Performance and Politics in Contemporary Poetics: Three Recent Titles from Atelos Press

Eric Keenaghan
Department of English
State University of New York, Albany
ekeenaghan@albany.edu

Review of: Laura Moriarty, Ultravioleta. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006; Jocelyn Saidenberg, Negativity. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006; Juliana Spahr, The Transformation. Berkeley: Atelos, 2007.

 
Disturbed by the mid-century capitalistic imperative that Americans make a living, and unsatisfied with the Soviet Union’s alternative of valorizing communal labor, Hannah Arendt seeks in the human condition some other idea of freedom. She is drawn to the ancient Greek polis model of a public space accessible exclusively to free male citizens liberated from the bonds of household labor and the work of crafting material goods. There men freely engaged in activities possessing virtú, or a liberating virtuosity and improvisational subtlety not unlike that of a musical performance. For Arendt, politics, speech, and music “do not pursue an end (are ateleis) and leave no work behind (no par’ autas erga), but exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself.” The freest and most political action in this schema is that which expends itself in the moment and place of its enactment, where “the performance is the work” (206). Arendt especially struggles to pinpoint where poetry lies in her tripartite schemata of work, labor, and action. She contends that “a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be ‘made,’ that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things” (170). An odd predicament, indeed. Poetry does not belong to this world, nor can it found a polis. Since its material is language, it closely resembles Arendt’s esteemed category of thought; but because words must be put to paper, poetry is not properly atelic. Thus, she judges it to be an impotent form: it cannot hope to found a new form of politicized action and freedom, and it may not even be the stuff of an intellectual performance.

 
I do not know whether Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz had The Human Condition in mind when they named their new publishing venture a decade ago. Yet their press, Atelos, implicitly challenges Arendt’s–and many others’–misunderstanding of poetry’s relationship to politics. Since its first publication (Jean Day’s The Literal World, 1998), all of the press’s books have included a clear mission statement: “Atelos was founded in 1995 as a project of Hip’s Road, devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate it from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact.” The press sets out to correct commonplace contemporary misunderstandings of poetry (as Romantic, self-contained, removed from politics, or unable to create new communities), and it also takes on those respectful but skeptical views of poetry such as Arendt’s. Atelos does have an end, a telos, since the publishers have announced that the list will include only fifty titles, a sort of literary republic or poetic polity mirroring the constitution of the actual States. Atelos resignifies not only how we understand “poetry” as a literary genre but also how we understand the virtuosity of poetic performance. The work need not disappear with the performance for it to have political virtú. Atelos Press reminds us that quite the opposite is true.

 
In the current climate of globalized capitalism, it’s impossible to romanticize, as Arendt had, a revolutionary space apart for politics or for poetry. We cannot naïvely want a genuinely atelic performativity. Art’s political performance now depends on manufacturing a product whose very materiality exists in a critical and conflicted relationship with dominant economic and political logics. Atelos has produced books that double as aesthetic objects and commodities. All of the books have the same distinctive dimensions (7.9 x 5.3 inches), with a slender band wrapping around the cover and containing the title’s number. While the objects are branded, what’s between the recognizable covers varies greatly–perhaps too much so for some readers’ tastes. In small press publications, content, like the covers, is usually branded. Not only does the Atelos catalogue contain a miscellany of authors not always thought to “belong” to the same poetic “tradition” or “school” or even “generation,” but Atelos projects often mark a departure from the authors’ own previous ventures. Rae Armantrout’s recourse to a form resembling memoir in True (1998), Barrett Watten’s documentary poetic prose in Bad History (1998), and Fanny Howe’s inclusion of a CD of a dramatic performance of her poem Tis of Thee (2003) are exemplary cases in point. The Atelos list has included work by younger poets–sometimes their first books (like Lohren Green’s Poetical Dictionary: Abridged, 2003) and sometimes not (like Rodrigo Toscano’s Platform, 2003)–that offer exciting evidence of the emergence and strengthening of newer generations of U.S. poetries that are at once lyrical and experimental, literary and political, philosophical and documentary/citational.

 
At the time of this writing, the Atelos catalogue contains twenty-seven titles. The six most recent are: Taylor Brady’s Occupational Treatment (2006), Ed Roberson’s City Eclogue (2006), Tom Mandel’s To the Cognoscenti (2007), Jocelyn Saidenberg’s Negativity (2006), Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta (2006), and Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation (2007). Each continues Hejinian and Ortiz’s mission and deserves review in its own right. I concentrate my remarks on the last three. These are written by women now based in northern California, the original home of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr are well-known and respected as important younger writers. All are concerned with poetry’s ability to pursue new political horizons, and each of their volumes plays with the relation between syntax and the poetic line. Unlike their predecessors’ New Sentence, though, these women are differently invested in what Ron Silliman denounces as conventional syntax’s “syllogistic leap, or its integration above the level of the sentence, to create a fully referential tale” (79). Referentiality, he argues, is capitalism’s chief ideological vehicle. If poetry reproduces the imperative that sentences combine to make sensible narratives, or if it commits the equally cardinal sin of a lyric association of poetic word with spoken parole rather than with written langue, the genre would be incapable of producing a resistant politics. Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr may not opt for lyric, but their abandonment of earlier vanguardists’ suspicion of narrative still prompts questions. What’s so generically distinctive about poetry or its “intellectual life” if it produces works locked into market and branding logics, and cannot distinguish itself from other written forms? Can contemporary poetry really deliver virtuoso political and intellectual performances?
 

Of the three titles, Jocelyn Saidenberg’s Negativity most closely resembles what nearly all readers would recognize as contemporary poetry. Its eight integral sections feature longer pieces constituted of segments, sometimes with line breaks (but more often not) and written in the familiar (even comfortably so) style of experimental poetry–what Spahr’s book repeatedly describes as “writing that uses fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on” (e.g. 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 78, 80, 155). As the director of San Francisco’s Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center and a participant in the Bay Area’s queer arts community, Saidenberg is explicitly invested in the politicized relationship between art and community. From her opening Dante-esque walk through a dusky wood (“Dusky, or Destruction as a Cause of Becoming”), Saidenberg constructs a shadowy, infernal world inextricably linked to her American one. “In This Country” turns on its head the Bush administration’s recapitulation of Samuel Huntington’s “theory” of civilization versus barbarism and its jingoistic rhetoric of being “with us” or “against us”: “In this country I’m in two places at once, with you and with you” (51). This voice is a representative of a queer nation: “In this country, we take our identity from how it feels when we come. When we come we are only that” (49). Here sex and pleasure do not found an idyllic queer community; rather, they entail a negotiation of homophobic ideologies, narratives, and realities. For example, in “Not Enough Poison” Saidenberg’s narrator performs cunnilingus on her partner’s “gash.” Citing a misogynistic slur, the poem tries to resignify the negative reference as “not separating, but unifying the abrasion to all the impure, non-separated.” This is not an utterly naïve or utopist attempt to remedy social ills with a verbal patina. Orgasm, that experience of supposed transcendental unification, is disturbingly represented as an “unmending, secreting, and discharging, leaking out in glops and gummy pus. Blending into the boundaries, coterminous sore of the visible, not presentable superannuated surface of self” (38). The narrator’s subjective agency is reduced to a mere fetish’s objectivity. “So I as shoes that have been sniffed and bitten and kissed hundreds of times” (44). Devastating scenes like this recur in Negativity. They form a perverse wall (one section is even titled “Immure”) into which we run headlong. As Saidenberg warns, “let no gate deceive you by its width” (31). Whether that gate is understood to refer to a general promise of freedom from a subjectivating order or to the specific promise of erotic freedom that comes through vaginal or anal gateways, freedom always has a price: of pain, fear, even death. By linking radical pessimism to radical critique, Saidenberg tries to do for poetry what Kathy Acker or Reinaldo Arenas had done for fiction. As we might expect from a poetic resistance reminiscent of Acker’s inveighing against Reagan’s murderous silence about HIV/AIDS or Arenas’s maniacal tirades against Castro’s internment of Cuban homosexuals, the political effectuality of Saidenberg’s narratival lyric risks being confined to that negative milieu it references and from which it cannot wholly extricate itself.

 
Laura Moriarty succeeds a bit more in that extrication; ironically, that is due to the fact that her Atelos volume is generically closer to postmodernist science fiction than to poetry. The central conceit of Ultravioleta is allegorical: books function as a mode of transport. Characters traverse space by vehicles made of paper, driven by the activities of reading and writing. The book we hold in our hands is itself a double for the fictive craft giving the volume its title. Moriarty’s narrative masquerades as epic, even including a feast reminiscent of Beowulf . . . but the adventure circles about on itself and the plot literally goes nowhere. In its generic failures as science fiction or epic, though, Ultravioleta (the book) ironically succeeds. Moriarty challenges what Samuel R. Delany describes as the “linear, systematic, more or less rational, more or less negotiable” conventional narrative. Ultravioleta is presented as a critical apparatus because it takes varieties of sources and reconnects them in less “rational” and “systematic” ways, and thus imbues its own internal “relations” with a “problematic status” (Delany 416).
 

Because of her fantasy relies on allegory, Moriarty–like Spenser–walks a thin line between heavy-handed political moralism and ethical reflection. At times, her characters’ distrust of “the government” and the media working in its service and infilitrating their homes reads as a bit too referential to post-9/11 America. But the poet deploys poetry and sci-fi’s shared device of the imagination to let this pseudo-epic act more virtuously. Referred to simply as “the I,” the fictive Martians embody an imperialist force existing somewhere between shadow and body, absence and presence, as they feed on human thoughts. Not reducible to an oppressive government and symbiotically linked to their hosts, the “I” is a subjectivating part of humanity that must be critically understood. With these alien figures, Ultravioleta consciously reclaims Jack Spicer’s poetic from Silliman and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets so as to rethink their rejection of referential and lyric poetry. Her fantastic scenario echoes Spicer’s warning to other poets to “try to keep as much of yourself as possible out of the poem” (Spicer 8), and instead to let in the “Martians” and “ghosts” to move around the “furniture” and “obstructions” of words, ideologies, history, and even personhood (29, 30). In her compelling “narrative” about the impossibility of narrative, in her characters’ allegorical struggle with being subjected to and occupied by a sense of personhood that reduplicates the governmental strategies now responsible for imperialistically occupying foreign lands, Moriarty is also implicitly criticizing the naïveté underlying the unexamined ideas of resistance promulgated by Spicer and the experimental poets he influenced. For Moriarty, opening a political space for poetry cannot rely on a New Sentence concerned primarily with language’s structure, nor can subjectivity be set aside so that language itself might speak.

 
The “I” plaguing Ultravioleta is also the subject of the struggle of Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation. Even more narrative than Saidenberg’s and Moriarty’s texts, The Transformation documents “a barely truthful story of the years 1997-2001” in Spahr’s relationship with her partners Bill Luoma and Charles Weigl (217). Dispensing with the memoir’s conventional first-person narration, Spahr opts to tell her story in the third-person plural. The threesome, then, collectively narrate their move from graduate school at SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics department to Spahr’s first tenure-track job at the University of Hawaii to their move to partial employment in New York City, just prior to the 9/11 bombings. The style of The Transformation performs the political nature of our struggle with communication’s categorical imperative. Unlike a deconstructionist, Spahr is nostalgic for, rather than skeptical of, transparent communication and referentiality. Poetry’s anti-narrative basis–its ability to refigure relations and to sustain aporetic conditions–is presented by Spahr as the best, if imperfect, means of communicating otherwise inexplicable differences.

 
Against the current trend to see violence in categorization and identitarian logics, The Transformation exhibits a nostalgia for some acceptable way to talk about identity and community. Spahr reveals the problem of defining who “they” are as ubiquitous in this age of Homeland Security. “So it was a time of troubled and pressured pronouns” (205). What happens when we identify not under the banner of an “us” (or the U.S.) but as a “they”? “They agreed to falter over pronouns. They agreed to let them undo their speech and language. They pressed themselves upon them and impinged upon them and were impinged upon in ways that were not in their control” (206). This volunteering to let one’s self be undone–not dissimilar to Judith Butler’s notion of precarious life–leads Spahr’s figures to a condition in which “they” come to terms with their writing bodies’ extension of their political environments. The Transformation tries to embrace all forms of alterity that condition us and estrange us from ourselves. Only then can we commune with those “theys” with whom we’re not supposed to sympathize. “Pumped through their lungs grief for all of them killed by the military that currently occupied the continent, the thems they knew to be near them and the thems they knew not to be near them, because to not grieve meant that their humanity was at risk” (213). Here, the historical referentiality of Spahr’s memoir generates a rather unpoetic moralism and a suspicious longing for the security of an identifiable world we might know and narrate in full. But this postlapsarian melancholic expression may be forgiven if we concentrate on the theoretical and ethical conclusion of Spahr’s work: in the end, writing is an ecological exercise. It affirms inclusive fields of connection, so poetry can manufacture “a catalogue of vulnerability” that lets her memoirs’ subjects, and by extension the author and her readers, “begin the process of claiming their being human” (Spahr 214). Even while longing for a humanist past, complete with its identitarian fictions, The Transformation–much like Negativity and Ultravioleta–demonstrates an awareness that the very conditions that we use to signify the human and to understand our selves have changed.
 

Unlike their L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E forebears, Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr insist that language is referential, that the sentence be combined syllogistically into narrative units, and even that the poetic personhood be recuperated. These decisions open their work, and Atelos, to some criticism. When a press defines its genre so vaguely as to include prose poems, memoir, and science fiction on its list, does the very term “poetry” lose meaning altogether? Should experimental writers and publishers provide a more coherent political and intellectual program today? Depending on their tastes, different audiences will arrive at different conclusions. Many, I suspect, will be pleased by the individual books but dissatisfied with what the list as a whole suggests about the state and the coherence of contemporary American poetry. After all, like Spahr’s figures, many readers long for the security provided by identity, even an avant-garde one. An oppositional identitarian attitude is often mistaken for a resistive politics and for a sign that poetry is doing its work.
 

However, these titles might also indicate that contemporary poetry publishing stands to gain much by avoiding a return to vanguardism’s combatative and territorial posturing. Read together, the volumes by Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr offer a “catalogue” (as Spahr would describe it) of how we are shaped, affected, and conditioned by forces to which we must remain vulnerable–including language itself. These ethical lessons have enduring political pertinence beyond the present moment. Writing “under the sign of poetry,” as Atelos’ mission statement phrases it, are performances that afford readers opportunities to critique the imperatives of identification and categorization constituting our social, cultural, and political lives. Such relations affect how we see both subjectivity and personhood. In this way, Atelos and its authors continue the project with which Gertrude Stein charged her art over three-quarters of a century ago. “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing” (Stein 516). The poetic page connects us anew with the world, and the selves we thought we knew. Some reference is necessary, then, so that we might move forward. It is reckless to insist on a poetic “us” absolutely divorced from a political “them.” Literature need not disavow narrative; instead, it can resignify narrative as a device for constructing other forms of commonality and for beginning the work of redefining personhood and humanity. We, the readers, are extensions of the poem; ultimately, that is the only factor that makes aesthetic work atelic. It’s up to us to continue its performance, so that life itself might be composed a bit more poetically. To paraphrase Stein, politics begins only in our beginning again the work our poets have already begun.

Works Cited

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 1958. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.
• Delany, Samuel R. “Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology; or: Poetry and Truth.” 1995. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1999. 408-30.
• Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof, 2003.
• Spicer, Jack. “Dictation and ‘A Textbook of Poetry.'” 1965. The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1998. 1-48.
• Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” 1926. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1990. 511-23.