Category: language

AG2024_DSF6786a or a silence not silent

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The ??launiu breeze lifts voices from the night.
Dogs curl under their houses. The city
burns to the shore, red with distant industry.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons. 

Even the dogs curl into sleep. Even the city.
We watch the headlights swipe past our window.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons
or their eclipse—night opening to night. 

Headlights skirt across our window
trailing the scent of gas. Sometime past 2am, 
I feel eclipsed. Night reaches out to night
drawing me back to the hospital room,

the scent of my baby’s matted hair. Past 2am,
I held his tiny body and we floated in a silence
that whirred and pinged. In the dark hospital,
in my exhaustion, I heard singing emerge. 

I held his tiny body, floating through a silence 
not silent, but a greeting from this other land, 
this one long night where we’d emerged.
He opened his eyes and his gaze was steady—

a greeting, a land. I began to weep. His body
against mine was too small for the weight 
of his gaze, his steady eyes—a doorway 
between our nights, and through it, voices.

Sleepless Pantoum, Laurel Nakanishi

January 2025 Poem-a-Day Guest Editor Campbell McGrath

necessities of ordinary

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2007

… it had been set in motion some time ago by what have by now become the familiar complaints that citizens of democracies make about all their leaders, particularly left-leaning ones, however moderate: that they represent an out-of-touch élite, that they are unresponsive to the economic necessities of ordinary people, that they are too sympathetic to outsiders at the cost of the native population, and all the rest.

Adam Gopnik on Trudeau’s resignation.

comprend sans effort le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes

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Élévation

Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées,
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées,

Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,
Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l’onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l’immensité profonde
Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.

Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;
Va te purifier dans l’air supérieur,
Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.

Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins
Qui chargent de leur poids l’existence brumeuse,
Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse
S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;

Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
—Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!

Les fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire

He whose thoughts, like larks,
Freely fly toward morning skies,
–Who hovers above life, and knows without strife
The language of flowers and of silent things!

-translated by Nathan Brown, Verso.

Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.

Saidiya Hartman

“The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic and performative.”

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, 1993), 37; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41.

AG2024_DSF6049a or fragmental as a new year

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Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
of the rutilant and cindering. I could rove incognito
to places pinned in office calendars. Too long I’d
mothered myself with the admiration of onlookers.
I was grateful to be alone in my abstraction. To be both
ignored and abraded by a coarse sky. I did not offer up
parts of me like kindling. I will not embellish a single
hemisphere. The ground bulges with a wet sound.
It is glutted with what was given. I do the wolfish work
of god and make myself again. Ripen like lichen on
the pavement. Like rain carrying the memory of lightning.

My Hair Burned Like Berenice, Ruth Awad

AG2024_DSF6301a or her connection to all things and the generative possibilities of creative invention

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Tara Anne Dalbow explores artist-poet Mina Loy’s thrilling embrace of contradiction. (LARB)

In her unfinished epic “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923–25), Loy describes two occasions that alleviated the painful drudgery of her life. The first was a visit from her Hungarian grandmother, dressed in fine silk and lace, who lavished praise and affection upon her. Loy likens their embrace to a “spiritual orgasm, the mystic’s admittance to cosmic radiance.” The second memory recalls an escape from her parent’s rage into their garden, where she encountered the wonders of her consciousness as it appeared intimately interconnected with the surrounding world. Beneath the “high-skies,” she saw how the “steadfast light” shone not upon her but from within her—a moment of “indissoluble bliss” that “illuminated” her connection to all things and the generative possibilities of creative invention.

Taken together, these two experiences composed her initiation into the spiritual realm “beyond the synopsis of vision,” where she bore witness to the divine force beneath the material surface: the continual metamorphosis that sustains the world. Loy had discovered her salvation and her sui generis talent: distilling the transformative energies of the invisible—sensual, spiritual, mystical—into poems, paintings, and objets d’art. Yes, the invisible could be contained—invisibly—in the visible. From then on, artistic expression became primarily an alchemical act: like gold from lead, she would wrest beauty, love, and light from the wretchedness of life. At first, from nothing but the turning of her mind, young Loy imagined stories and poetry; later, scraps of paper became tessellated bouquets (her Jaded Blossoms series) and cellophane and salvaged glass turned into calla lilies suspended miraculously in a lucent globe at the base of a lamp.

[…]

Loy adopted complexity as a liberatory practice, refusing to conform to social expectations or strip down her expansive notion of the self. She fought against what she perceived as a compulsive tendency to “re-simplify” in an attempt to “forget what a complicated affair life has been mistaken for.” Perhaps there is value in following her lead and making a more concerted effort to resist the reduction of our lives to easy categorization and quick consumption. Could insisting on a little more complexity restore some degree of agency or integrity? As Loy suggests in her 1917 poem “Human Cylinders,” a solution can “Destroy the Universe,” especially if that solution is homogeneity.

Loy’s understanding of paradox and her tolerance for uncertainty were qualities she brought to bear in every aspect of her life. Rather than upholding or evading binaries, Loy nullified them, ratifying the validity of both sides. And yet, she took stands, asserted her beliefs, refused the paralysis of inaction. She often went too far. She often went so far that no one else could see what she saw. Always alert to nuance and multiplicity, she reached a point where complementarity existed beyond duality, establishing a continuum of ideals, identities, affiliations, and faiths. She lived on a spectrum, ever moving toward what André Gide described as the “limitless possibilities of acceptance.”

Tara Anne Dalbow

“In a 1924 tribute, she calls Gertrude Stein the ??“Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary” who can “extract / a radium of the word.””

landscape created by an itinerant artisan, errantly

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“the landscape created by an itinerant artisan who follows the movement of matter-flow to create concrete assemblages suffused with incorporeal affects;”  Max Hantel in Rhizomes.net,issue 24, in a paper on the “relationship between Édouard Glissant and Deleuze and Guattari.”

Glissant opens Poetics of Relation with a moving call to his readers to imagine the horrors of the middle passage … The middle passage in this telling is a series of three interconnected abysses: the slave ship, the ocean depths, and the alien land of the new world.

“[I]n your poetic vision, a boat has no belly a boat does not swallow up, does not devour; a boat is steered by open skies. Yet, the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. It generates the clamor of your protests; it also produces all the coming unanimity. Although you are alone in this suffering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know. This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death” (Glissant 1997: 6).

Glissant’s apt and paradoxical description of the slave ship as a womb abyss, pregnant with death, brings into relief many of the characteristics of the ship as heterotopia described by Foucault. Glissant calls them nonworlds, similar to Foucault’s use of nonplaces, because these slave ships exist in the seams of Western civilization, outside of the carefully crafted narrative of Enlightenment rationality or humanist religion that supposedly girds the various trans-Atlantic empires, and yet constitutive of that narrative’s condition of possibility.

[…]

Glissant proposes the term “errantry,” […] to think through these conditions of forced diaspora. From the French errance, errantry literally means roving movement. Glissant does not intend the term, however, to simply mean a free-floating movement through undefined space or a solipsistic peripateticism. And here we return to the rhizome. Glissant reminds his readers that the rhizome is still a root-system and so, while characterized by horizontal movement and decentered growth, it is still a generative network that anchors, perhaps only temporarily, a specific localization of matter and energy.

Errantry is rooted movement but still a “desire to go against the root,” where “the root” refers to the imposition of a univocal (or monolingual) meaning on the self and the world. The history of the West is a history of fixing movement in terms of the static model of the nation-state, a model adopted by decolonizing countries: “Most of the nations that gained freedom from colonization have tended to form around an idea of power – the totalitarian drive of the single, unique root” (Glissant 1997: 14). Against this totalitarian root, Glissant proposes the root as multiplicity embodied in the relationship with the Other – not the drive to know the Other in a fully rational sense, but instead, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, an openness to affect and be affected by others. Like his tiptoeing act in the description of the slave ship, Glissant’s idea of errantry lies between a notion of fixed identity, rooted in an ancestral past (the movement back to Africa) and a purely fluid subjectivity that precludes communities of affinity and shared horizons of meaning.

[…]

It is understandable why even his most astute readers focus in on the politics of language, then, because Glissant’s most important locus of expression is the creolization of thought through a polyvocal poetics.

As for the Other, Glissant aligns himself with Deleuze in the rejection of some central chamber of subjectivity that can be rationally known if only discovered. He uses the word “opacity” to describe the status of the Other in our confrontation with them. One has the choice to embrace the conditions of opacity as the basis for an ethical relationship, or to work tirelessly to overcome opacity through knowing the other, whether through violence or the accumulation of knowledge (or both) (Glissant 1997: 62). In setting out a research agenda for Caribbean philosophy that takes its cues from Glissant, the notion of opacity is instructive. Reworking Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, Glissant provides a mode of engagement with past trauma that neither disavows totally the meaning of the historical fact of suffering nor identifies completely with the facticity of memory and an inability to move beyond the reality of that suffering. The rhizomatic embrace of errantry and opacity articulates new modes of subjectivization and collectivity both grounded and open, escaping the false choice between the totalitarian root and rootlessness.

Max Hantel, Errant Notes on a Caribbean Rhizome, rhizomes, issue 24, 2012

Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1997.