9, 142 Diamond, Stanley, 123, 154 Díaz, Porfirio, 38 Dido, 95 “difference,” 13, 63, 79, 90 difrasismo, 50–52 Dimock, Wai Chee, 179–81, 191 Disclosing New Worlds, 43 discrepancy, 108–9, 116–17, 120, 130–31 Discrepant Engagement, 108, 116, 120 Disney World, 29 “diversity,” 74–76, 80, 87, 136 Divus, Andreas, 78 Dogon people, 111–12, 116, 120–22, 128–30 Dominican order, 24–25 Donne, John, 54, 57–58, 158, 160 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 82 Douglass, Frederick, 89 Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII, 34 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 20, 30, 40–43, 46, 80–81, 131–33, 142–43, 148; “absorbed coping,” 133 Dreyfus, Stewart, 142–43, 162, 195 “Drum Taps,” 90 Du Bois, W. E. B., 82, 88, 103 “Dualism in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man,’” 121 Duncan, Robert, 108 Dura, 191 Dürer, Albrecht, 166 Dylan, Bob, 35

222

Index

“The Ecstasy,” 152 “educational-industrial complex,” 53 Edwards, John, 152 Egypt, 79–85, 92–93, 98, 100, 107, 118, 156 Egyptian Book of the Dead, 82, 93, 107 “El Louie,” 35 El Norte, 31 Elgin, Catherine, 7, 27 Eliot, John, 152 Eliot, T. S., 35, 57, 61–62, 77, 82, 95, 100–101, 136–37, 145 English language, 75–76, 135–39, 158–60, 170–77, 183–84. See imperialism: language “enuma elish 2,” 127–28 epic, 28, 52, 79, 95, 103–4, 128 Equiano, Olaudah, 90 Eroding Witness, 111–18, 126–30 essence, 12, 15, 20, 44–45, 57, 65 Ethnic American literature, 4 ethnic nationalism, 12, 14, 15, 21, 27, 31–33, 36, 40, 44, 46–47, 83, 124, 195 “ethnic” or “poetry” question, 1, 21–22 ethnobotany, 148–49 ethnography, 73–75, 77–82, 100, 105, 120–22, 125, 144 ethnopoetics, 108, 113, 120, 123–25, 151 Etruscan Places, 184 Euripides, 92 Eurocentrism, 181 European alphabet, 170–75; cultural dominance, 95; ethnography, 151; languages, 181; linguistic history, 51–52; literary modernism, 57–58; modernism, 83; monotheism, 77; worlds, 18, 164. See also mapping; social science Eve, 95 Everyone with Lungs, 191 “The Exaggeration of Despair,” 136 “Existential Phenomenology and the Brave New World of The Matrix,” 142–43 experience, 5, 8, 89, 115–16, 130, 142, 145, 156, 159, 194

experimental poetry, 1–6, 14, 17, 18, 34, 46, 49, 107–8, 132, 136–37, 144–45, 160–61, 177, 185, 195 experimental writing, 116, 186 Fanon, Franz, 16, 76–77, 82, 94–95, 100 Faulkner, William, 102 Fenollosa, Ernest, 151 “fire poetics,” 53–59 Fitzgerald, David, 179, 182, 195 Les Fleurs de Mal, 62 Flores, Fernando, 13, 131–32, 162 Florícanto, 50 Florícanto en Aztlán, 5, 15, 33–47 Foster, Tonya, 161 Foucault, Michel, 7, 120, 185–86 Franciscan order, 25 Franklin, Aretha, 92–93 Franklin, Benjamin, 141 Frazer, James, 77, 79, 81–83, 85, 102 French and Indian War, 173–74 French Jesuit explorers. See Jesuit missionaries Freud, Sigmund, 121, 147 Friedman, Thomas, 13 From the Warring Factions, 188–91 Fuentes, Carlos, 62 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 11–12 Galison, Peter, 176 Genocide of the Mind, 149 “Ghede Poem,” 129–30 Gibson, Mel, 31 Gilbert, Alan, 168 Gillespie, Dizzy, 132 Ginsberg, Allen, 45 Glancy, Diane, 137, 161, 173 Glissant, Édouard, 7, 42, 58, 80 global capitalism, 11, 29, 33, 97, 172–76, 179, 183, 188, 192–93 “Global Studies,” 179 globalization, 11–12, 19, 23, 29, 31, 70, 137–40, 160, 170, 177, 180–91, 196 God-Military-Industrial-Educational complex, 175 God Is Red, 73–74 Golden Bough, The, 77, 82 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo, 15, 29, 30, 53

Index Gómez-Quiñones, Juan, 33 Gonzales, Jorge, 33 Gonzales, Rodolpho “Corky,” 2, 5, 33, 36, 45. See Yo Soy Joaquín/I Am Joaquin Goodman, Nelson, 7, 20, 27 Goupil, René, 168 Gramsci, Antonio, 16 Of Grammatology, 2 Griaule, Marcel, 121–22 Greek mythology, 77, 92–93, 98–99, 161–62 Greeks, ancient, 11, 61, 77, 79, 84, 90–95, 98–100, 102, 104, 113, 161–62; and Kairos, 102; rationalism, 93 Greenblatt, Steven, 14 Greene, Roland, 52–53, 64, 116, 158 Grenier, Robert, 2 group membership, 14, 21 Guattari, Felix, 20, 88 “Half-breed’s Guide to the Use of Native Plants,” 145–48 Halliburton, 171 Hambone, 108 Hannula, Mika, 11, 14, 20, 45–46, 120, 123, 130, 140, 170, 182, 185, 195 Haraway, Donna, 20, 89, 141 Hardt, Michael, 12, 170, 186 Harris, Roy, 151 Harris, Wilson, 108 Hartley, George, 47 Hawass, Zahi, 107 “Heart,” 66 Heart of Darkness, 90 Hebrew language, 61; law, 93 hegemony, 18, 25, 38, 56, 95, 107, 111, 119, 121, 123, 128, 160, 170, 176, 196 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 123 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 102–4 Hejinian, Lyn, 3 Helen, 95 Hermes, 78, 141, 160–62 Herrera, Juan Felipe, 53, 59 Hillman, James, 133 Historia de la Nueva México, 24, 58 historical materialism, 103, 122–23 historiography, 73–76, 105

223

history, 95–96, 100, 103, 108–14, 116–23, 130–32, 140, 177–79, 193; alternative, 120, 130; and democracy, 123; dominant, 96; and modernity, 103; as subject, 100 Hollander, Benjamin, 189–90 Homer, 51–52, 78–80, 82, 90, 93, 94, 162 homophonic translations, 59–61, 63 Hongo, Garrett, 136 Howe, Susan, 108 Hughes, Langston, 90, 114 Hugo of Saint Victor, 65 Human Universe, 78 Hurlbut, George, 164 Huron, 167–68, 173 Husserl, Edmund, 142 Huyssen, Andreas, 39–40 hybridity theory, 47, 52, 65–66 Hymes, Dell, 123 “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” 110 identity, 1–10, 30, 42, 75, 80, 102–5, 116, 130–31, 138, 147–48, 181; based writing, 116; as changing, 1–10, 80; and the Internet, 30; as numerous, 5, 75; and time, 102–3; politics, 181; “relational,” 42 Iliad, 79 imagination, 89, 95, 161 Imagined Communities, 119 imperialism, 65, 75, 96, 101, 109, 130– 32, 139–40, 150–51, 170–77, 184, 192–93; and language, 139–40, 150–51, 170–77; and war, 172–73 Inca, 16, 56, 58, 181 information retrieval culture, 41 innovation, 2–4, 10, 13–14, 109–10 Internet, 28, 30, 41 Iraq war, 170, 173–76 Iroquois, 75, 139, 141, 164, 168–69, 173; and U.S. Constitution, 141 Isis, 93–94, 101 James, William, 1, 2–3, 6–8, 20, 122–23. See radical empiricism Jameson, Fredric, 27 Japan, 58 Jarnot, Lisa, 186

224

Index

jazz, 108, 110, 132–33 Jesuit missionaries, 151, 164–70 Jesuit Relations, 164–65 Johnson, Samuel, 145 Jolas, Eugene, 181 Joplin, Scott, 110 Joyce, James, 57–58, 62, 86, 88, 91 Juana, Sor, 57 Jung, Carl, 81–82, 85, 91–92, 95, 100–102 Kafka, Franz, 82 Kahlo, Frida, 58 Kenner, Hugh, 161 Kerouac, Jack, 45 Key, 171 Key into the Languages of America, A, 19, 138, 152–53, 159 Kierkegaard, Søren, 102 Kim, Myung Mi, 19, 191–94 Kincaid, Jamaica, 148 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 85, 88, 103 Kuhn, Thomas, 109 Laclau, Ernesto, 18, 20, 123, 160 Lamming, George, 94 language: abuse of, 139; as bridge, 160–62; and imperialism, 139–40, 150–51, 170–77; and localness, 13, 17, 50, 154; materiality of, 158, 185–87; one-world, 186; order of, 154; playfulness of, 2, 7, 9–10, 59 (see “pantextualism” poetic, 16, 115–16); as pre-selected, 140; and racism, 4, 98–99; and religion, 151; self-reflexivity of, 3, 4; and selfhood, 2, 4, 126; and time, 102; and U.S. poetry, 135. See also language poetry; Latin taxonomy; primers L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, 2 language poetry, 2–3, 144–45, 190 Latin America, 45, 53, 58 Latin taxonomy, 145–49 Lawrence, D. H., 184 Leeming, David, 128 Léon-Portilla, Miguel, 62, 66 Levertov, Denise, 45, 136 library culture, 40–41

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, 30 likenesses, 79 literacy, 41 literalism, 133 literary analysis, 8, 21; history, 116, 130; lines of influence, 58–59; modernism, 57–58; temporality, 102–3; studies, 78–79, 135, 179–86 Livewright Press, 102 Livingston, Ira, 70, 112, 119, 154 Lockheed Martin, 171 Loftis, N. J., 16–18, 75, 77, 80–104, 120. See Black Anima Looking for Livingstone, 75 Lorde, Audre, 132 Los Angeles Police Department, 63 lover(s), 57, 66, 98, 101, 147, 157, 164–65, 167–68, 176–77 Lowry, Malcolm, 30 Lucero-Montano, Alfredo, 96 lyric poetry, 3, 20, 103, 136 Mackey, Nathaniel, 17, 18, 75, 77, 90, 107–34, 136; and “agnostic history,” 120–23, 134; “jazz fiction,” 132; and margins, 109–11; and mixing, 108, 128–29; persona as poet, 113; poetics of ethnogenesis, 123–30 style and history, 130–34. See also discrepancy; “noise”; Song of the Andoumboulou Major, Clarence, 108 Mannoni, Dominique, 76 mapping, 54–55, 165–67 Marduk, 128 marginalized social groups, 5, 13, 14, 15, 20–21, 28, 47, 53, 56, 74, 77, 96–97, 109–10, 140, 159, 170, 184; and language, 159, 170; and revolution, 96–97 margins, 109–12, 120, 154–55, 161 Martí, José, 62, 179, 185 Marxism, 42, 96, 100, 122–23 Mary, 94–95, 103 Mate, Reyes, 96 “Matisse,” 10 matriarchy, 75

Index Maximus, 34 McClure, Kirstie, 20, 75 meaning making, 2, 3, 8, 87, 114–16, 165 media rhetoric, 170–75, 188–89 medieval Christianity, 44, 93 Mellis, Miranda, 186, 191 Melville, Herman, 82, 98–99 Memoir of the Future, A, 165 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7, 76, 94, 132, 142 Merwin, W. S., 125 Mesoamerican, 16, 28–30, 36, 45, 55, 57, 59 Mesopotamian, 128 Messerli, Doug, 3 mestiza bloodlines, 58 metonymy, 51, 128 “Mex-ploitation,” 29 Mexa-phile texts, 45 “Mexica Movement,” 31 Mexican-American, 30–32, 36, 53 Mexican-Indian thought, 50 Mexican revolutionaries, 61 Mexico, 30, 38, 42, 45, 55, 65 Middle Passages, 76 migration, 26–27, 31, 44, 58, 68, 150, 179–82, 191–95 Mimesis, 51 Min-ha, Trinh, 193 missionaries, 27, 138–39, 151–56, 158, 160, 164. See Jesuit missionaries; Puritan missionaries mistranslations, 59–61, 63–64, 156 Moby-Dick, 98–99 Modern Language Association (MLA), 107–9, 116, 120, 123–25, 129, 133, 140–49; 121st convention of, 140–49 modernism, 23, 78, 103–4, 119, 137 Mohawk, 18–19, 137–38, 141, 145, 150, 159, 165, 170–71 monism, 11–13, 16, 17–18, 20, 24, 51, 65, 73–77, 81, 88–89, 95, 108 monotheism, 73, 77, 93, 100 Montoya, José, 35 moods, 8–10, 20, 68, 89, 165 Moore, MariJo, 149 Moraga, Cherríe, 28, 46–47 More, Thomas, 58

225

Morrison, Jim, 35, 39 Mouffe, Chantal, 20, 123, 160 Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 46 Mullen, Harryette, 4 multiculturalism, 1, 12, 23–24, 76, 79, 108, 110, 136, 171, 180, 183; and anthologies, 136; and civil rights, 180 multiethnic experimental poetry, 1–6, 21 multiethnic experimental poets, 5–6, 13–15, 18, 20–21, 170, 177, 195 Multi-Ethnic Literatures in the United States (MELUS), 1, 4 multinationals, 11, 28, 172–76 Musical View of the Universe, A, 121 Mythopoeia, 27 myths, 52, 56, 82–83, 95, 101, 108, 126–29, 161. See creation myths; Greek mythology Nahua, 16, 24–25, 27, 42, 56, 62, 70, 181 Nahuatl, 50, 54, 58, 61, 64–66, 136, 141 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 67–68 Narragansett, 152–59 narrative, 18–20, 49, 64, 102–3, 107–8, 121, 135 Narrative of the Life, 89 nationalism, 119, 135–37, 140, 176, 179–80 Nationchild Plumaroja, 42, 47 nation-state, 19, 31, 44, 174, 180, 182, 188 Native American, 9, 18, 21, 118, 136–37, 158, 170–73; children’s primers, 170, 173; literature, 137; “picture writing,” 158; recontact narratives, 18; tribal nations, 9. See also Akwesasne Mohawk nation; Huron; Iroquois; Ottawa Native American Religions courses, 74–75 Naylor, Paul, 17–18, 90, 109 Nebuchadnezzar I, 128 Negri, Antonio, 12, 170, 186 neoliberalism, 12, 46–47, 107–8, 160 Neruda, Pablo, 58, 62 “New Day,” 69

226

Index

“New World,” 14, 16, 24, 28, 32, 52–58, 64, 74, 97, 110–20, 148–49, 157, 164, 174–75, 183 New York Armory Show, 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 13, 73, 103 “noise,” 108–10, 113–16, 130–33 “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” 89 “ntsikana’s bell,” 124–25 Odyssey, The, 51–52, 78, 80, 82, 95–96, 161 Ogotemmêli, 121–22 “The Old Negro Dreams of Rivers,” 90 Old World, 16, 58, 146 Olson, Charles, 34, 45, 78–81 Oppen, George, 21, 45, 49, 108 Orientalism, 98, 169 Origins of American Linguistics, 151 Ortiz, Simon, 136 Osiris, 93–94 Osman, Jena, 64, 141, 161 Ottawa, 173 “Our America,” 179, 185 “pantextualism,” 7, 79 Parker, Charlie, 110 Parker, Dorothy, 102 Parson, Marie, 107 “Passing Thru,” 112, 116 Paterson, 14, 61, 112 “Penitents,” 67 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 32 Perloff, Marjorie, 62–63, 84, 181 Philip, M. NourbeSe, 16, 75–77, 139, 141–42 pictorial vocabularies, 24 Piña, Javier, 30, 36 Pizarro, Francisco, 56 Plato, 44, 53 plural-world(s) crossing, 56; and dissent, 24–25; dwelling, 44–45; literature, 138, 182; and locality, 147–48; and poetry, 7, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20–21, 37, 44, 46, 177–78; and writing, 74, 138 plural-world model, 42–43 PMLA, 179

poesis, 11–22, 52–55, 64, 70, 103, 141, 150, 155, 194–95 Poethical Wagner, The, 181 Poetics of Relation, 42 poetry and hegemony, 18; 1990s, 63; open, 70–71; and remembrance, 103; teaching, 4, 6, 9–10 Poetry magazine, 78 polytheism, 16, 24, 51, 70, 73–80, 92–95, 104–5 Pontiac, 173 Pontiac “Aztek,” 29 Ponzi schemes, 46–47 postmodernism, 1, 5, 7, 8, 10, 20, 23, 25, 28, 30, 33, 40–41, 45–47, 63, 78–80, 136, 157, 159–60, 185, 190, 195; coining of, 79; and the Internet, 30; “two postmodernisms,” 10 poststructuralism, 79 Pound, Ezra, 14–15, 34, 61, 77–79, 82–85, 90, 94, 99, 120–21, 136, 151, 161–62. See also Cantos (Pound) Pratt, Mary Louis, 32 primers, 170, 173–74, 192 Prospero, 94 Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, 76 Protestant church, 152–53, 171 Puritan missionaries, 151–56, 158, 160 Pushkin, Alexander, 93 Quasha, George, 123 Quetzalcoatl, 67–68, 118 Ra, 92 Ra, Sun, 108 Ra’ad, Basem, 158, 180, 183–84, 196 Rabasa, José, 23–25, 32–33, 46, 151 Radhakrishnan, R., 179 radical democracy, 123, 160 radical empiricism, 122 Ramazani, Jahan, 135 Ramírez Codex, The, 27 rationalism, 51, 74, 93, 128, 142, 155–56, 158, 166 “La Raza,” 33, 37–40, 42, 53

Index “reconfigurers,” 108 Reed, Ishmael, 75, 110, 121, 140 Religion and Gender courses, 75 Retallack, Joan, 161, 181 Retamar, Roberto, 94 “The Return,” 161 Revisionist, The, 186, 191 “Rhinocerus,” 166 Richards, I. A., 29 Rimbaud, Arthur, 62 Rivera, Diego, 58 Rivera, Eléna, 14, 28 Rock the Boat, 170 Rodriguez, Richard, 15 Roman Catholic Church, 67 Roman Empire, 184 Rosaldo, Renato, 46 Rose, Wendy, 136 Rorty, Richard, 7, 46 Rothenberg, Jerome, 45, 159 Rowlandson, Mary, 156 Roy, Arundhati, 170 Ruíz de Alarcón, Hernando, 64–67, 69 Rukeyser, Muriel, 45 Sabina, Maria, 45 Said, Edward, 12, 65 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6 scale change, 167 Schlosberg, David, 10, 20, 88, 123 Schultz, Susan, 10 Seafarer, The, 78 Searle, John, 7, 142 Seawright, Caroline, 118 “Second Coming,” 83 selfhood, 2–4, 6–9, 14, 28, 31, 126, 147 self-reflexivity, 3, 4, 100, 154, 186–87, 194 September 11, 2001, 171 serial poetry, 5, 15–17, 20–21, 24–28, 32, 34, 35, 40, 42, 44–45, 47, 50, 53, 59–63, 70, 104, 128–29; and collective readership, 59–62; and political content, 25–28; as postmodern, 45 “shadow poem,” 10 Shakespeare, William, 58, 94 She Tries Her Tongue, 75 Shepp, Archie, 132

227

“Shield of Achilles,” 92 signification, 8, 50, 63, 79, 95, 111, 115, 157. See difrasismo Silko, Leslie Marmon, 75 Simpsons, The, 31 Singer, Peter, 181 Singing the Holes in History, 17 slave narrative, 75–76, 90 Snyder, Gary, 123, 139, 159 social science, 151, 163 Song of the Andoumboulou, 17, 110–12, 120, 122, 124–25, 133–34 Sordello, 84 Soto, Gary, 136 South America, 58 Snake Poems, 15, 64, 66 Spahr, Juliana, 19, 53, 64, 108, 136–37, 159, 161, 177, 191. See Everyone with Lungs Spain, 136 Spanish colonialism, 24–29, 50, 52, 56, 113 Spanish Inquisition, 56, 64–65 Spanish language, 15, 30–31, 54, 59–61 “A Species of Martyrdom: The Huronia Series,” 167–68 Spinosa, Charles, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 20, 40–43, 46, 131–32, 162, 195 Spivak, Gayatri, 62, 181 “Station of the Metro,” 83 Stein, Gertrude, 2, 10, 181 Stevens, James Thomas, 18–19, 135–78; heritage of, 137, 149; and listening, 165–66; and lovers, 164–65, 167– 68, 176–77; and Philadelphia MLA convention, 140–49; pluralization and localization, 150–51; and scale change, 167; and spanning, 155–56; and “Sui-translation,” 143–47; and things, 154–55; and translation, 151–60; and worldcrossing, 160–62. See also Alphabets of Letters; A Bridge Dead in the Water; Combing the Snakes from His Hair; Tokinish Stevens, Wallace, 83, 89–90, 161 Story of A: the Alphabetization of America, The, 173 “The Stream of Thought,” 2, 6, 8

228

Index

Structure of Scientific Revolution, The, 109 the sun, 25–26, 37, 39, 44, 92–93 “Sunday Morning,” 83, 89–90 Szymborska, Wislawa, 187 Tafoya, Carmen, 47 Tahui, 55 Taino, 16 Tardos, Ann, 181 Tarn, Nathaniel, 123 Tedlock, Dennis, 123–24 Tempest, The, 58, 94 Tenoch, 39 Thetis, 92–93 THIS, 2 Thoughts and Culture, 62 “Three Translations from the Mohawk,” 143–44 Tiamat, 128 time, 37–40, 63, 78, 94, 96–98, 102–4, 113, 119–20 Tiresius, 77, 94 tlacuilo, 24, 42–43, 55, 64–65, 141 “To His Mistris Going to Bed,” 57 Tokinish, 19, 138–39, 141, 151–58, 160, 170 Tolson, Melvin, 83 Tolstoy, Leo, 81 de Torquemada, Tomás, 56 Tracy, David, 158 translations, 50, 59–64, 155–56, 181 transnationalism, 19, 22–23, 135–36, 148, 152, 176–83, 188–90 “Traveler’s Prayer,” 67 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848), 33 Trojan Women, The, 92 Truxillo, Charles, 31 Turkle, Sherry, 30 Two Years Before the Mast, 30 Ulysses, 91 Under Flag, 192 Under the Volcano, 30 Union of Farm Workers, 2, 34 United States, 38, 42, 46, 63, 65, 91, 98–100, 108, 110, 135–38, 156, 176, 180–81, 186–87, 189, 191; and black writers, 108; colonial, 42, 65; cultural homogenization of, 99;

culture, and black Americans, 110; exceptionalism, 138, 156, 191; and hegemony, 38; and immigration, 31, 191; literary studies, 179; paranoia, 176, 180–81, 186–87, 189, 191; poetries, 135–37; post– World War II writing, 176; and Puritanism, 138; racism, 100. See also American literature; “American multiculturalism”; Iraq war Unknowne Land, 28 U.S. Border Patrol, 63 U.S.–Mexico border, 55–58, 63 Utopia, 58 Vadén, Tere, 11, 14, 20, 45–46, 49–50, 120, 123, 130, 133, 140, 170, 182, 185, 195 Valdez, Luis, 33 Valéry, Paul, 114 value pluralism, 11, 177–78 Van Sertima, Ivan, 118 Vasconcelos, José, 33 Vicuña, Cecilia, 18 de Villagrá, Gaspar Pérez, 24, 58, 62 Virgil, 79, 82, 85, 95, 97 Visit Teepee Town, 137 Vooght, Jeremy, 79 Walcott, Derek, 75, 79 Waldinger, Roger, 179, 182 Waldrop, Rosemarie, 159, 160 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 151, 163 war and commerce, 173–76 Warrior, Robert, 182 Washington, Booker T., 82, 88, 103 Wassons, R. G., 45 Waste Land, The, 35, 77, 82 Watten, Barrett, 2 “We Will Not Lost Our Words,” 143–44, 149 weaving metaphor, 18, 86–88, 90, 92, 94, 97–98, 101–4, 111, 116, 126, 130 Western culture, 6, 7, 17, 28, 44, 51, 75, 77, 80, 82, 90–93, 96, 109, 113–14, 116–18, 120, 124, 130– 32, 139, 150–51, 163, 166, 180, 184; ethnocentrism, 92; literary tradition, 120;

Index Western culture (continued), theories of civilization, 117; and violence, 184. See also imperialism; rationalism Whatsaid Serif, 121, 127, 133–34 Wheatley, Phyllis, 90 White, Hayden, 111 whiteness, 87–89, 95, 98–99, 101 Whitman, Walt, 90 Williams, Raymond, 119 Williams, Roger, 19, 135, 135, 138, 152–56, 158–59, 162, 171. See A Key into the Languages of America Williams, William Carlos, 14, 53, 61–62, 112 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 7, 79, 102, 116, 142 Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 193 women, 46, 58–59, 95 world(s), 8–9, 11, 24, 26, 43, 54, 66, 78, 142–43, 149–51

229

world crossing, 40, 78, 149–51, 159–62, 166–67, 182 world literature, 136–38, 182 “world poem,” 17, 78, 83, 131 Wright, James, 125 writing, 186 writing class, 9–10 X, Malcolm, 85–86, 88, 103 X-Files, The, 31 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, 161 Yeats, William Butler, 77, 83 Yo Soy Joaquín/I Am Joaquin, 2, 5, 36 Young, Julian, 13 Zapata, Emiliano, 38–39 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), 23, 24, 30 Žižek, Slavoj, 111 Zong!, 16, 75–76, 139–40 Zukofsky, Louis, 60

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