Reading Anahid Nersessian’s luminous and arresting work of poetics, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, I found myself recalling lines from John Ashbery’s apophatic ars poetica from his 1977 Houseboat Days, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Was Her Name.” Ashbery opens the poem by declaring: “You can’t say it that way any more.” Like the earth lopped from Constable’s cloud paintings in Nersessian’s chapter on apostrophe, Ashbery’s declaration gestures toward what it abjures, directs attention to occluded ground. What cannot be uttered, what is impermissible that the poem nonetheless conjures in its absence? What is it, in turn, about this now that makes this old way of saying unsayable? The poem ends with these bravura lines:

The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind

Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate

Something between breaths, if only for the sake

Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you

For other centers of communication, so that understanding

May begin, and in doing so be undone.

In its turning motions, its glimpse of social longing as a desire to express “something between breaths,” its light play with images of emptiness and fullness, Ashbery’s poem embodies a form of the poetics so beautifully evoked in The Calamity Form. These lines articulate their own presence as a space through which some uncommunicable truth moves, where understanding enters and is gently undone, a poetic space that Nersessian’s book dilates and tarries with across its pages. As Nersessian writes in her chapter on forms of obscurity in Wordsworth, such work “wants to make the insubstantiality of difficult experience and the compromised consciousness we have of it palpable” (85). Reading Ashbery by way of Nersessian, I apprehend with new force its particular way of “telling you what it is to know nothing” and its existence within a broader horizon of poems characterized by this quality of poetic nescience.

Ashbery’s poem marks a recent instance of the long Romantic mode that Nersessian charts in The Calamity Form. This poetics, emerging alongside the new productive relations of industrial capitalism, endures into our present as a mode acutely responsive to the challenges of consciousness and comprehension that characterize this system’s total workings. The Calamity Form examines the complex repertoire that poets and artists develop to convey the uncommunicability of this real and the affective and perceptual responses that this uncommunicability elicits. Turning to what she calls the “intransitive” being of figure across a series of poetic texts from the Romantic era and more recent aesthetic artifacts, Nersessian argues that “their organizing presence in a work of literary or visual art corrals that work into their own oblique mode of representation” (12). Nersessian undertakes a series of virtuosic readings that illuminate the oblique, refractory qualities of figure as an index of historical cognizance. The Calamity Form’s experimental method coordinates literary analysis with its objects to find an approach adequate to their particular figurative register. The figures she devotes time to across these chapters are thus not described so much as critically animated through her interpretive engagement. Nersessian’s critical orientation is dazzlingly kinesthetic: it “sidl[es] close,” turns, leaps, halts, compresses, swerves. Arranging its materials in startling, vivid array, the study develops a paratactical approach akin to Jarman’s seaside garden by the nuclear plant.

The work of Theodor Adorno and Geoffrey Hartman serves as central inspiration for Nersessian’s approach across The Calamity Form. Adorno’s attention to the negative aesthetics of damaged life finds sustained correspondence in Nersessian’s readings. If his Minima Moralia serves as ground note for the general sensibility of this study, his essay “Parataxis,” which develops a paratactical reading method via a reading of Hölderlin’s poetry contra Heidegger, elaborates a model that Nersessian’s own readings extend and redirect across the study. Hartman’s 1995 essay, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” which considers how the insights of trauma theory can generate new approaches to literary interpretation via a turn to the “nescience” of “traumatic knowledge,” is another key source here. Approaching the signs of trauma in a text as that which eludes full comprehension or knowability, the interpreter’s task is not to “attempt a definitive judgment or evaluation” but instead to “disclos[e] an unconscious or not-knowing knowledge,” Hartman argues (544). Hartman’s framings of a literary nescience bearing signs of undisclosable trauma, and of the interpreter as one who listens for these signs rather than working to “expose” or demystify them, resonate in Nersessian’s characterizations of the task of the critic who takes close, inductive measure of the poetics of calamity through the divagations of figure.

To note, however, the guiding presence of these figures in The Calamity Form is necessarily to take account of the essential divergences in her approach. Both Hartman and Adorno’s work is situated within and creatively expands upon key philosophical traditions at the heart of literary-critical inquiry: psychoanalysis and historical materialist analysis, respectively. Their key concepts, methods of analysis, and horizons of interpretive meaning find their essential salience within these hermeneutical situations. Nersessian, by contrast, develops an approach that explicitly resists such situating, whether in relation to theoretical traditions or particular historical contexts, in order to attend to the irreducibly distinctive operations of the literary texts under investigation. She writes that the poetry she is examining does not “claim to be able to assemble a causal network of actors and events capable of being translated into a predictive theory. This is a strike neither against poetry nor against theory. It is just a glance across the distance that exists between them, and a hint that criticism (whatever its aspirations) ought to be responsive and responsible to that distance” (6). Nersessian’s argument pointedly refuses to read poems as “evidence” in any regard—and therein lies, perhaps, her departure from psychoanalytic perspectives that would regard poetry as testimony, however indirect. She wants to develop a brief for literary criticism’s work as relatively autonomous of contextualizing or evidentiary frameworks, whether theoretical or historicist.

This critical feature of The Calamity Form comes to the fore most complexly in Nersessian’s engagement with historical materialism. Nersessian opens the book by asserting that it will explore the “limits of historical materialism for literary study” (1). Nersessian lays out a certain critique of Marxist literary hermeneutics, indicating that the dialectical imperatives and causal accounts central to Marxist hermeneutics operate in a different register than the specific work of poetics, imposing strong readings that overlook the open-ended and elusive matter of figure that a more immanent approach can address. Part of the issue, Nersessian suggests, is that Marxist readings have tended to emphasize narrative both in terms of their interpretive objects and in their broader historical plot arcs, whereas she discerns in the poetry of capital’s calamity an eerie cutting loose of the present from past and future alike and a refusal of the teleologies of narrative.

Yet many of the formidable resources of Marxist aesthetic and literary interpretation seem very much at play in Nersessian’s arguments, if sometimes operating in buried or indirect fashion. Her critique of literary empiricism, for instance, takes its place within longer dialogues within Marxist criticism surrounding reflection theory and the politics of aesthetic form. Her elaboration of nescience dovetails with complex conceptualizations of ideology critique, reification theory, totality, and mediation central to Marxist aesthetic analysis. Despite her critique of Adorno’s emphasis on dialectical reading in “Parataxis,” Nersessian’s readings often feel essentially dialectical in their operations. And of course the commodity and its social logics are the central framework through which Nersessian’s “calamity form” develops its resonance (about which more below). In certain sections—most notably the stunning chapter on Keats and catachresis—these materialist inheritances emerge more directly as intellectual infrastructure of the project.

Nersessian’s determined foregrounding of the limit of historical materialism to her study thus returns me, in another register, to that question of occluded ground that she so deftly highlights in her reading of Constable’s clouds, and that Ashbery’s opening prohibition points toward. She draws my attention, quite fixedly, to Marxist criticism—its practices, techniques, debates—as a determining but obscured presence throughout The Calamity Form. I wonder, then, about the nescience that the book stages with regards to its affiliations with historical materialist analysis, and about its imperative not to engage more directly with these traditions—or, alternatively, to develop a more fully elaborated critique of what she regards as materialism’s limits for literary analysis. Why might the work of Marxist scholars who have attended so carefully to the specifically non-narrative and non-teleological logics of literary form remain unavailable as a resource for approaching “calamity form”? Why might the remarkably rich and supple repertoire of concepts that Marxist literary scholarship has developed precisely to explore the problems of representing the real—what Jameson calls the materialist “study of Darstellung”—that The Calamity Form pursues fundamentally insufficient for its analysis? “You can’t say it that way any more,” Nersessian seems to say. And yet the study enacts a more complex, ambivalent, and active relationship to this genealogy than such an assertion of limit would indicate. I wanted to understand the coordinates of this ambivalent relationship more fully.

These questions extend to the governing analogy of “calamity form” and “commodity form.” Nersessian sets these concepts alongside each other, thereby raising a series of questions about their shared properties and points of divergence. The calamity form, like the commodity form, “names a disfigurement that is at once sensual and cognitive: it effects changes in how we, as embodied beings, experience the material world, and it also makes those changes hard to grasp in explicative, let alone actionable, terms,” Nersessian asserts (4). Yet if the commodity form is the primary element of capitalist economic relations, expressive of its fundamental operations and social logics, Nersessian’s calamity form bears quite different proportions, both broader and more narrow: it is “both the Industrial Revolution and a poetics awkwardly responsive to or co-operative with it, working alongside though not necessarily in cahoots” (4). As defined in this way—as at once transformative historical condition and its coterminous poetic field of response—the calamity form as a concept emerges as decidedly heterogeneous to the appearance and logics of the commodity form within capitalism. I found myself puzzling over the extent of their mutual illumination and the directional force of the structural analogy Nersessian sets forth. To what extent does calamity offer a redescription or new turn to the commodity concept? How might the commodity form’s particular properties and itineraries find analogous dimensions in the calamity form? Might “disaster”—as event or as more temporally extended social texture—offer a way to understand the mysteries of commodification, at another level? How might we read the forms of “social life” that the calamity form makes manifest in relation to the social form of the commodity (that is, the relations it contains and simultaneously obscures)?

I’ve mentioned Ashbery’s poem as one that offered, for me, a new conjugation of Nersessian’s powerful argument. Another poem that preoccupied my thoughts while reading The Calamity Form was Langston Hughes’s 1925 poem, “Johannesburg Mines.” Here’s the whole poem:

In the Johannesburg mines

There are 240,000

Native Africans working.

What kind of poem

Would you

Make out of that?

240,000 natives

Working in the

Johannesburg mines.

The figure that Hughes employs in this poem is antimetabole, or repetition via reversal (here, of the opening and closing lines)—a syntactical “turning about.” In the poem’s turnings, the key polemical question that Nersessian poses—“What’s the point of reading a poem as a record of verifiable social and historical processes?”—is staged and worked through, in Hughes’s case through a meditation on the compositional rather than the interpretive act. Hughes identifies a fundamental divergence between the “verifiable” facts of capitalism’s operations and the form of being that is a poem. Hughes asks, “What kind of poem” could emerge from a bare reckoning with the calamitous everyday of extractive capitalism, its fully globalized modes of racialized exploitation and environmental plunder? What’s the point of making a poem that offers this kind of record, and what sort of poem would it be? The poem lays out these questions and answers them through the figuring of its presence, a figuration that hinges on the turn and return to elemental social facts: the site of production, the workers, their labor. Through its figurative reversal, it could be said to negate its own negation, bearing the awareness of the “strange fit” (following Barbara Johnson) of poem and historical knowledge while refusing to regard this relational unconformity as poetic limit. What kind of poem? One wherein the figurative resources of the poem are vigilantly deployed to illuminate the hard social fact as something more than empirical detail, Hughes answers. Reading Hughes’s (certainly non-Romantic) poem in the charged light of Nersessian’s thinking, I glimpse a different opening on poetic nescience, or a new turn, perhaps, of the ways poems can apprehend the forms capitalist calamity takes.

It is one small measure of the force of The Calamity Form that it leads me back to key poems to approach them anew. More importantly, this exhilarating study returns me to the most essential, challenging interpretive questions for the study of poetry, about the work of figure, the conditional qualities of representation, the relay between a poem and its historical present.

Calling The Calamity Form a work of literary criticism about European Romanticism is a bit like calling Magritte’s The Treachery of Images a painting about a pipe or saying the Grateful Dead were a rock band—to do so isn’t wrong, exactly, but it also doesn’t quite convey the whole experience. Canonical works of Romantic poetry are here—and subjected to meticulous and often refreshingly off-kilter readings—but Nersessian seems just as interested in riffing on figures and topics rather far afield from Romanticism: the filmmaker Derek Jarman’s gardens, the philosopher John Dupré’s pluralistic ontology, the singer Kate Bush’s contemplations on clouds, the German humorist Willhelm Busch’s comically violent illustrations, Helen Mirra’s conceptual art. And it is in this same spirit of eclecticism that I would ask to be permitted my own non-Romantic digression as I respond to Nersessian’s work: throughout reading The Calamity Form, I found myself considering the author’s thought not only in the context of prior scholarship on anti-capitalist and/or “green” romanticisms—and it certainly offers a valuable contribution to these discourses—but also in relation to a less likely thought partner: the philosopher of science Wilfrid Sellars’s writings on epistemology.

In the roughest and readiest terms, Sellars argues that science has an ontological burden: its warrant is the Real. As he famously put this in his major work Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind: “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”1 Science, in other words, is in the business of telling us what kinds of things are and how those things hang together. Of course, this is not a controversial or terribly unusual view of the mandate of scientific practice (even if folks in Science Studies might have good reason to quibble with it!). But where Sellars does depart from this orthodoxy is to insist that this “scientific image of the world”—whose mandate is really real reality itself—cannot be brought into accord with our everyday, common sense (in his parlance, “manifest”) image of the world.

That is, science does not provide us with a more granular, epistemically “higher resolution” picture of our everyday understanding of things. Rather, these images of the world are different in kind. Complete, lossless translation between the scientific image and the manifest image is impossible. Taking a physics class won’t help you ride a bike, and riding a bike won’t teach you very much about physics. The promise of a world picture in which scientific and everyday knowledge mesh into a cohesive whole is thus a fool’s errand, a bit of inverted epistemic alchemy that promises to turn the gold of scientific truth back into leaden common sense. Confronted with this irreconcilability, the way forward, per Sellars, is not to sink into epistemological despair, but to adopt a “stereoscopic” view of the world that accepts the permanent disjunction between the kind of knowledge that tells us how things really are and the kind of know-how that tells us how to do things, to get about town, to suffer existence.

If my Sellarsian appeal seems perhaps unorthodox in a response to a work of literary criticism, it is done in keeping with Nersessian’s own free-jazzy improvisations that have her seamlessly bouncing from eighteenth-century rhetorical theory to cutting-edge contemporary art. More importantly, though, it is also because there is something deeply Sellarsian about Nersessian’s project, concerned as it is with the capacities of reason in general, and poetic reason in particular, to epistemically capture crises—both economic and environmental—occurring at scales and degrees of abstraction beyond the possibility of our complete cognitive grasp, and that ordinary language is not up to the task of confronting.

The claim Nersessian makes is that the Romantics often use figurative language (specifically parataxis, obscurity, catachresis, and apostrophe) as a means to foreground nescience—not knowing—about an industrializing, internationalizing, and environmentally-exploiting world rapidly retreating from the possibility of epistemic capture. As she puts this quite lucidly: “The argument I want to make about mainstream Romantic poetry, in particular, is that it is self-consciously trained on the difference . . . between propositional and nonpropositional forms of speaking and writing—the difference, in other words, between language that makes a claim about how things are, and why, and language that insists on its own estrangement from positive knowledge” (15). Here, we have a similarly Sellarsian drama transposed to a slightly different register: a drama between language that claims an ontological warrant—that presumes itself adequate to the describing of what is and how what is is—and another kind of language, figurative, that turns on a recognition of precisely its own inadequacy, and even incompetence or impotence, with respect to its aspirations to know the world.

Naturally, as someone who hangs his hat within the environmental humanities and whose work focuses on the history of thinking about human extinction, I am most intrigued by Nersessian’s attempts to tether her interrogation of Romantic explorations of figure and not-knowing-the-world to the question of ecological catastrophe. In particular, I am interested in pursuing two question-comments, followed by an observation, about the arguments The Calamity Form presents.

First, I firmly believe that analytic philosophy can contribute more to literary criticism than we usually allow. Consequently, I was excited to see the work of figures like Donald Davidson and Derek Parfit make an appearance here and found Nersessian’s repeated reliance on philosophical voices outside of the usual continental storehouse to be vitalizing. That being said, the near-total absence of phenomenology—in a work focused on the limits of reason, that contains substantial engagements with Hölderlin, and that frames “the poetics of calamity” as directed toward “an encounter with the inaccessibility of the real”—struck me as a strange omission given Nersessian’s professed concerns here (5). I was left wondering if its absence was intentional and strategic, and if so, why. Likewise, although Nersessian’s primary texts are well-chosen examples culled from what she labels “mainstream Romanticism,” and although her reading of each is invariably deft and often ingenious, it was surprising to see her leave largely unconsidered Romantic texts which engage, in a more direct and more legitimately cataclysmic fashion, with invocations of environmental calamity. With the exception of a passing reference to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Romantic works concerned with truly large-scale eco-disasters—not only, but to my mind most egregiously, Byron’s “Darkness”—are left off the docket.

In many ways, of course, it is perhaps not surprising that Nersessian leaves such texts unconsidered in favor of poems like Keats’s “To Autumn” or Cowper’s The Task: central to her argument, after all, is the notion that Romantic poetry engages the calamity of capital and its downstream environmental repercussions not directly but through the indirection or misdirection of figurative language. Yet, I still find myself pondering if and how her thinking might accommodate Romantic texts that are less cagey and less modest about their ability to get their epistemic arms around environmental calamity. How might a text like “Darkness”—an 1816 poem written by an author not insensitive to the economic and moral perils of industrialization (having come to the defense of the Luddites only a few years prior) and which describes a total extinction event in which a future Earth is rendered “Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless”—carve out a place within the “calamity form” Nersessian describes?

The odd absence of reckoning with the more brazenly apocalyptic strands of Romantic art and letters brings me, via detour, to the aspect of The Calamity Form that I found to be the most provocative and—if a work of literary criticism can be described as such—courageous. In her discussion of Cowper, Nersessian frames nescience as “a standoff between experience and conjecture . . . [that] contemplates the impossibility of knowing how behaving differently in the past would have made a difference in the present” (48). Yet, there is a double-impossibility Nersessian flags throughout: not just the Wordsworthian difficulty of associating past events and present circumstances, but the broader impossibility of knowing whether past texts might have anything worthwhile to say to our present climate catastrophe.

Indeed, one of the most stimulating aspects of The Calamity Form is Nersessian’s skepticism toward the kind of environmental criticism that assumes that a nineteenth-century poem about the sun or a painting about a cloud—situated before the discovery of anthropogenic climate change—might have anything meaningful to tell us about the contemporary climate crisis. She puts this quite bluntly: “Throughout this book, I avoid reading texts as if to solve them; nor do I intend to pitch any part of its content—from literature to my ideas about it—as an effective contribution to the global struggle against social and ecological catastrophe” (7). And if I find the honesty of this assertion so refreshing, it is perhaps because I began reading The Calamity Form while I was teaching a course called “Climate Fiction”—the syllabus begins with “Darkness” and ends with Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea—populated by Environmental Studies majors who were (understandably!) very eager for me to tell them, precisely, what fiction about climate change tangibly accomplishes in the fight against climate change. My answer, when pressed, was always that I’m not certain that it accomplishes anything tangible at all, but perhaps we might think differently about what the burden of environmental art should be, where its value is located.

It is this same kind of question—about the political efficacy of art concerned about industrialization and/or environmental ruin—that haunts the background, and often the foreground, of The Calamity Form throughout. As Nersessian notes in her epilogue:

[EXT]Like all trauma, ecological crisis overloads the testimonial burden borne by the artworks that try to grapple with it. Chronicling the attenuation of planetary life is tough, and it’s not surprising that the tropes of near-disappearance or partial erasure that scaffold environmental art often recall long-standing, big-picture questions about aesthetic representation: what it is, how it works, and the open question of its value. (170)[/EXT]

After raising the question of art’s adequacy to environmental crisis, she goes on to make the curious claim that “the view that harm is difficult to represent is not a popular one among literary scholars whose work emphasizes environmental themes.” I say this assertion is curious because there are certainly ecocritics, and indeed very prominent ecocritics, that are not at all sanguine about the ability of literature to effectively engage the climate crisis and the human and non-human harm it engenders. Perhaps most notably, Rob Nixon’s landmark work Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is an extended investigation of precisely the difficulty of aesthetically reckoning with environmental harm. When it comes to “environmental calamities,” Nixon asserts, “a major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects.”2 More recently, and in a similar vein to Nixon, the novelist and literary critic Amitav Ghosh has highlighted the struggle of literature in general, and the novel in particular, to confront climate change. Like Nixon, Ghosh asserts that the climate crisis poses thorny representational challenges, perhaps most notably what he calls a “scalar” resistance to the novel’s formal conventions. As he puts it: “[Climate change’s] essence consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel—forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space.”3

I highlight the work of people like Nixon and Ghosh not simply to gently push back against Nersessian’s suggestion that environmentally-attuned literary critics are usually optimistic about literature’s ability to grapple with ecological crises and the forms of violence and suffering upstream and downstream from them. Rather, I am pointing out this aesthetically-skeptical idiom of ecocriticism because it actually seems to me that Nersessian is developing an even more radical, and potentially more valuable, line of thinking here. Although both Nixon and Ghosh are quick to draw attention to the way in which climate change and environmental calamity scramble the usual techniques artists and writers have used to confront other kinds of disaster, both critics seem to remain broadly optimistic—or at least open to the possibility—that we might yet devise forms of art better suited to grappling with such spatiotemporally diffuse, and thus ontologically hard-to-pin-down, ecological phenomena. In other words, their work seems to rest on the assumption that a more environmentally efficacious kind of literature is possible, and that if we merely develop a new “aesthetic strategy” we might rise to the challenge and find a way to, in Nixon’s phrasing, “articulate these vital aesthetic concerns to socioenvironmental transformation” (Nixon, Slow Violence, 32).

Above, I noted Wilfrid Sellars’s rebuttal to the notion that we might find some way to accommodate the scientific image of the world to everyday understanding. His argument is that we must abandon the pipe dream of a perfect synthesis between scientific reason and common sense, rather learning to live in and with the permanent disjunction between science—as an ontological discourse adequate to the Real—and “the manifest framework of everyday life . . . adequate for the everyday purposes of life.”4 In keeping with this line of inquiry, I might suggest that folks like Nixon and Ghosh are not unlike Sellars’s pipe-dreamers, aware of the tension between climate science and aesthetic representation but nonetheless convinced that, with a bit of creativity, some translation might be effected between the world of hard facts and that of aesthetic form, giving rise in the process to a new kind of art capable of actuating socioenvironmental transformation. By contrast, Nersessian appears to be on the road to a slightly more pessimistic, more Sellarsian, and potentially more intriguing assertion: that it is not at all clear that art can do much more, with respect to the calamities of capital and environmental ruin, than telegraph its own impotence, that at best art might learn to live with its permanent epistemic alienation from the very calamitous reality it wants to find purchase against.

Indeed, Nersessian’s (brilliant) reading of John Constable’s cloud paintings hints at precisely this possibility when she draws attention to the potential resonances between the pioneering geologist James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth and the painter’s meteorological forays. She writes:

Hutton’s language harmonizes with Constable’s studies: both allude to apocalypse while sidestepping its endgame, and both monitor the planet from within an accentuated present, which holds clues to past events and may help us anticipate future ones. Still, Hutton is a scientist and Constable a painter, and this makes a difference. (158)

Here, this “difference” speaks volumes, and we might even suspect that Nersessian really means to say “it makes all the difference.” On my reading, Nersessian’s candor about the limits of poetry (literature and art more generally) with regard to either economic or environmental knowing is not tantamount to conceding that the making or studying of aesthetic objects is a fruitless pursuit, ill-suited to a world rocked by the metastasizing crises of late capitalism and anthropogenic climate change. It is to admit, though, that the fantasy of an effective merger between scientific and poetic representation is indeed a fantasy, that there might be no zone of transit between literature and the “real” world of sweatshops and melting ice caps, that at best we might learn to live with the stereoscopic disjunction between the kinds of knowing that measures coastal erosion or carbon in parts per million on the one hand and poetic nescience on the other. Just as Sellars is not attempting to denigrate everyday know-how, but rather assert that—while we cannot live without such knowledge—its value is located elsewhere than in providing truth about physical reality, perhaps too we might ask after an environmental literature whose value lies elsewhere than as a vehicle for the dissemination of actionable insight about ecological collapse. In fact, perhaps the question we should consider asking is not how aesthetic objects can be reimagined to produce tangible results in the fight capitalism or climate change—a question which axiomatically assumes art’s political power—but, as Nersessian asks: “What would it mean to stand by these objects in the face of their political inutility” (135).

How can we reconcile historical experience with poetic creativity? We understand that what happens in poets’ lives necessarily shapes them; and we know, too, that poets shape poems. But does the transitive property apply? Must the activity in a poet’s life shape his or her poetry? On page 4 of The Calamity Form, Anahid Nersessian ventures a hedge: faced with difficult social dynamics brought on by the Industrial Revolution, she argues, the Romantics developed “a poetics awkwardly responsive to or cooperative with it, working alongside though not necessarily in cahoots” (4). To be “responsive to,” to work “alongside”—these are not quite the same thing as to be shaped by or to interpret or amend. Nersessian’s account of the poetry she loves sets up a different sort of relation between poetry and social life that, before her book, felt difficult to describe: being “awkwardly responsive” doesn’t have to mean being un-responsive (just as, for Keats, being negatively capable isn’t the same thing as being in-capable). In The Calamity Form, inability—to respond, to represent, to interpret—arranges its own set of figures, and failure has its upsides.

I paraphrase Nersessian’s foundational premise partly as a disclaimer, because I suspect what follows may feel more “awkwardly responsive to” her argument than directly interpretive of it. This is because one of the aspects of The Calamity Form that I most admire is its willingness to talk freely about the function of literary criticism. Nersessian’s specific interest in “the limits of historical materialism for literary study” is one that I share, and I will offer a few of my own “lightly ordered” ideas here about our discipline’s habits with regard to reading poetry that I hope might work alongside some of her broader ideas about the field (1). To my ear, several of the most moving and persuasive sentences in Nersessian’s introduction (i.e., the more theoretical, less practical, portion of her book) address Romantic poetry’s vexed relationship with historically-grounded truth-telling. For example, on page 5: “the poetry that interests me is likewise built to fray, twisted into a net that, sieve-like, sets loose more than it manages to hold” (5). And on page 13: “the plight of love, which, like writing, clasps experience in vain and prolifically falsifies what it imagines to be true.” And on page 18: “poems knuckling under to the same unanswerable passion” (that is, a passion “to explain anything about their historical moment”). Through these well-wrought sentences and others, Nersessian demonstrates why she finds certain poems’ sense of insufficiency both earnest and appealing; her chosen poets, counterintuitively, reflect the world around them beautifully failingly. And here is where my own interest is piqued. Some of the words she uses when discussing these poems—“insufficiency,” “failure,” “weakness”—are words we usually associate with value judgments. Nersessian is not exactly judging when she calls Wordsworth obscure or accuses Keats of reaching too far with his metaphors, but her book’s elucidation of certain rhetorical tropes of failure in poetry nevertheless associates itself, at least to my ear, with a more evaluative turn in literary study that is worth lingering upon.

Her chapter on “Keats and Catachresis” feels especially suggestive in this regard because of the assumptions that necessarily accompany that word. “Catachresis,” Nersessian points out, “cuts at least three ways”:

[EXT]It is a positive dereliction, a winning effort at going against the grain; it is a mistake; and in any case it is a disturbance, even, as some commentators suggest, an act of violence or an offering of injury. (96)[/EXT]

Within her specific argument about Keats, not all of these definitions apply with equal weight. The first—that Keats’s poems often contain positive derelictions—feels true enough, and the examples Nersessian finds (“poesied” for “kissed,” “full-grown lambs,” etc.) do indeed feel like “winning efforts” on Keats’s part even if—or, rather, because—they “reach.” But to be derelict is not the same thing as to be mistaken. When Keats implies that kissing is like versifying, his metaphor is just subjective enough to remain defensible against mistake. (Who can say for sure whether their lips felt like rhymes besides Isabella and Lorenzo?) That such a metaphor “disturbs” must be true (since all metaphors are disturbances of a kind); and I found Nersessian’s reading of the hyperbolically sensuous excesses in “To Autumn” especially appealing (oozings and over-brimmings and wailing gnats). Her central argument about a certain form of overreaching, often in bodily language—that Keats “tropes capital’s theft of life” and “pit[s] rhetorical misuse against economic abuse” (95, 96)—speaks persuasively to Keats’s radicalism (which she subsequently takes up in her new book as well). Inelegance and misuse become for Keats a kind of method—a method predicated on a poetics of failure.

But Nersessian’s point, which is both a political argument and a comment on Keats’s craft, takes for granted a certain brand of “badness” in Keats’s writing that I think is worth pausing over. In order to complete the logic of her argument, I found myself being asked to judge (with her) aspects of Keats’s language as inadequate or inappropriate in some way, probably because aesthetic judgment and catachresis (Keats’s kind, anyway) are inextricably linked. That is, to know Keats’s radicalism involves acknowledging his forms of badness—and acknowledging his forms of badness involves enlisting our own ability and willingness to evaluate. This may seem like a small point, especially since, as Nersessian notes, “everyone, even his most committed votaries, can admit, if there is one thing Keats is not short on it is bad metaphors” (94). But I confess I have never consciously thought of what Nersessian calls catachreses as failures before. Excesses yes—but not exactly wrong. Her book’s interest in failure on a general level made me think again about what we are doing as literary critics when we claim that a poet’s metaphor or analogy is bad. Who’s to say, exactly, and how?

These are philosophical questions about aesthetic judgment (and semantic questions about terminology), not comments on Keats’s radicalism or his inability to represent the suffering of and in his world. But thinking through his figures of failure, as Nersessian does, necessitates an evaluative critical faculty that isn’t so common nowadays as it once was. And as Nersessian (and Levinson and so many others before her) knows, it is hard to talk about aesthetic judgment and Keats, or to evaluate him, without worrying about politics. How could we ever separate the style of his writing from the cares and failures and disappointments of his life—which themselves were never emancipated from his socioeconomic status, his heath, and the political moment he lived through? Here is one of the moments where Nersessian faces some of the limits of historical materialism she invokes in her introduction—and where I found her argument most excitingly provocative. Because to say that Keats fails poetically is the kind of judgment literary critics usually resist making, and not only because there was no finer or more talented English poet than Keats (other than perhaps Shakespeare or Milton), but also because, when faced with the problem of judgment’s seemingly inherent conservatism compared to most critics’ ideas of democratic equality, it is simply easier to demure.

Others (Michael Clune, Robert Lehman, et al) are working actively in this field and thinking through the ways that aesthetic judgment may or may not impinge on progressive politics. This short Syndicate response—to a very different sort of book—is not the place to paraphrase their larger, complex points, but I am hoping it might be chance for me to pursue some of the evaluative reading practices that Nersessian’s chapter on Keats indirectly suggests to me. I have written elsewhere about Keats’s mistake on Cortez in “Upon First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”—an error that it is surprisingly still provocative to point out. But catachresis or other forms poetic failure needn’t necessarily take the extreme form of mistake. Where are the “regular” bad metaphors in Keats—and how bad are they? And what would a criticism that took up badness and goodness as criteria look like at this moment in literary studies, two hundred years after Keats’s first critics were accused of snuffing out his life out with negative reviews?

I’ll offer two short examples in turn—one good, one bad, in my judgment. (How freeing that feels!) The first can be found in Keats’s wonderful late sonnet “Bright Star”—a favourite of mine in part because of the ways in which Keats defies readerly expectations (first thematically, by relating himself to the bright star instead of his beloved, as you might imagine a sonnet would, and then formally, by never fully resolving the complicated syntactical structure he initiates). There is so much good in it, but I call attention to the phrase “ripening breast” in line 10, as in:

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft swell and fall

Keats had revised these lines from a previous version which had “Cheek-pillow’d on” instead of “Pillow’d upon” and “my Love’s white” instead of “my fair love’s.” But that somewhat incongruous-seeming phrase “ripening breast” was there even in the earlier version. What I perhaps like best about it is the possibility it conjures of his biting right into her. And Keats is not shy about sexually-charged fruit descriptions elsewhere (as we shall see in a moment). But where this phrase more respectfully earns its keep is in the subtler science of it, which is easier to spot if you remember the earlier version of the line. When Keats dispenses with “white” as an adjective, I suspect it isn’t only because of its bridal connotations or a worry over false chastity. This breast—Fanny’s breast—is turning red, as fruit does when it sweetens. Here is not the marblesque statue of the untouchable maiden in Keats’s “Cold Pastoral” but actual skin that blushes and invites. Away from the cold white starlight of the sonnet’s opening lines, Keats attaches himself to a real, sun-warmed, and blushing body in her bed chamber. “Ripening” does all of that work without resorting to having to say the word “fruit.” This “excess” feels perfectly in balance.

Less so at the end of “Ode on Melancholy,” which features some poor soul with a strong enough tongue to “burst Joy’s grape.” This fruit is slightly rotten to my taste. It isn’t Keats’s awkward sexuality here that bothers me so much as the difficulty of that fruit as a working metaphor. Do we burst grapes? I had always imagined that we crush them. Nersessian remarks (agnostically) in her new book that “a burst is a pretty savage sort of explosion,” and I would add that it is also a verb that usually denotes what happens when things grow too big for themselves, not when you eat them. Bubbles burst—and balloons. Or people burst into places where they aren’t welcome. But grapes aren’t exactly spatial in that way, nor are they hollow. Maybe all this sounds very finicky; but imagining joy as a grape isn’t an obvious cognitive exercise. In fables grapes can be sour; in “the South” they are crushed for wine. And even when they dangle sexually, or are dangled, they grow in bunches rather than singly. Who has ever burst just one?

Don’t misread me: not everything in a poem has to work for the whole thing to work. Keats took more risks in his brief adult life than most poets took across their entire careers. I don’t especially mind this grape, knowing all the other joys in this poem (and across his work), but I would like to be allowed to gripe about it all the same. Keats’s badness doesn’t have to be the same as his goodness for us to accept it (and conversely, he is not always at his best when he is at his worst). We must trust ourselves to know the difference between writing that is excellent even as it fails and writing that is poor. Nersessian doesn’t fully exercise her evaluative faculty when she enumerates Keats’s catachreses, perhaps because she doesn’t need to. But what if literary studies more readily encouraged calls on quality just for the sake of it? By pointing out the failures of poets who are “fixated on the poorly representative and even misleading qualities of their work,” Nersessian’s book reminded me of the silent judgments we are always making as we read.

I have been focusing on Keats in order to keep this response manageably narrow. But there are other moments in The Calamity Form that likewise speak to literary criticism’s evaluative potential, even if Nersessian is careful never to make evaluation feel like her primary intent. Soon after she writes in chapter 2 that “I don’t like Wordsworth,” she notes that “this isn’t about critique” (57). And for her it isn’t; but for others, couldn’t it be? I do happen to like Wordsworth—but moreover I like the feeling her book gives me that I might be able to say so, bluntly, as part of the critical project. Nersessian explains modestly in The Calamity Form that “whether I like Wordsworth or not is not anything to keep anyone up at night” (58). But I find myself wondering, as I read her and others’ writing about poems that fail in spite of their goodness, or that succeed in spite of their badness, whether the aesthetic judgments of trusted literary critics like Nersessian might not be worth staying up late for after all?

Who Knows What Calamity This Is?

—Khwaja Mir Dard

 

As fascist aggression fomented during the weeks preceding the Unite the Right convergence of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017, I began writing a bunch of occasional poems that would become Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World. Full of rage, disgust, and fear, I despaired in the knowledge that whatever writing I might do in response to that present moment would only reflect my impotence in the face of grotesque violence and fail to make a dent in the social surround, if that were even writing’s aim.

At first, I referred to these poems as “calendrics” as they channeled the daily slough of emotional run-off, lending my rage, disgust, and fear some fabled form to keep it all from recrudescing in a barely somnolent paralysis whose waking dreams arrested sleep. But even at their best, the poems could only promise to quiet those dissipative energies enough to organize them in some provisional structure, like a crystal of entropic decay, where the present might be said to flicker and refract.

But as it, too, flickers and refracts, can my poem’s burnished amber show me something I don’t think I already know about the present? Against the grain of my desire—perhaps in despair, or a more sober realism—I felt myself forming a question that challenges my convictions about poetry’s promise to sense the world in advance of my cognition, its hope of wresting language away from dominant meaning systems, and its potential to make otherwise abstract relations visceral and perceptible through concrete sensation, which the poem might manifest as legible form.

Under the spell of this agitation, I submit my question to a thought-experiment. Giving the poem the benefit of the doubt that it can sense the world in ways that are incongruous with prevailing forms of knowing, I ask the question my faith has repressed: Isn’t the poem’s “non-knowledge” just a negative picture of what I think I already know about the world? Or, can the poem yield otherwise unavailable intelligence?

That’s the title of one of the poems: “Otherwise Unavailable Intelligence” (see below). Upon returning to it months after losing track of its various threads and intertexts, I mistook the title for a phrase derived from Aimé Césaire’s “Poetry & Knowledge,” as if I wished upon the poem’s chance for suprasensible perception—the way my four-year old daughter might wish upon a star—only to recall with astonishment, upon quickly searching the fugitive phrase, that “otherwise unavailable intelligence” quotes a CIA operative’s alibi for “enhanced interrogation techniques.” For a dazed moment, it’s as if I had never considered the relation between poem and “black site,” and in the shade of nonplussed beguilement, I feel the rumored place of my own vocation flicker in the shadow of a rendition zone.

Put another way: Can the poem only lend expressive form to something I already think I know (without even having to think), despite my desire that the poem do something else? “I know that I can’t know anything,” writes Kathy Acker, “but I don’t know what this knowledge is.”

It’s too often been said that the poem contains something obdurate, something otherwise unknowable, incommunicable, something resistant to the currency of exchange, the way a commodity can be said to contain something fundamentally useless, something resistant to the priorities of circulation into whose networks it is set adrift, something otherwise fundamentally negated by those priorities.

But what does it mean for a poem “to contain” something? To hold, keep, and carry? Or, to enclose, neutralize, and monitor?, the way a virus might be contained, or a riot, while its conditions go unchecked.

My thought experiment may have only just arrived at its most depressed moment here: I mean, if my poem can only contain something I already know about the world, and if our collective knowledge of the world has not yet enabled us to abolish its conditions, I fear this is tantamount to saying that the poem can only console the impotence of knowing, while securing that impotence with a rarefied veil of pedigree and form. This contradicts a proposition that’s always been axiomatic for me, that the poem performs like a living organ—prosthetic extension of my senses—enabling some otherwise imperceptible perception of the world, as if for the first time.

Poetic language, then, while aspiring to some “authentic” place “outside” the system that produces it as a kind of excrescence or waste, might at best become the counterfeit of its currency, performing a likeness that arouses and organizes an otherwise silenced emotion, and “only emotion conceives in sensual forms that which isn’t conceivable” (that’s Acker again.)

In The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, Anahid Nersessian gets at the problem like this: “What’s the point of reading a poem as a record of verifiable social and historical processes? What will that tell you that you don’t already know?” (8). It’s a painful question. For Anahid, “the calamity form” gives cultural expression to disaster without necessarily addressing disaster explicitly or even consciously. In doing so, however, the poem may only be able to lend sensual form to the limit of what one can already cognize about the calamity we’re all unevenly subject to, the social catastrophe that has expropriated our entire sensorium—even its innocuous prosthetic—by way of which we make the world and perceive what we’ve made.

“The poetics of calamity,” Anahid writes, “is directed not toward an encounter with what is real but toward an encounter with the inaccessibility of the real,” an encounter, perhaps, with our inability to adequately represent what is happening (5). Without breathing the ether of old poetical bromides—to attain the unknown!—whose nineteenth-century materialism risks becoming a twenty-first century idealism, I still believe in the poem’s potential to stage an encounter with that inaccessibility, that is, with something all too real, at once intimate, proximate, immediate, yet impersonal, remote, mediated, something inseparable from ourselves though separated from our apprehension by nothing less than thought itself, something we can’t accurately name about the present—let alone diagnose—which my friend Bob Glück calls “the one thing impossible to put into words because a language does not yet exist to describe the present.”

So my poem stares back at me from so much waste, like Benjamin’s “hieroglyphs in whose dark prism social relations lay congealed and in fragments” (that’s Hito Steyerl). It’s like being subject to a hole in thought, where I feel unable to think myself thinking, a vacancy knowledge cannot rush in to fill, a void resistant to our ways of knowing it, while remaining sensually attuned to what defensively resists that resistance.

If only as a feeble part of a collective effort to abolish the current conditions of that impossibility, I want to believe that a poem offers a stimulant for what Saidiya Hartman calls an “abolitionist imaginary,” because “what is required is a remaking of the social order, and nothing short of that is going to make a difference.”

As the incarcerated poet Justin Rovillos Monson writes in the recent Poetry Project Newsletter (#262): “Poetry can flesh out what prison often hides from the world. In doing that, a hidden corner is exposed and given an economy beyond the counting of bodies caged in some field in a rural town called Freeland.” But my own poems can’t pretend to speak of that “hidden corner”—despite my work inside—except insofar as that corner inhabits me in ways that lack a language.

While arousing my body to move toward the bodies of others struggling against these lived conditions—in streets, schools, or prisons—my poems can only inhabit this imaginary as a kind of negative capability, enabling me to feel my relations to real conditions without being able to grasp or know them fully. This has everything to do with one’s “proximity to criminalization and police violence,” as my friend Cyrus Dunham put it recently when speaking about the place from which one writes, and this place, for me, is relatively safe.

Like the commodity form whose name it echoes, what Anahid calls “the calamity form” disfigures the world whose impress it bears like a mudra, or seal, presenting us with something “hard to grasp in explicative, let alone actionable, terms,” nothing as clear as we’d like things to be, while I feel the weakness of my juridical imagination reveal an impoverished logic that has already betrayed my abolitionist desire (4).

Referring to calamity’s “unique structure of feeling” by way of Ecclesiastes, Anahid turns the problem like this:

What is to be done about a world whose complexity is so uncomprehendingly lived, whose harms are palpable and yet obscure, seeming to come upon us from everywhere and nowhere? Here “all things are full of labor” and yet “man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” To feel but not to get, to undergo but not to understand: this is the etiology of trauma and of the traumatic historical event. (4)

What if the poem can only materialize an ephemeral breach, a fragile tear on the skin of what we know, a modest interruption resistant to our own comprehension? I mean, what if the poem can only bring to articulation an impasse, something about the world—or an experience of it—otherwise inarticulable, “at the edge of semantic availability,” as Raymond Williams would have it, something at once “sensual and supersensual,” which is how Karl Marx describes the commodity? I know, I’m not saying anything new here. But what if this inarticulable something were our own unknowing? Anahid calls it a “void of uncertainty” in and across which we must act.

Considering this “void of uncertainty,” Anahid looks to Cindy Patton’s critique of conspiratorial tendencies within early HIV/AIDS activism, tendencies arguing, for example, that HIV was “deliberately spread among gay and African American communities by the United States government.” Patton’s critique is worth quoting just as Anahid quotes it:

Suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know? (quoted in 7)

Like the paranoid reading that guides it, conspiratorial thinking reduces the unknown world to the known, reproducing what we believe to know about it already. But what if the promise of a poem—and of poetry, more generally—were the opposite of a conspiracy theory?

Like giving a “name to the nameless so that it can be thought” (that’s Audre Lorde), the poem might lend provisional form to a blind-spot so that one might begin to sense something otherwise imperceptible, or paradoxically “see nothing”—when “nothing” is quite something, perhaps even the most substantial of things—recalling Jalal Toufic’s notion that artworks potentially perceive what’s been removed from perception in the wake of social catastrophe. I’m also reminded here of Robert Smithson’s “Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan,” where reflected light gets erased, the way the glow of the grid erases itself in the things it brightens, or the way the factory light illuminates the very world it extinguishes, negating what we look at, even when we’re looking at the things we make with our hands, our minds, our language, our labor.

Giorgio Agamben gets this right when he says, “one cannot see because of the light,” and, I’m moved to think, if a poem were a prepared photo-emulsive mesh upon which that light has been thrown, it might be a hieroglyph of the inverted world.

Here’s Smithson: “To reconstruct what the eyes see in words in an ‘ideal language’ is vain exploit. Why not reconstruct one’s inability to see?” and he goes on to suggest “a type of ‘anti-vision’ or negative seeing” as if proposing a kind of camera obscura, a beguilement of light whereby the image projected by way of a device appears to the human eye upside down, as if, without such a prosthetic of vision, one might see things as they “really are,” as if sensation and cognition were otherwise somehow identical.

Could it be that the end of the poem, if a poem can be said to have an end, is the endless disruption of that identity, just as the poem’s function, if a poem can be said to be anything but a dys-function, is to short-circuit that false immediacy?

Rather than recycling the commonplaces of critique, which often excuse the impotence they protest, what might it mean for a poem to embody an impasse, a breach, or rupture, without falling for the consolations of a precious obscurity?

A poem may be such a void, an agnostic zone—unforeseeable, unanticipated, even “naïve,” in the sense of being unburdened by believable ideas, aims, or goals—where one runs headlong into what we don’t already know.

Famously, for Marx, the camera obscura offers a material analogy for “ideology,” which illuminates the world for us only by disfiguring it, making our “circumstances appear upside-down,” so that things like ownership and dispossession, private property and exploited labor appear natural and unchangeable, as if they’d primordially originated beyond our own doing, undoing us while erasing things, like the legacies of slavery, lost in the appearance of their effects.

Just as the physical world appears inverted upon the human retina, only to be “righted” by physiological processes—electrical impulses along the optic nerve to the brain, where we perceive the image as correct—so too, Marx’s strained comparison goes, does the social world appear inverted, only to be “justified” by historical processes, so that a false image of the world appears to be “right.”

Whether you call it “ideology” or “common sense,” as Antonio Gramsci disfigures that disfiguration, it’s already anti-vision, right?—so that “negative seeing” amounts to the inversion of an inversion, like Andy Warhol’s Untitled (Birmingham, Alabama) pierced under the blinding power of Césaire’s venereal sun. Or, Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant—a.k.a. A Subtlety—blinded by the searing light of Etel Adnan’s cosmic moon.

This “hieroglyphic” appearance of the world is a social artifact, like language. “Later on,” Marx writes, “we try to decipher the hieroglyph, to get behind the secret of our own social products.” But the secret of the thing may well be that there is no secret. And so, we endlessly translate, further disfiguring the disfiguration of our hieroglyphic experience, which is never quite our own, in an effort to get at something more truthful about the contradictory “work” of not-seeing.

As Anahid suggests, a poem “cannot be written off as mere ideology,” though it might be a place where the poet unwittingly stages an incompetence to represent “the train of consequences set in motion by contemporary economic shifts,” the logic of calamity being anything but syllogistic, its causes and effects—like a fire scar on a single forested tree, or a wedge of Styrofoam in the Pacific, or a mechanical screw on the Plain of Jars—indecipherable indices of disaster, being all but indeterminate, except for the fabled last instance where the market drives its coffin nail home (2).

“Seeing” things like these—a scar, a wedge, a screw—involves the whole sensorium, the body and mind in a dynamic of sensing, feeling, and perceiving, all sutured to the social violence of everyday life. But even the seemingly natural act of discerning what is a thing and what is not one—be it an image of Billie Holiday, or a bottle of Strega (as in O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”); or, a body bound in the hull of a slaving ship, or an insurance document indemnifying the ship’s owner (as in NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!)—can’t be divorced from the conditions that structure our vision, the way “the images produced by cameras also structure the meaning of sight” (that’s Jonathan Beller). That these “things” and “nothings” can appear here as substitutable examples in the same sentence says something about the conditions of poetry.

Can a poem be this inability to see these clots in sense—whether it’s a shiny transistor in Shenzen, or flammable cladding in London, or a ruined cistern in Sidyana—each emitting a plane of light reflecting other planes to illumine a “pointless vanishing point,” like mirror travel, where the artificial rules of perspective are destroyed, the way Tarkovsky’s sheets of time can’t be reconciled by the present tense of a cinematic frame? Or, is the poem just another clot, the sensual form conceived in the emotion of that impasse? In performing its own inability, the poem might then bear an illegible trace about the world that one could otherwise not say and whose unspeakable aim might be to abolish its own conditions, something the poem is only ever too feeble to do.

The poetics of calamity, then, is directed not toward an encounter with what is real but toward an encounter with the inaccessibility of the real. What it cannot diagnose, it cannot abolish. (that’s Anahid, p. 5)

In other words, diagnosis of our conditions always lies elsewhere, as the poem’s competence is not that of prognostication, but rather a willingness to make manifest the shriveled power of its own diagnostics, not as an end itself, nor an aestheticized failure, but as a point of departure, perhaps for nothing more than “affection and a new way of communicating” (as Acker translates Rimbaud’s “l’affection et le bruit neufs”), a way that contradictorily needs the poem to abolish that need, and thus a move beyond the poem, out of poetry, headlong and recklessly into the world.

My appreciation of a theory of ideology—and its relevance to poetry—owes everything to Jamaican-born theorist Stuart Hall, the Black-British Marxist for whom “there is no social practice outside of ideology,” not even the practice of theorizing about ideology, and certainly not the ideologically saturated practice of writing poems. “It is not possible to bring ideology to an end and simply live the real,” Hall writes, and one would be an idiot to think you could do that in verse, as if a poem could forget for a second that it’s a dream of language dreaming itself—though I forget this all the time.

I am moved to look outside the frame, off-screen, at the park outside my window or the homeless man sleeping there under a box, anywhere away from the poem and to sense the world we’ve failed to make, the world the poem might desire or entreat, register or index, but in the end can only impede, defer, or displace by the poem’s own inadequacy. But these worlds are not two.

Put another way, the poem is nothing more than an incitement to give up on the poem.

Perhaps this figure—the poem as hieroglyph—encrypts nothing but another mystification willing to acknowledge itself as such, a figure that can’t be deciphered, only further disfigured to enrage its feebleness, or arouse the poem’s weakness to exceed its limit in a movement beyond the shattered sight glass: to conceive what’s inconceivable, in an effort to abolish the conditions of that impossibility.1

Otherwise Unavailable Intelligence

for & after Sean

 

To break the barriers of thought and overthrow the law

Of reason Césaire argues these are the poem’s revolutionary

Motives when you want the thing to be a rock or a vivid stain

On that vile venereal sun to block the light no one can

In their right mind believe in and “I will never seek light”

Notley writes in The Descent of Alette be it for reason or fear

Of photon’s false white bone “he owns the light” she says

The way one might own gold and all we can see is synesthetic

Radiance an aged clamor whose windowless pustules emit

The shabby glow by which I write or the glint of a smashed

Atom the flame of a drone shot down in the nite sky but there is

No light in the sun not an effect of some whacked hallucination

Some camera obscura in whose inverted dream we struggle

To see & to love so I turn that phrase like a muddied tire I stretch

Its syllables like a chain of synthesized molecules designed to prove

The tireless insurgence of life to affirm the way we magnetize

The sounds whose hum exceeds every measure as if I needed to

Prove it’s useful channeling the dub to render meanings

Counterfeiting stones to rhyme with what I can’t even hear

Inaudible substance of catastrophe a heavy-handed conceit

But it leavens my feeble lines like yr snuffed-out star or the soul

In Donne’s Funerall where the poet compares his to a wreathe

Of braided hair laced around his lover’s shrouded wrist

Confusing the spirit that inspires his verse with a cuff

Or cop-lock affirming the vehicle’s power to collapse mystery

And manacle but this model falls flat the conceit’s useless

To do anything more than what poetry has always done

To arouse the ache for communion or the rage that joins

Its loss but today I heard that producing otherwise unavailable

Intelligence was the seductive purpose used to ration

-alize the irrelevance of law so as to rape & waterboard

Rendered men indefinitely detained and I can’t dismiss

The identity of my enchanted poem w/ that carceral drive

To extract information from a breathless gasp the union

Of truth & alibi whose fusion at the heart of the public

Secret unites the unknown pith of any verse worth its salt

With a black site at the center of this interminable war

Whose illegible inscriptions I read impressed on yr poems

Yr voice hammering away at Baudelaire in English the lang

-uage crushed in a vice like fossils of the present they bear

Concrete a violent trace of abstract force be it border or law

Whose labor disappears in the composition of its mineral life

And decays more quickly than I can sense anything at all

When true bone is mashed and we hear nothing it is

Like trying to feel yr own lost limb or what will have been

Here in the bark of a tree or a cracked femur found in the Sonora

When that bone becomes a sign no one can read the equal

Of an extinct bird’s wing or a trace of fluorocarbon in the water

And the cynobacterial blooms whose blue-green aurora mocks

The Northern Lights and makes the present itself prehistoric

As if a poem could announce what will have been here

The way a star lodged in the gut of Cerberus might fall

From its orbit to bring us intel from the future whose origin

Coincides with some Atlantean place of new life no longer

Trapped in the cycle of accumulation & extinction when

The immanence of the coming crash appears about as probable

As the earth falling into the sun or “into anti-matter there

Where mornings go” (that’s Adnan) the way yesterday’s labor

Is extinguished in the present destroyed or consumed not

The way iron rusts or wood rots or paint peels but w/o a trace

On yr mind’s milky membrane the way what was once

Historical enters Eternity as if any of this could ever touch

The purpose of poems when purposeless rhymes mute forgotten

Crimes our own now sanctioned & protected under private

Contract like the one the GEO Group holds for detaining

Immigrants at the Adelanto Processing Center or the one

CoreCivic obtained to operate at Otay Mesa our new

Common place which reminds me now of Andrea’s simile

When she likens my lyric to a “kill box” collapsing space

She says it extends the scene of domination to penetrate

The interior of a prison cell like another hoary figure for the soul

Making the poem’s motive consonant with that of the crime

Scene being everywhere coeval and bearing no resemblance

To the sound a body makes when it screams that way

We cleave to the old mysteries rituals of dismemberment

Like the gift you tender when you have nothing left to give.