sous les pavés, la plage
»beneath the paving stones, the beach«
IN THIS ISSUE
SOUS LES PAVÉS is a bi-monthly newsletter of poetry & ideation distributed by mailing list only and funded by the generous donations of its readers. To join the mailing list or to donate, visit the SOUS LES PAVÉS tab at www.interbirthbooks.com
SOUS LES PAVÉS invites responses to the contributions within these pages & will strive to make such responses available in print. Send mss. & correspondence to Micah Robbins | 3515 Fairview Ave. | Dallas, TX 75223 or email
micahjrobbins@gmail.com
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SOUS LES PAVÉS
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March 2011 Number 3
Jay James May
Lara Buckerton
Frances Kruk
Susan Briante
Francesca Lisette
Goat Far DT
Richard Owens
Sean Bonney
Justin Katko
Elliott Colla
Debrah Morkun
Tomas Weber
Linh Dinh
Danny Hayward
Keston Sutherland
Pocahontis Mildew
Sommer Browning
Collective Anon
SOUS LES PAVÉS
… the past year has witnessed a resurgence of direct-action politics in the streets of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. These actions have taken new and surprising forms and have developed in ways that indicate immense complexities that are invariably distorted by the chatter of the mainstream media. In an effort to both register and understand something of these events beyond the usual clichés, the current issue is largely given over to individuals with first-hand experience of the protests in the UK and is entirely dedicated to the spirit of dissent and revolt. I hope that this issue takes some small step toward opening a productive dialogue and forging a lasting bond of solidarity between the US and UK poetry communities. May this be but the beginning …
As always, this publication depends on the generous donations of its readers. A great many thanks to the following donors, past and present: Jared Schickling, Charles Godwin,Projective Industries,Joel Calahan,
Keith Tuma,Edmond Caldwell, The Chicago Review, Brenda Iijima, Ross Sloan, Tim Earley, Alistair Noon, Austin Smith, William Sylvester
+9 anonymous donors.
Our goal is to continue publishing and distributing SOUS LES PAVÉS on a bi-monthly basis … en perpetuity … but to do so we need your help. Please consider joining the ranks of those listed above by lending financial / material support to this effort …
To donate, visit the SOUS LES PAVÉS tab at www.interbirthbooks.com or send cash, checks, M.O., reams of paper, books or rolls of stamps, ink, staples, etc. to:
Micah Robbins | 3515 Fairview Ave. Dallas, TX 75223
Please support this effort by donating today.
Note: send us your letters, especially when they engage with specific items from past issues, and we’ll print them on this page. This space is not, however, intended to be an exclusive domain of praise. If you want to challenge an assertion made within these pages or correct an error, please do so. If you want to sound off on the state of contemporary poetics, publishing, academics, politics, etc., write me or one of the contributors and we’ll try our best to include your message in this limited space.
—MICAH ROBBINS
CORRESPONDANCE
What can I say? The second issue of Sous les Pavés is very exciting. Read it end to end this morning over a coffee—tho it might have been the first paragraph of Dale’s essay that woke me up! Great essay, and Brooks’ collage seemed to just magically fall into place at the end. Torregian’s poem for Rich is beautiful, and Rich’s essay is most insightful. David’s poem a blast—how does he ‘write’ those? And perhaps best of all is the open letters to the editor that you publish.
—KYLE SCHLESINGER
My surprise on receiving the first number of Sous les Pavés
was just redoubled by the appearance of the second: something about receiving these missives in the mail feels terribly intimate and tangible and real and reminds me of our overlapping communities, among those we haven’t met yet.
—ZACK FINCH
In his piece in Sous les Pavés #2, “Skinner & Collis: Hasty Notes on Their Use of Neglect,” Richard Owens explains, “In the northwest of North America blackberry brambles proliferate like a sort
of weed.” He quotes Jonathan Skinner: “Blackberry brambles swarm over the edges of west coast cities—they are the marginalia of the urban and suburban city / text.” Of course, blackberries are not confined to the northwest, nor are they confined to what Skinner describes. I don’t mean to suggest any sort of error on the part of Owens or Skinner, astute observers that they manifestly are. The writers are focusing their attentions on one precinct of the blackberry, which otherwise overtakes the fringes of deciduous woods. Like poison ivy, blackberries like to crop up wherever the manufactured clearing exists, and they appear as well at the natural edges of shady forests, where the sun hits. They also seem, somehow, indomesticatable—the blackberry of the supermarket, though bigger and often seedless, is a bland variant of the seedy, gritty, tiny, potent blackberry of the Maine woods. (I’m not sure why; the wild, tastier blackberry would seem easy enough to grow, preserve, and ship.) I mention this as it seems to complicate some of Owens’s fascinating points regarding the lesson of the urban and suburban blackberry: “the conditions for their proliferation are willfully manufactured,” yet in possessing “no formal market value” they represent the detritus of hope, “the negation of enclosure” (Skinner), a “third landscape,” the “productive and destructive” fallout from our “reckless overinvestment.” Deploying a late-stage understanding of the toxicity of market-based societies (those which simply discard from their path whatever proves useless within systems of capital accumulation and circulation), Owens argues, “the logic of primitivist efforts that typically refuse the utopian possibilities contained within the thoroughly domesticated is itself part of the problem.” In this, and in the larger purview of the essay, I hear, “the logic of sophisticated efforts that embrace the utopian possibilities contained within the thoroughly domesticated is part of the solution” to capitalist overinvestment and its attendant, necessary neglect. Thus, welcoming into our gaze and affections the noxious cousins of the blackberry weed— “undocumented workers, the unemployed, the destitute, the homeless, the hopelessly criminal”—becomes an antidote to our violent, atrophic drive to eliminate the “grass growing up through the cracks” (Skinner). I would agree with Owens that this is true. However, I would argue, in contrast to certain points within his argument, that there is still the possibility of recognizing within and around the nurtured and neglected a “pure wilderness … a pristine ‘natural’ space untouched by human hands.” I would also add that an accurate conception of “wilderness” automatically “refuses to presuppose an edenic moment,” a time at which the paradoxical and natural coexistence of beauty with ugliness, health with disease, perfection with imperfection, life with destruction, etc., cannot be recognized. I would suggest that there exists, and always shall exist, a pure, unsullied space beyond human needs and concerns, an interior and exterior space that is actually “untouched by human hands,” an ever-present challenge and assault to humanist desire and affirmation. This would seem a healthy vitamin to swallow, insofar as Aldo Leopold’s case for the sustenance to be had by a “land ethic” still holds water: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” I mention this in relation to Owens’s brilliant and useful essay because, despite the environmental catastrophe our scientific communities more or less agree is at hand, the greatest ape has yet to fully embrace what reason lies in valuing autonomous nature as such—what reason lies in simply guiding, to the utmost extent possible, hands from the bounteous pot. In other words, I don’t think it is over the top to ask if the third landscape—that which presently follows, and will follow like poison ivy, from transformations of the first—will keep proving home turf on which to reconstitute human society.
—JARED SCHICKLING
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POKED WITH A STICK
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THE NEW POLITICS
—for the Westminster Bridge Kettle
I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party man: but I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended. I have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor my understanding made a dupe of.
—William Hazlitt, ‘Preface’ to Political Writings (1819)
The Government and its police force now understand that we are at once intelligent and fearless. We do not rely on top-down leadership: the union is redundant and unrepresentative, the faded umbra of a dead ballot. We reject traditional structures of organisation and action. We reject nostalgia: this is not May 1968 or October 1917. Youvefuckedus. As I write, the web browser on my laptop is up. I search ‘student protest London 10/11/10’ on Google, then search “Poll Tax”, or “Toxteth”—I check my email. Books. I visit, say, Amazon, and as I do so, I leave the electronic trace of my existence and desire for objects—my coded reptilian dead skin. I leave it there as a testament to the voluntary labour of my “browse”: I dig the hole and fill it with the information that is central to the accumulation of web-based capital. From this well of information, my future manoeuvres can be speculated on, my desires bound up in code and sold back to me. Thus, control—at least in this respect—is predicated on desire. If my desires can be predicted based on economic/mathematical models of behaviour, then they can be engineered. My desire is thus rendered a fantasy of transference. Perhaps what makes the London protest of 10/11/10 so remarkable is that in this commodity economy in which our behaviour is predicted before it happens, authorities have been forced to concede that they had not expected, that is, they could not predict what would happen. Demand the Impossible. Our desire has gone beyond its allocated configuration. Whose streets? Our streets. On 24/11/10 I fought with and ran away from armoured riot police. I kicked the fence over in Parliament Square. I smashed into the Treasury. I cheered as teenagers smashed windows and burned benches. Eat the Rich. The damage is tallied in material value and straw-man public outrage. The only real outrage felt was by the party on the receiving end of kicked-in windows and occupation, and the media stooges that channel their meaning. The narcoleptic public, as always, slept peacefully. The issues are burned off using oxygen siphoned out from the discursive space. The cracked Millbank windows fill the void. A boy in a Soviet Ushanka waves a hammer and sickle flag atop the statue ofLord Palmerston. Shame on you for turning blue. Even The Independent, our so-called left-wing newspaper pines for the comfort of home, encapsulated in the black and white shot of a protester high-kicking the glass front. But we must build a new house. Same goes for the 24/11/10 protest: someone jabs a stick at Camilla Parker-Bowles through the open window of her chauffeur-driven car as it attempts to pass through a protest on Regent Street. The BBC and the mainstream print media fail to see the obvious hilarity in this moment, with Home Secretary Theresa May doing her professional best to exacerbate the situation. BBC vomit: “Home Secretary Theresa May has confirmed there was ‘contact’ between the Duchess of Cornwall and one of the protesters who attacked her car. But she did not confirm reports the duchess was poked with a stick during student protests on Thursday ... Several protesters launched an attack on a carcarrying Prince Charles and
the Duchess of Cornwall as it passed along Regent Street. Their Rolls-Royce was kicked, splashed with paint and a window was cracked to chants of ‘off with their heads’. There were reports Camilla was poked with a stick, through one of the car windows as the royal couple made their way to the London Palladium. Mrs May told Sky News: ‘I'm not sure about the term “poked with a stick”. I understand there was some contact made.’” Less kettles, more tea— errata!—fewer kettles, more tea. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson vomit: “The officers who were protecting their royal highnesses showed very real restraint. Some of those officers were armed.” Peter Hallward: “In reality, the great majority of the violence has been suffered rather than inflicted by the protesters. In reality, given the calamity that confronts us, protesters have acted with remarkable discipline and restraint. In reality, although police justify the use of ‘containment’ as a means of preventing violence, most of what violence there was during Thursday’s rally began well after the vast kettling operation was set up”. The Hallwardian Real: in short, the stickwielders and paintflickers were lucky not to be shot to death in the road by the royal entourage. Lucky like Alfie Meadows, refused treatment at a local hospital after being bludgeoned by an armed cop. Lucky like Ian Tomlinson, killed for not moving fast enough at the G20 protest he was not even part of. Lucky like Jean Charles de Menezes, the plumber executed by cops on the London Tube for living in the same block of flats as a suspected terrorist. In the kettle there is commitment, community, humour, purpose and connection. We cannot sleep. We are defined by our presence within, distinct from those without. Our laws are different: we are truly one and the same. The cops say that they will let those who are not breaking outside laws go free, and we ask how they can tell. We can’t, they say. We are all thugs, vandals, criminals. To protest now means to break the law. The blend of gender, age, race and class is created by this environment in a way utterly distinct from any other. Those with no public voice express themselves through other means. Their discourse is the broken window. No longer will the tabloids feed us images of terrified teenage girls and expect us to swallow them. A riot horse throws its rider from its back and jumps on him. To avoid containment is to “deviate”. Barthes punctum “is that accident which pricks me... [t]he studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste.” The mainstream print media in Britain have succeeded in cropping our perceptive field for us: all that remains is the punctum, yet social media scatters our shattered voice and gives us hope. Millbank was the white-hot centre of our desire, our interest and our taste, so visceral that it could not be edged, fudged, or fogged-out, burned-off. The sheer power of this creation, this coming-into-being of the new politics renders the Porter-led “marches” at once “unconcerned”, “various”, and “inconsequential”. Let them mourn the death of the status quo with their glowstick vigil. If it wasn’t for the “deviation” to Millbank, the protest would have died in the street. Whose streets? Our fucking streets. “We must be careful not to alienate the public”. No, let them sleep. Nick Clegg is in a relationship with David Cameron. Gordon Brown likes this. Jeremy Varon on US New Left Violence: violence “may never have functioned as the voice of ‘the people,’ and neither were they even the preferred tactics of the antiwar movement. But they did seem to inspire fear among the political and military establishment of a popular uprising that would cripple the government and force intolerable degrees of national division”. We’re running out of chants. A pink stormtrooper ambles by. Perhaps G.D. was right: “l’humanité ne sera heureuse que le jour où le dernier bureaucrate aura été pendu avec les tripes du dernier capitaliste”.
—JAY JAMES MAY
THERE IS NO OTHER CHEEK TO BE TURNED
milk is a blood product & we the blood of procedure quietly leaking to standards in responsible walls. What necessary things are harmless
if we are thrown to the cow who will find its teeth first
What of the tower and its broken glass? It sparkles. But not merely from the crushing and fire that tens of thousands of students gave it in London on 10 November 2010. That which makes it glitter is the blood on it. It is not only the blood of slashes to all levels of education funding (trebled tuition fees being only the surface issue), but also that of hospitals, libraries, public transport, social housing, financial assistance for the jobless, disability benefits, child benefits, adult home care, local council services. Even the uniformed filth that fuck protestors’ skulls with truncheons have their share of cuts coming, and the douchebag heart of this destruction lies in the Millbank Tower.
when there was no longer what to say the events went random as a city dogs belted lungs powdered
procedures move persons in common narrative of ribs
(c)’ Nick Cledge even argued that popular sovereignty could be legitimately subordinate to the internal parliamentary arrangements. Why isn’t there this amazing YouTube clip of Paxman or someone destroying the guy’s career over this point? The coalition deal is no more a source of legitimacy than a coffee date with David. Indeed it is a sort of gruellingly drawn-out coffee date with David.
I hope this will not be seen as an exception, but as a symptom of a social and political system which is unobtrusively undemocratic in the usual course of things. The anti-cuts movement as a whole will not always enjoy such palpable affronts.
In 2011, students, workers and others will unite and fight. Posie and I are definitely in too. We will need some kind of core consensus. Realistically, social democracy is the only philosophy which can provide that consensus. I hope and believe it will be— has already begun to be—a new social democracy, a totally souped up, cool futuristic social democracy, incorporating historical lessons, vibrating throughout with original, exhilarating, vital thoughts.
Those to the left of social democracy may rightly perceive an awful lot of hegemonic ideology veiled within that word “realistically.” But wait! I don’t think that social democracy represents the end of a spectrum of realistic political organisations. I think that it represents the realistic core consensus of a movement in 2011 which is capable of far more radical changes—the kind of changes which make people nervous.
The short term task, for those who desire them, is not how to persuade me and millions like me not to be nervous when we contemplate such changes. It is to work out how to act together with us nevertheless. It is discovering coordination without consensus. Or maybe you could say, to win class war without consciousness. I don’t know. Woo-hoo!
—LARA BUCKERTON
RIOTING A BIT
For Click Negg, it was just a big misunderstanding! He asked students—eventually he may actually have begged them—to “actually look” at the Bill before Parliament. If they actually looked at it—and not at Twitter or Drake or whatever—they would see that it “did not affect them.”
Then the whole tape would play in reverse. Student swarms would polish that police van, shake away its dents and fill its windows with glass. Jody McIntyre would get up, and a police escort would walk him backwards to his wheelchair. The poop would scoot back into the poor Prince. Ashes around Trafalgar Square would blow together, kindle, and turn into a lovely exhibition of peace poems. If they actually looked.
The DPM (Double Penetration Minister—fucked no matter which way he goes! Tee hee) was speaking in a context of pervasive, inevitably plural, and often articulate and detailed critiques, from students, academics, campaigners, media types and inquisitive ladies like me.
What gives? Is it possible that he couldn’t make sense of us, because we mostly weren’t speaking from a perspective of narrowly economic possessive individualism, or whatever?
Maybe—but I rather doubt that he and his team really thought everyone was rioting and everything out of mistaken economic self-interest. Others would overhear his plea however and, thinking it was meant for someone else, wouldn’t look into it too deeply. This kind of spectacle tête-à-tête, designed for eavesdroppers and onlookers, must be second nature to contemporary politicians.
In a tight spot it was the best Nick Reneg could do. He bundled it with that other vaguely marketable bit of misinformation, that the policy would be progressive by raising the repayments threshold from £15,000 to £21,000. Now, that higher threshold is still well below median income in the UK. Allowing for pay rises and inflation to 2016, it will be about the equivalent of £16,000 right now. These facts didn’t really make it into the mainstream coverage, and I blame Posie Rider coming unannounced to stay at my house for that (but well worth it, Posie!).
Around the student struggle there is an aura of comprehensive relevance. Like Kate Middleton—not relevant to anything, just relevant. It certainly doesn’t emanate from the issue, which is enormously complex and not limited to access or to progressive versus regressive funding arrangements (for example, it’s also about independent and fruitful civil society). I think it comes from the unusually and acutely undemocratic way in which the policy took shape:
(a) An independent commission was appointed. It was clear from Lord Browne Sugar’s report that he did not actually look at academia. He and his team worked by consulting a select group of stakeholders, and interpreting them according to an even narrower range of perspectives.
(b) The parliamentary vote was conducted under a three line whip, as pimped as any hip hop artist ever did aver. There was the maximum possible constraint of personal judgement and individual consciences by party mechanisms.
– but I’m –
Description Shut. Indifferent as Sun.
moving fast & like smoke
it’s not a procession of isolated events it’s not fancies of numbers.
It’s –
Silence, Little Springing Fool - the white hush of pathological ellipses slammed into a fuzz
The static fuzz so loud there is no way to ensure the blankness of that blank continues. Not all of those students knew they were conjuring the spectre that never quite stopped haunting Europe, but fast like smoke it was acutely felt, it leapt from its exile in official hush. Throughout November and December the country blazed with unprecedented student action. Just off-camera, the usual government smothering of everything else, but visible noise rising this time, coming up alongside mass student organistion. Camera has no choice but to pan.
The result was more strikes. Town hall riots! Trade union flags trickling into student demonstrations. Students learning the picket line. A rising consciousness of the need for unity against David Cameron’s Pig Society, its smug underestimation of what it is attacking. What of the tower and its broken glass? It smashed itself.
the typeface sent me yes – no – skull can possibly escape the willing
tools of the project for you are revolt & fog
& goat sound
ear to wood & ground & I am mythic ordinary people with hearts of plastic, wire & nail:
Of Artificial Fires, Of Invisible Writing, we have known it colder.
By powder, by surprise the button waits the wire spits
why, this is hell, nor am I of it
Nerves choke the atmosphere now. But the passing of the tuition hikes bill has not stopped the momentum. Rather, it has changed it in quality: the electricity running sharper blue between all of those who will/do suffer from the government’s cuts to human dignity. There is a drilling of tunnels, forward, running thicker cords, local groups and unions refreshed and inspired by broken glass, making their own ellipses as the possibility of general strike looms. At the core of ongoing student assemblies, they fuse teeth, cease tentative gestures and graft fully into the larger body of working and workless facing the next round of cuts. Fireworks being repositioned. May be rhetoric unstable, hope and doubt a single barbed tangle, naïveté, probably. But so is the government. Wires beneath their feet, hate under their houses. NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down (di Prima).
When I am the blood I will be behind your teeth
& the Black Spot, once delivered is the wound that makes new time
(Rumours of international solidarity actions for strike in March. Invitation.)
—FRANCES KRUK
JULY 29—THE DOW CLOSES DOWN 9870
more come, begin their lives here
just as I prepare to leave, pull
thumb tacks out of the wall
tell the birds at the feeder
the horses at pasture
hold the phone
away from the baby
the air-conditioner cycles
on and again
in their nest sparrows
open their mouths
to porch light
O sparrows you look so old
and hungry, where
has your mother flown today
—and how do you feel wing
to wing and hungry?
10.12.10
Aftermath
Symptoms blaze up in riled kettle-swell, mouse laser ground objective over the squeal of FACTS, prostrate gleams your black blow swindle decisive ‘Page after page
of filthy poetry’
Stick to the FACTS. Repeat tie underbrush loosening sigh fist, the FACTS. National radio skyfill globule rape stupid violence the FACTS. Grimly siphoned history repudiates her darling blood-breasted poppy arrow justice stone wax figurine / drooping fungal. Transistor hup blue chest glow.
Attention it prostitutes a molasses bleeding drink cunt entropy as happy anger miss the shields. This is what always happens. Language shifts to a welter of redundancy. More interest in a political career. Sell individual mass cum. Sell this fucking grey angel of smoke as it escapes my hand.
***
A train could not possibly have any less agency, placid plug-out adults don’t / are trapped LOST clamped feeling your legs become a crushed tongue gathering steel pace shafted ken, sight ice in a suit OFFENSIVE licking never mind strength pupa numbed in-version. His spit-strangled ear X’d with state loathing the voice of LOSS prisms chase stuffed packet data the spectacle warps behind safety doors, capitalism in its right place might pickle your beliefs in shadow excrement or ace the cut-out burden of life you stuck a spine to beat with.
***
Materialism means attention to bodily harm, rigidity pays the price of dog-head brunt which slips thru the human shed clear as water, what right have you a
phantasmic intellect jelly to reproach meltdown? Witness catalog a joke cast out of oxygen, bodies scraped emphatic rodeo germinal commandants twitching in the anti- paralytic dock of iron gesture: pixellated testimonies crumble by the hour.
GOAT FAR DT EXCERPTS
or flux, pointing to a misty dawn in which society is based on ecstatic equilibrium of expulsions recycled by one’s fellow man as emetics—though who will build the dialysis fairgrounds? Of course, that’s too big a question for me to answer here. But when passion leads to bloodshed? Where’s the fun in that? And without fun, can you have critique? Am I saying that fun and passion are inimical, or that critique is inimical to itself? Of course not. In the end, it is the shifting possibilities of text that allows each of us to make and remake her or her own meaning. And since the poststructuralism evacuated the essential self, we are completely free to reshape our personal meaning whenever it comes into conflict with another which we truly judge using the first shape to be worth recognising. Is this nihilism, relativism? No. But in a funny sort of way, maybe it is the “war” over poetry itself that is where the true poetry lies. And this brings me back to my initial theme. As the queen and her counsels survey this divided landscape, what must they be thinking? To give to any one party would be to doom all to a famous bellum omnium contra omnes. The laureateship cannot be abolished. Unless the huddled “elite”—the Third Way of poetry I spoke of—can find among themselves a strong leader, someone capable of uniting those who wish to rise above faction, of overviewing the entire situation and seeing off assaults from the enemies of fraternity on all sides, there is but one option left. The people themselves must be made poet laureate.
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NOTES ON BRITISH POETRY NO. 34
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(In which Goat Far DT counsels restraint in these troubled times.) I went to Brixton to write this post. I’m there now—here. I just kind of wandered around a bit and looked at the people there, and even stopped and talked to some of them, to just like get a real sense of the place. So I guess it’s a kind of psychogeographical post. Place is very important to my posts, in fact the other day someone even described me as a forum poster of place, I don’t know how true that is, but anyway. The boiling irony is, I typed it thinking it was going in another place—on the POETS ON FIRE forum, but I can’t seem to register. Roddy Lumsden asked, “I’m tempted to join the protests but a fair amount of my wages come from the state—should I still shake my fist?” Roddy was part of an impressive line up at a tolerably half-full (“intimate?”) La Langoustine est Mort last night, & a little hollow birdie intoned boomingly to me that footage of his and spine-free (“friarweather” friends, if you will) “comrades”. Though “hypocrite” derives etymologically from hypokrites, the pretender, actor, and “hippie” from the fin de siecle Chicago imagination, to sear the surface of history, to kindle debate with our coiling black skins and draw the steady *thwuck* *thwuck* of “hecklecopters” o’erhead. Our lives must be assimilated to that role, just as a City (hard-)worker, had he been accidently muddled with the effigy, must lie still as he burns, or else risk profound hypocrisy. He must judge as the effigy, plop over as the effigy.
What the marchers, or “praxis dudes” as they seem to now be calling themselves, don’t realise is this. Effigies which get up and run around screaming are no longer effigies. The same goes for poets. ONCE YOU ARE THE EFFIGY YOU ARE THE EFFIGY.
What really winds me up, more even than how the praxis dudes act as if made rational by our system (taking state funding etc.) in order to dismantle it (rather than doing the right thing & sacrificing themselves absolutely to that system’s tendential slavery and homicide), is their litter. On Wednesday I even saw swathed caitiffs dragging metal partitions into the path of oncoming rows of brave truncheoneers! By their own logic, they should be stooping to clear their yoghurt pots and flapjack crumbs from under the boots of the charging law & order! These are certainly the same folks we see flying, driving or taking the train—not, at any rate, cycling—to their various Climate Change / War / Anti-Domination “conferences” (read: jollies) in exotic locations across England.
There’s nothing more laughable (I mean it: “ha ha ha ha” there I go) than a pamphlet exhorting me to recycle! Why don’t you just tell me, mate? They have everything backwards; I will swear I saw an anarchist at the so-called vigil on Thursday (what kind of “vigil” forces police to kettle it just to keep the peace, I ask you?) suckling a severed boob on a baby’s head which was immured in her chest. New Social Movements come Janus-faced as standard, so I’m not surprised their members have extra faces sticking out of them. At Cambridge, I knew a global warming activist, “Jonathan Stevenson,” at Cambridge, and I remember often seeing a light in his window late into the night. Even the energy he spends waving his arms around while he bores you could have boiled an egg for six months, which he would probably then eat because he is disgusting. If someone like Stevenson really cares about the irreversible corruption of the conditions which sustain life, he should consider deforesting less rainforest for the purpose of placardsmithing; he should move around a little less, breathe a little less, he should to less and fro less, because that wears down his soles, he should toss less and turn less, because that thins his blanket, he should shut his eyes because those suck up light, he should draw in his arms and tuck his knees up to his chest, so he takes up less space, he should be a pod, inert, starving, a non-meat, a block, a puck, a global flank, dead and self-kettled and silent as fuck. Either that or think about actually doing something worthwhile with his gifts like giving me the sucking chest wound dialectic blowjob-titwank I deserve for my poems.
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NOTES ON BRITISH POETRY NO. 44
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(In which Goat Far DT offers advice to up-and-coming poets.) Up and coming poets, look how (Loony?) Leftism has failed partly due to its failure to take on board media training. Don’t let poetry go to the same grave! It’s not enough to strongly hint that your faction has won because it is more materialist or more prosodic. Even if it is true, most normal people do not care. It is no coincidence I use Excel to keep track of where I stand.
On the below chart, young students must tick which apply. You think I am satirizing. What am I, Kate Nash in “Flourescent Adolescent”? If you want mere topsy-turvy like horses whipping peasants, you better walk on over to some medieval marginalia—with the round poos, chuck. By the way, Florence & The Machine—Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) video must certainly be the best thing on Youtube today. It is amazing. I have been watching it all day. It is just amazing. However, I in no way advocate
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SCRAPE THE ICE
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(OUR BUTTER STINKETH)
Defiantly pissing in the face of repression and wastefully pissing in the wind are two markedly different things. And I suspect Western efforts to map a revolutionary chic or barricades-qua-ghetto fabulousness onto internally complex political developments in the Arab world and elsewhere have the potential to be incredibly destructive. According to more than a few understandably enthusiastic but at times dangerously overinflated estimates, it is 1917 in Egypt, 1959 in Tunisia, and 1968 in the UK. Whether or not this is the case, we in America continue to reside in a chillingly liminal, Weimaresque time out of mind. In America we are repeatedly blindsided by the brute force of the Dodge Revolution.
On the question of Egypt, stock-in-trade Leftists repeatedly conjure the old clichés, over and over again, against a clear sense of their bankruptcy—against our own well-informed knowing better. Take recent statements by Slavoj Žižek, whose critical
judgment appears to have been blunted by the dull edge of his enthusiasm for events in the Arab world when he writes: “The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society.” The revolution in Egypt, Žižek claims, “is clearly that of a
universal secular call for freedom and justice…” Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama—they, too, invoke these transcendental Dioskouroi, freedom and justice, to persuasive effect.
In an American context the conjuration of such battered concepts and clichés among the Left, however noble and well-intentioned, appears to be driven by a desperate, self-defensive confidence in the face of overwhelming powerlessness and stupidity, a confidence which is at once admirable and despicable. There are clear reasons we can never walk like an Egyptian—at least not with any faith in the twisted length of our bowlegged American stride. And clamoring to hitch our ideologically overburdened wagon to a star we can’t even see clearly through the fog will not throw into sharp relief a blueprint for better times.
America is indeed exceptional and the primary question is, on some level, stupidly simple: How does one account for the striking ideological distance separating the US from the rest of the world? In some sense it is wholly absurd to speak of an American Left outside that part of the Americas that resides in the global south, and this is specifically the case in the US where words like socialism and communism are no longer operative concepts but filthy words in politically and culturally conservative quarters and, worse, irrelevant concepts for progressives and liberals that underscore more than a century of failure. But to invoke notions of socialism—or a thoroughgoing critique of capital that presupposes a belief in the possibility of something beyond a market system— outside the US, without ironic effect, is usually not so absurd. And so I want to understand this distance between a place in the world where one can speak about socialism with a straight face and a place in the world, this place, where one must do so only under cover of embarrassment or grave reservation.
If we speak in terms of geography, we must speak in terms of psychogeographies, the topography and architectures of thought, of consciousness and of the unconscious. And if we speak in terms of history, we must speak in terms of the irretrievability of the histories we grope toward, reconstruct, reconstitute, reimagine, instrumentalize and strategically deploy.
Henry David Thoreau’s maternal grandmother, Asa Dunbar, participated in the Great Butter Rebellion at Harvard in 1766, the first American student protest on record. For want of unspoiled food the students chanted, “Behold: our butter stinketh!” A bread and butter issue in the clearest sense, however complicated it may have been by the undeniable privilege of the students. In May 1968 Ed Dorn—with his partner Jennifer Dunbar—stood witness to student riots in Paris. Writing as a sort of embedded journalist to Frontier Press publisher Harvey Brown, Dorn commented derisively on student efforts to align their struggle with French workers, insisting that French workers wanted nothing to do with the students, that they imagined their grievances differently, through a radically different set of concerns. What strikes me about Dorn’s comment to Brown is its utter refusal of zeal. Dorn’s observation is without question a crucial one, but I sense it is also a deflationary detail an American eye is specifically groomed to see. For all the things one might register amidst the chaos of Paris in May ’68, it is this Dorn chooses to see. And I wonder now—as the growing strength of the Tea Party keeps frightening pace with unrest outside the US—if such a seeing is in fact a choice.
On November 10 thousands of British students walked on, vandalized and occupied Tory headquarters at Millbank. The closest analog to the Tory Party in the US is, of course, the GOP. And the thought of thousands coming together for any reason to occupy Republican National Headquarters is so wholly unreal, so wholly unthinkable, that it breaks the heart. This impossibility extends well beyond questions of political geography—beyond strategy or the threat of authorized force and state power—to the heart itself.
In Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune—a film that promises to be as poorly received in the US as Oliver Stone’s South of the Border—one British critic smartly remarks, "Left wing politics was his career, but the thing to remember about Phil Ochs is that what was in his heart was not left wing politics at all; it was John Wayne and Gary Cooper." In America it is always high noon. Whether we like it or not, we all worship Clint Eastwood, and when we do organize it is most often in the form of a lynch mob. I mean, if the figuration of the lone gunman wedged at the center of the American imaginary was gunned down in cold blood, Americans would organize in a wave of revolutionary hysteria to hire a new gun—and the more progressive or radical we are the more lonesome he’ll be. We always go it alone. The question, I suspect, is one of ideology in the largest sense—where the hired gun stands as a self-righteous, stoically belligerent quilting point around which specifically American forms of consciousness are constituted, amended, enabled, unleashed. Scrape the ice and you get more ice.
NOTE FROM LONDON
On January 29th simultaneous demonstrations took place in Manchester and London, which were supposed to signal the continuation of the student revolts of November and December last year. It didn’t quite work out that way: the numbers were low, and the atmosphere was subdued. Having been up most of the night watching the Egyptian uprising on Al Jazeera, our own revolt seemed pitiful. It was like we were at a funeral, as if the events of last year had never taken place.
November 10th shocked everyone, when a standard demonstration—against cuts in university funding, threefold increases in student fees and the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance—ended with the anarchist flag flying from the roof of Tory Party HQ, with bonfires lit in its courtyard, windows smashed, offices ransacked, and the end of at least two generations of political apathy. Predictably, the media complained about how a respectable (“middle class”, no less) demonstration had been hijacked by a small minority of “extremists”. But to the majority of demonstrators it was clear that if the demo had passed without incident, if Cameron had been able to congratulate us on our well-behaved expression of discontent, then it would have been a meaningless failure. As it was, it was the most meaningful demonstration in Britain for two decades.
The following weeks were wild. Chaotic demonstrations in most British cities, hundreds of newly politicised teenagers running wild down major London streets, universities occupied up and down the country, weekly mass meetings, Italian students rioting in solidarity. Messages of support were coming in from Greece, from France, from Iran. There were riots outside council offices. Massive demonstrations in Ireland brought their government to crisis point. A car carrying Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles was surrounded by an angry mob all yelling “off with their heads”.
When you meet a Tory on the street, cut his throat. It will bring out the best in you.
It is as simple as music or drunken speech. There will be flashes of obsolete light.
You will notice the weather only when it starts to die.
The mainstream media only talked about it in terms of violence. To be fair, they couldn’t do anything else: a full-scale revolt is outside of the comprehension of capitalist media except as violence, pure and simple. And as revolt, as demonstrations that crossed the line from liberal protest into militant illegalism, they were violent. After every demonstration the papers, the government, and representatives of the cops talked about how that violence had reached “unprecedented levels”. It was true enough: the government couldn’t let what had happened on November 10th go unpunished, and so the level of police aggression at subsequent demonstrations was astounding.
But the real violence—far more serious, and far more longlasting than smashing up a building—was the sense of lines being drawn. As the form of the demonstrations changed, so did the subjectivity of the demonstrators. The government, the entire economic system, became absolutely other. We were beginning to become capital’s impossible, its non-existent meanings, the ghost
that's been haunting it for centuries.
Lines being drawn: this was expressed positively in the occupations, and the opening up of other radical spaces. Students from the Slade School of the Arts occupied the National Gallery. Teach-ins were held all over the place. The idea of education as learning for its own sake, everything that capital is trying to destroy, was forcefully asserted everywhere. These same lines were expressed negatively in the police kettles, in an intensity of police violence explicitly intended to make protest impossible. If the occupations were about opening spaces, and the positive rejection of thought as commodity, then the kettle was radical closure, the denial of the possibility of thought as anything but commodity.
Lord Browne, from politeness government of millionaires, gradually allowed itself to become simply “the student protests”. The attack on Millbank had raised the stakes massively, but it also made it all too easy for the movement to become spectacularised. On the December 9th demo, when the cop violence reached delirious levels, it began to feel that we were just playing a part. Far from being capital’s incomprehensible other, we were its all too comprehensible sideshow freaks.
From the distance of a couple of months its clear that what seemed, for a while, to possibly be the end of the movement was inevitable and necessary. Today, February 12th, a mass meeting in London brought together groups from across the wider movement. Student militants were there, as were welfare rights groups, militant unions, socialists. That is, the student movement is now beginning to take its place within a wider, militant grouping with the explicit aim of bringing the government down. The events of last year have transformed everybody’s ideas about what could be possible.
December 2010. a high metallic wire. content exceeds phrase.
slight shift in geometry / slight interruption in the flow of their / crimson & guillotined bacterial princes / shifted / rivets of history
ok listen. theirs is a more stupid alphabet. sections to be rings and taken away. unspoken contradictions in their footsteps. a universe devoid of images. an october we thought we couldn’t have. external symbols within our sky. back now to our studies. negation of the negation. we will raise the dead.
The first conversation I had with the leader of my local anti-cuts union was sobering. “Its going to take more than breaking a few windows”, she said. Everything that had happened last year was suddenly compressed into a few pieces of broken glass. But it was clear from the meeting today that the traditional left is willing, is eager to learn from the creativity, the courage, and particularly the absolute disregard for the usual limits of protest that we showed last year. But the students also need to learn from them, about the hum-drum routine of grass-roots political work, about patience, about tactics. Last December things became so intense it was easy to start believing that everybody in the country was ready to take to the streets. Its not exactly the case.
Capital’s crisis has woken up a few ghosts. There have been general strikes and mass protests across Europe. Everyone is looking with amazement to Tunisia and to Egypt. A few months ago all of those scenes would have looked like messages from another planet to us, but now we look at them with a sense of what just might be possible, and a lived knowledge of just how rapidly things can escalate, and how quickly apathy can be transformed to militancy. There are major demonstrations planned for March. Things look set to get lively again.
—SEAN BONNEY
LINES FOR A PROTEST SONG, AFTER 9 DECEMBER
Oh the Parliament has voted against the people, But the people be here today to say no;
And behind us is the power of history,
So you know that we've been here before.
Which side are you on? Which side are you on?
Sometimes I wish that instead of their horses They'd call up the hold where they store their guns;
And when they shoot one of us down we'll rise up stronger, For in the taste of our blood be remembered we are one.
Which side are you on? Oh which side are you on?
—JUSTIN KATKO
THE POETRY OF REVOLT
It is truly inspiring to see the bravery of Egyptians as they rise up to end the criminal rule of Hosni Mubarak. It is especially inspiring to remember that what is happening is the culmination of years of work by activists from a spectrum of pro-democracy movements, human rights groups, labor unions, and civil society organizations. In 2004, when Kefaya began their first public demonstrations, the protesters were usually outnumbered 30 to one by Central Security Forces. Now the number has reversed—and multiplied.
No less astonishing is the poetry of this moment. I don’t mean “poetry” as a metaphor, but the actual poetry that has played a prominent role in the outset of the events. The slogans the protesters are chanting are couplets—and they are as loud as they are sharp. The diwan of this revolt began to be written as soon as Ben Ali fled Tunis, in pithy lines like "Yâ Mubârak! Yâ Mubârak! Is-Sa‘ûdiyya fi-ntizârak!," ("Mubarak, O Mabarak, Saudi Arabia awaits!"). In the streets themselves, there are scores of other verses, ranging from the caustic "Shurtat Masr, yâ shurtat Masr, intû ba’aytû kilâb al-’asr" ("Egypt's Police, Egypt's Police, You've become nothing but Palace dogs"), to the defiant "Idrab idrab yâ Habîb, mahma tadrab mish hansîb!" (Hit us, beat us, O Habib [al-Adly, now-former Minister of the Interior], hit all you want—we're not going to leave!). This last couplet is particularly clever, since it plays on the old Egyptian colloquial saying, "Darb al-habib zayy akl al-zabib" (The beloved's fist is as sweet as raisins). This poetry is not an ornament to the uprising—it is its soundtrack and also composes a significant part of the action itself.
A HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONS, A HISTORY OF POETS
There is nothing unusual about poetry playing a galvanizing role in a revolutionary moment. And in this context, we might remind ourselves that making revolution is not something new for Egyptians—having had no less than three “official” revolutions in the modern era: the 1881 Urabi Revolution which overthrew a corrupt and comprador royalty; the 1919 Revolution, which nearly brought down British military rule; and the 1952 Revolution which inaugurated 60 years of military dictatorships under Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. The first revolution succeeded in establishing the second parliamentary government on the African continent before it was crushed by foreign military intervention. In the aftermath of defeat, the British established a rapacious colonial rule over Egypt for more than 70 years. The second revolution was a sustained, popular uprising led by a range of pro-democracy activists from a range of civil institutions. Though savagely repressed, it did force the British to grant some concessions. The third revolution officially celebrated in Egypt stands apart from the first two in that it was a coup d’etat that went out of its way to circumscribe popular participation. In any case, it was accepted in the moment since it finally ended the rule of the royal family first overthrown in 1881 and initiated a process of British withdrawal from Egypt.
Besides these three state-commemorated events, Egyptians have revolted against the corruption, greed and cruelty of their rulers many more times in the last 60 years. On January 26, 1952, Egyptians emerged onto the streets to protest an array of issues— including the corruption of the monarchy, the decadence, power and privilege of foreign business elites, and the open-ended British occupation. The revolt was quickly suppressed, though the damage to property was massive, and it set in motion an exodus of foreign
elites—and the military coup months later. In 1968, Egyptian students launched huge and daring protests against the repressive policies of Nasser’s police state. In the early 1970s, Egyptian students engaged in sustained mass protests against the radical political reorientations of the new Sadat regime—and eventually forced the state to re-engage in military confrontation with Israel. On January 18-19, 1977, Egyptians rose up en masse to protest against IMF austerity measures imposed on the country by the corrupt, inept and ruthless regime of Anwar Sadat. The Egyptian President was already on his jet ride into exile before the Central Security Forces and Army finally gained the upper hand. In Egypt it is the Central Security Forces rather than the military who deals with civil unrest and popular protest. Yet, even this “solution” to the problem of recurring popular revolt has proven at times uncertain. As in the military, the CSF has been the site of mutinies, one of which, in late February 1986, involved 20,000 low-paid conscripts who were put down only when the army entered the fray. During the early 1990s, Islamist protests against the authoritarian rule of Mubarak escalated into armed conflict, both in the slums of the cities and in Upper Egypt. Hundreds of militants, soldiers and innocent civilians were killed before the revolt was finally suppressed. This list leaves out other significant moments of mass civil protest and contestation—like the massive protests against the First Gulf War, the US invasion of Iraq and Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza—but even so, the tally is impressive: no less than 10 major revolts and revolutions in 130 years. In other words, despite what commentators might say, modern Egyptians have never passively accepted the failed colonial or postcolonial states that fate has dealt them.
Many of these revolts have had their own poets. 1881 had the neo-classical qasidas of Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi. 1919, the colloquial zajals of Bayram al-Tunsi. Salah Jahin became one of the leading colloquial poets of the 1952 Revolution, and his patriotic verse became core material for Abdel Halim Hafez, who pinned his career to Nasser. From the same period, Fu’ad Haddad’s mawwals also stand out—and are still sung today. Since the 1970s, it has been Ahmed Fouad Negm who has played the leading role as lyricist of militant opposition to the regimes of Egypt. For forty years, Negm’s colloquial poems—many set to music by Sheikh Imam—have electrified student, labor and dissident movements from the Egyptian underclass. Negm’s poetry ranges from praise (madh) for the courage of ordinary Egyptians, to invective (hija’) for Egypt’s overlords—and it is no accident that you could hear his songs being sung by the leftist activists who spearheaded the first day of revolt on January 25. Besides these poets, we could add many others—Naguib Surur, Abd al-Rahman al-Abnoudi, Tamim Barghouti—who have added to this literary-political tradition in their own ways.
But beyond these recognized names are thousands of other poets—activists all—who would never dare to protest publicly without an arsenal of clever couplet-slogans. The end result is a unique literary tradition whose power is now on full display across Egypt. Chroniclers of the current Egyptian revolt, like As’ad AbuKhalil, have already compiled lists of these couplets— and hundreds more are sure to come. For the most part, these poems are composed in a colloquial, not classical, register and they are extremely catchy and easy to sing. The genre also has real potential for humor and play—and remind us of the fact that revolution is also a time for celebration and laughter.
HOW TO DO THINGS WITH POETRY
the couplet-slogans being sung and chanted by protesters do more than reiterate complaints and aspirations that have been communicated in other media. This poetry has the power to express messages that could not be articulated in other forms, as well as to sharpen demands with ever keener edges.
Consider the most prominent slogan being chanted today by thousands of people in Tahrir Square: “Ish-sha‘b/yu-rîd/is-qât/in-ni-zâm.” Rendered into English, it might read, “The People want the regime to fall”—but that would not begin to translate the power this simple and complex couplet-slogan has in its context. There are real poetic reasons why this has emerged as a central slogan. For instance, unlike the more ironic—humorous or bitter—slogans, this one is sincere and states it all perfectly clearly. Likewise, the register of this couplet straddles colloquial Egyptian and standard media Arabic—and it is thus readily understandable to the massive Arab audiences who are watching and listening. And finally, like all the other couplet-slogans being shouted, this has a regular metrical and stress pattern (in this case: LONG, LONG, short-LONG, short-SHORT-LONG). While unlike most others, this particular couplet is not rhymed, it can be sung and shouted by thousands of people in a unified, clear cadence—and that seems to be a key factor in why it works so well.
The prosody of the revolt suggests that there is more at stake in these couplet-slogans than the creation and distillation of a purely semantic meaning. For one thing, the act of singing and shouting with large groups of fellow citizens has created a certain and palpable sense of community that had not existed before. And the knowledge that one belongs to a movement bound by a positive collective ethos is powerful in its own right—especially in the face of a regime that has always sought to morally denigrate all political opposition. Likewise, the act of singing invective that satirizes feared public figures has an immediate impact that cannot be explained in terms of language, for learning to laugh at one’s oppressor is a key part of unlearning fear. Indeed, witnesses to the revolt have consistently commented that in the early hours of the revolt—when invective was most ascendant—protesters began to lose their fear.
And having lost that fear, Egyptians are showing no signs of wanting to go back. As the Mubarak regime has continued to unleash more violence, and as it steps up its campaign to sow chaos and confusion, the recitation of these couplet-slogans has continued, as if the act of repeating them helps the protesters concentrate on their core principles and demands. Only hours ago, as jets and helicopters attempted to intimidate protesters in Tahrir Square, it seemed as if the crowd understood something of this—for with each sortie, their singing grew louder and more focused. It was difficult to determine whether the crowd sustained the words, or the words the crowd.
POETRY AND CONTINGENCY
Anyone who has ever chanted slogans in a public demonstration has also probably asked herself at some point: why am I doing this? what does shouting accomplish? The question provokes a feeling of embarrassment, the suspicion that the gesture might be rote and thus empty and powerless. Arguably, this nervousness is a form of performance anxiety that, if taken seriously, might remind us that the ritual of singing slogans was invented precisely because it has the power to accomplish things. When philosophers speak of “doing things with words,” they also remind us that the success of the locutionary act is tied to the conditions in which it is performed. This is another way to say that any speech act is highly contingent—its success only occurs in particular circumstances,
and even then, its success is never a given. Success, if it is to occur, happens only in the doing of it.
Since January 25, Egyptians have been leaping into the uncertainty of this revolutionary performance. They have now crossed multiple thresholds—and each time, they have acted with no guarantee of success. This is, I think, the core of their astonishing courage: at each point it has been impossible to say that victory is already theirs. Even now, six days into the revolt, we still cannot say how things will eventually turn out. Nor are there rules of history and previous examples that can definitively tell us. Certainly, revolutions follow patterns—and those who rise up tend to be the most diligent students of past uprisings. Activists in Cairo ask comrades in Tunis about tactics, while others try to glean Iran’s Green Revolution for lessons that might be applied now. Yet, in the end, each revolution is its own moment.
Those who decide to make their own history are, in the end, not only required to write their own script and build their own stage, they are also compelled to then play the new roles with enough force and conviction to make it cohere, even in the face of overwhelming violence. We have already seen one example of this re-scripting in the extraordinary, original pamphlet from Egypt entitled, “How to Revolt Intelligently.” The poetry of the streets is another form of writing, of redrafting the script of history in the here and now—with no assurances of victory, and everything in the balance.
—ELLIOTT COLLA
[note: first published in Jadaliyya on Jan. 31, 2011]
THE POETICS OF THE POSSESSION DANCE
It is not new to say that poetry is the language of the dead. Many poets who have come before have said just this, and have engaged in practices to summon the dead to let them speak. I have lately been engaging with arts Afro-Caribbean in origin that have been working quite well. Some of these are inspired by Santeria, and some by Allen Kardec, noted to be the first to bring Spiritism to Latin America.
Thus, engaging with Spiritist poetic techniques is one of the most resistance-laden practices in the world.
In the Cuban mystical tradition known as Santeria, the possession dance is the most important of all practices. It generally occurs during a ceremony called a “bembe” in which practitioners dance in repetitive movements to summon the Saints (or the “orishas,” one in the same). The dances involve heavy doses of repetition because it is through this that the body enters a state relaxed enough to open for the Saints. Once the dancer is ridden (that is, “mounted” by the spirit), he/she goes into a trance-state & is no longer seen as mortal flesh, but as the Spirit itself. At this point, those unridden at the bembe run over to the Saint to engage him/her with life questions. It is said that the Orishas always answer, but often in tongues that include many languages—often the Yoruba dialect among them. This dancer is possessed by the Saint that has chosen to come down—& now he/she possesses all knowledge. It is especially important to note that the Saints travel through the head, in the same way that the unconscious is structured like language. The Saints are preserved in the heads of us. The Saints travel by water. They made their way to Cuba suffering in Slave Ships from Yoruba land. They made their way to the U.S. in the heads of many Cuban exilos. The Orishas are an active pantheon, and as such are very accessible. The Saints flourish because they travel in the head.
It is difficult for the average American to communicate with the dead because death is, for the most part, hidden from us. The typical funeral procession does little to satisfy the need for the dead to be fed & honored. In Santeria, you must give ashe to get ashe—the dead will always speak with a little prompting, especially if you offer ebbo. To propitiate the dead, it is essential to consider what they liked while living. A seashell for Aunt Esther, some whiskey for dear old Frank, a pack of Camel Lights for that guy who looked like Grover Cleveland. In some Spiritist circles, there is the practice of keeping a boveda. This is an altar for one’s dead ancestors. This should be kept in a room not normally visited by strangers, for the dead deserve respect.
The act of writing a poem after engaging in possession dancing allows for the dead to speak. In his poem Khurbn, Jerome Rothenberg writes, “it is in the scraps of language / by which the century is read to us the streets the dogs / the faces fading out the eyes receding / they are the dead & want so much to speak / that all the writing in the world will not contain them…” What once was still is. Trace elements linger forever. It is not merely a game of precious memory. I remember writing a poem for my grandmother just after she died. When I finished the poem, I heard a strange music playing. I went downstairs & found that my iPod had turned itself on, and was playing the haunting song “Handwriting” by The Rachels. My Catholic mystic mother always told me that when she sees a cardinal, she knows that the dead are speaking. That she is being visited. Once she told me the ghost of a little girl lived in the backyard of my childhood home. The trace elements linger. It is not merely a game of precious memory. Collect them, collect them, & put them in the poems.
There is an importance in searching for these trace elements, because some of them contain pieces of you that have scattered & need remolding. This is a different kind of encounter with the dead—a moment of eternal recurrence—a pattern of possession dancing that brings the self to light. Most often, though, this involves engaging with a philosophy of history—a Hegelian dinosaur chronotope in which only the most golden sepulchral will
be enough to contain the remnants of time gone in the air. In The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson writes, “My problem is how to make you believe / these persons, who lived here then…” In Maximus, Olson constantly refers backwards—to the past of Gloucester’s timeline—to demonstrate Gloucester’s present—which in turns elucidates the continual present. The poem is thus haunted, so to speak, with tons of dead people, the ground work of a Magic Opus. A dead woman plays a harp in the square.
Unfortunately, there is a very rich history in squelching death-awareness. This movement is conspiratorial. If we are aware that one day we will die & think about this often, we will live much different lives. These lives might not benefit the State, but they will benefit the Masses. When this death-awareness-squelch manifests in poetry, a sturdy hegemonic politics of appropriation is revealed—let the dead speak for the dead because they cannot speak at all. Let the poets speak for the poets because other poets are the only ones who understand. Let me categorically sift through the internet backlog of millions and selectively choose & publish it all again. The companies will then assign a grab bag price tag to my book of spliced together internet lines & you will read them regurgitated like vomit. I am uninterested in loan words, which are vomit words.
In this grave consequence—or consequence of the grave—there is a remonstrance—the wellspring of language of the dead—a pure poetic act akin to early sacred theatre—not only speaking of the death of the gods & how this manifests in modern tongue—American corporatese—but in the head of the young virgin who carries the carcasses in her chariot to the underworld— that which must be passed through—to receive the kind of epiphany immediately received when engaging in possession dance. In Khurbn, for instance, Rothenberg writes, “let them account the value of a body (the soul has no account) and let the / living refuse the living unless a price is paid.” In a true moment of resistance, a moment that cuts through like epiphany or ecstasy, the soul, which has no account, or no value, is unpedastaled. To break through, then, as in chora, the invisible must manifest & mount the poet, and from there, death-speak.
Jack Spicer wrote letters to Lorca, or Lorca wrote the letters. Spicer believed in poetry as dead-speak. “The poems are there,” he writes in After Lorca, “the memory not of a vision but of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes & whispered to me…” “This is how we dead men write to each other.”
To engage in the poetic process of possession, or, rather, in the possessive process of poetics—to ignite the possession dance that leads to poems, here are some steps to follow:
» First, announce that you would like to be ridden. Make this known. Say it aloud at least three times a day.
» Create your own boveda. It should be in a room not often visited by strangers. Keep it in a backroom, or hidden in a closet. Leave offerings for your ancestors on this boveda, & tell them weekly to give you good poems.
