American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement

INTRODUCTION

Michael Dowdy

I

We have assembled this anthology during a critical juncture in the history of the United States. Our editing process has thus been guided by a two-part premise. First, this volume’s poets offer a robust history of the present that challenges the norms and narratives of social and political life, as well as conceptions of poetry as an art apart from society and politics. When poets reinvent the roles of historians, ethnographers, and, most broadly, activists, Lytle Shaw argues in Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics, they create alternative conceptions of the processes that produce the cultures and subjectivities of the United States.¹ Second, the range of aesthetic practices and cultural commitments in this volume demonstrates some of the ways that contemporary poets have anticipated the new era that was consolidated in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. These poets remind readers that this era is decades, even centuries, if not millennia, in the making. Their writings provide unique lenses onto the histories and outcomes of conquest and colonization, slavery and mass incarceration, neoliberalism and globalization, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and anti-immigrant nativism. But they also find momentary joys and glimpse liberatory futures, all the while showing how the effects of these sociohistorical processes are inscribed in literary sources and forms.

Since the publication in 2012 of the most recent volume in this series, Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America, the relationships among ethnicity, race, class, and gender, on the one hand, and the poetry business, comprised of poets, publishers, editors, and critics, on the other, came into focus in a series of disturbing events.² These racially charged appropriations of blackface, yellowface, and autopsy reports, by critically acclaimed and lesser-known poets alike, are small stakes in comparison to the precarious lives of unaccompanied minors, undocumented migrants, and refugees fleeing climate change and the shape-shifting forms of contemporary warfare. Yet these small stakes are manifestations of, and thus inextricable from, the big stakes. After all, these poetry-specific acts represented the nadir of the poetry world’s mainly white room, in Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s terms.³ For many poets and critics, moreover, these literary events clarified an emerging consensus—conceptual poetry’s promotion of post-identity and against expression models is functionally racist and classist—that exposed the long-standing political fault lines between avant-garde formations and identity-based multiethnic poetries.⁴ Subsequent consciousness-raising and organizing around the possibility that poets should participate in social critique took a range of forms, from the tenacious activism of the anonymous collective Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo to the affirmative solidarity of Asian American poets identifying under the Twitter hashtag #actualasianpoet. These events also illuminated movements already in motion, such as the Undocupoets, a group of undocumented poets that successfully pressured publishers and poetry presses to remove citizenship requirements from book prizes.

These tectonic shifts in the poetry world underscored the ways in which innovative poets have long blended art and activism. Nowhere was this dynamic more apparent than in the ascendance of Juan Felipe Herrera to national prominence. Herrera’s experimental, improvisational, multilingual, anti-imperialist poetics led him, remarkably, to his appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States, the first Latino to be so named. Simultaneously, however, the rise of Donald Trump, whose rhetorical vehicle was racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and anti-Latino nativism, ironically highlighted the issues that Herrera has written against since the late 1960s.⁵ In sum, these events and counter-events foreground the role of poets in the contentious public sphere of a nation, publishing industry, and academy hesitantly confronting (and acting out) living histories of inequality and injustice. This anthology features fourteen innovative poets who grapple, in various forms and from various angles, with these conditions, and whose poetic practices engage with and seek to transform social reality: Rosa Alcalá, Brian Blanchfield, Daniel Borzutzky, Carmen Giménez Smith, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Cathy Park Hong, Christine Hume, Bhanu Kapil, Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, Fred Moten, Craig Santos Perez, Barbara Jane Reyes, Roberto Tejada, and Edwin Torres. Some already have national and international reputations, while others, we believe, deserve increased scholarly and critical attention. More capaciously, these poets take readers into the world, beyond academic conversations, by providing unique ways to apprehend, resist, and survive the disasters of the twenty-first century and to imagine emancipatory otherwises.

We have followed the organization of the previous three collections in the series, with each chapter featuring a selection of the poet’s poems, the poet’s poetics statement, and a critical essay. Readers of the earlier volumes will notice subtle differences in our selections and in the historical and theoretical framing in this introduction. Our title, Poetics of Social Engagement, reflects the shifting landscapes of the avant-garde and the poetry world more broadly. Most simply, the title indicates our lack of recourse to models of identity (that is, women poets) or newness. Although many of these poets can claim the mantle of the new, and half are women, the present volume is not a second edition of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, which was published in 2007.⁶ This volume’s poets have each published at least three full-length books, though one, Brian Blanchfield, has done so in multiple genres. In introducing Poetics Across North America, Lisa Sewell writes that the volume’s thirteen women poets inhabit a shared thriving center of alterity. Alterity is likewise important to the poets here, and their shared center is largely a function of affinity and affiliation rather than of shared identities or aesthetics. These factors may expose our selections to greater scrutiny. Yet that many other poets deserve inclusion testifies to our historical moment’s abundance of innovative poets, some of whom appear here as critics. Urayoán Noel, Chris Nealon, Joyelle McSweeney, and J. Michael Martinez, who contribute essays on Edwin Torres, Brian Blanchfield, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Craig Santos Perez, respectively, have strong claims to inclusion as poets. Their excellence in both roles exemplifies the prevalence of poet-critics in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Other poets who come to mind—Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Mónica de la Torre, Terrance Hayes, Evie Shockley, Rodrigo Toscano, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Rachel Zucker, to name a few—would launch another volume of equal excellence. Even so, we believe the poets gathered here highlight the powerful range and depth of the field of poetry and poetics in the United States.⁷

Because this range is on full display in the present volume, it is challenging to articulate sufficiently wide aesthetic parameters that would help readers navigate the differences. The first volume in this series, Where Lyric Meets Language, offered a useful frame for assessing the tensions and convergences between lyric- and language-oriented poetics while also pointing out the (then) current terms of the debate. As was true of the second and third volumes, however, even a capacious dialectical frame no longer proves useful or appropriate to the current moment. In short, this group of poets is not easy to pin down. The contentious debate between lyric and Language poetries has dissipated, giving way to a field of contemporary poetry in which their modes have combined, blended, and enriched each other. As Brian M. Reed notes in Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics, the convergence of lyric and Language modes has produced a new consensus with traditionally literary ends.⁸ The writer in this volume most firmly working, by her own account, in a lyric mode—Giménez Smith—emphasizes its suitability to her project by its qualities of atemporality, enigma, and corporeality, each of which also arguably defines various strands of language, conceptual, materialist, postlyric, and anti-lyric practices.⁹ On the other end of the spectrum, Bhanu Kapil cannot be said to be working in, or anywhere near, the lyric. Nor is she, by any light, a descendant of the Language poets, though her prose sentences have some of the characteristics of Ron Silliman’s new sentence. Between Christine Hume’s interests in acoustic memory, sound poetics, and the limits of cognition and Craig Santos Perez’s serial book-islands, which adapt the Japanese haibun (among other forms) to decolonizing ends, there is dissonance, multiplicity, and incommensurability.

A careful reading of these innovative poets reveals many surprising connections. We have taken the volume’s subtitle, Poetics of Social Engagement, from Cathy Park Hong’s touchstone intervention in the debate around race, conceptual poetry, and the avant-garde. The title reflects the primary realm of these connections—the dramatically unequal, and unjust, social reality for people of color, women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and the poor in the United States. Poetry, Hong writes, is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.¹⁰ Hong’s 2015 essay was simultaneously a call to action for socially engaged poets and an accurate description of the current field of poetry and poetics. The fourteen poets included here can be counted among the best of the poetry of social engagement. We would, however, like to broaden two of Hong’s claims, which will help to define social engagement. First, Hong takes somewhat for granted what counts as socially engaged poetry, an assumption that is produced in part by her understanding of what (and who) counts as conceptual poetry—Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Expanding the parameters of the conceptual would encompass older writers such as Herrera and Pedro Pietri, who have influenced many of the poets included here, as well as Tan Lin, Mark Nowak, and M. NourbeSe Philip, among others.¹¹ Poets of color and working-class poets are generally not afforded this distinction because, as the nefarious thinking goes, they are too occupied with identity to be concerned with high concept. Lytle Shaw offers one way to site conceptual poetry differently: Appropriation, he argues, only becomes meaningfully ‘conceptual’ (and ultimately valuable) when it helps one analyze or read actual sites—from the empirical to the discursive. What is ‘conceptual,’ Shaw continues, is how a work situates itself in relation to its claimed context or site of intervention. Conceptual practices, he concludes, depend on their insightful placement.¹² In this volume, the empirical and discursive sites in Daniel Borzutzky’s Chicago poems and Hong’s boomtown poems, for instance, can be read in these ways as conceptual. Poetry of social engagement is defined as much by the aesthetic tools, strategic interventions, and placements used by poets as it is a category ascribed to poems after the fact. Even so, most of the poems included here are not narrowly but rather capaciously political. In apprehending the material world, they find forms to challenge the ways that world is recreated through discourses of power.

In the recent critical anthology The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement, the editors Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston define poetry of engagement broadly as writing about concerns beyond the personal, epiphanic, or aesthetic.¹³ While their emphasis on the varied modes and forms of engagement is a welcome critical move, their suggestion that aesthetics are private concerns apart from politics, power, and public life has the effect of reinforcing the narrow conception of poetry their model aims to overturn—that socially engaged poems are inevitably artistically compromised. By foregrounding events (that is, September 11, 2001) and effects (that is, of climate change) as sites of engagement, Gray and Keniston provide ways to read Alcalá’s long poem on the femicide in Ciudad Juárez and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s poems on the Oneota earthworks site Blood Run, both of which are included here.¹⁴ Such poems enfold what Gray and Keniston call a heightened awareness of mediation,¹⁵ an awareness that is obsessive, recursive, and omnipresent in Borzutzky’s poems, wherein disembodied voices interrupt poems with the rhetoric of overheard headlines of violence and crisis—have you heard the one about.

Reading Gray and Keniston’s volume alongside Hong’s essay begs the question: What does social add to Gray and Keniston’s unmodified engagement? In other words, why do we, following Hong, insist on social engagement? In calling engaged poems "the new public poetry" (our emphasis), Gray and Keniston reinforce a binary that has been eroded by neoliberal ideology and outcomes, from the expansion of the surveillance state to the privatization of public goods and services.¹⁶ This volume’s poets show that socially engaged poetry can be private, personal, and at first glance shunted off from public events and concerns. This is especially true of the queer poets Blanchfield and Roberto Tejada; of poets who write about mothering, such as Alcalá, Giménez Smith, and Hume; and for Fred Moten, whose book B Jenkins includes dozens of seemingly private homages.¹⁷ Understood most broadly, social emphasizes the cultural, political, and historical dimensions of aesthetic practices, which are often contentious. The word social has frequently served in poetry criticism as a euphemism for racial and ethnic identity. In Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, Dorothy J. Wang identifies over the last two decades

the firm clicking into place of the terms identity, identitarian, and, most overtly, identity politics as the antithesis of (opposite to and opposing) literary value and critical rigor. So it is that one can group the terms identitarian, identity politics, cultural, social, [and] political […] together and know exactly what is being invoked (that is, demonized).¹⁸

Our use of poetry of social engagement to describe a group of innovative contemporary poets is explicitly designed to encompass a range of racial, ethnic, and class identities, as well as a wide array of modes, styles, sites, histories, practices, and forms. Not coincidentally, many of these modes can be traced to the radical social-artistic movements and the new American poetries of the Fifties and Sixties, many of which were led by poets and critics of color.

Second, the writing assembled in this volume consistently highlights the historical presence that Hong’s essay, given the timeliness of her intervention, does not have the space to address. Rather than ushering in a new era, many of the poets in this anthology (as well as many of their contemporaries and their predecessors) were agitating and innovating long before 2015.¹⁹ This is especially true of poets working in (or adjacent to) the black radical tradition, the Chicano tradition, and the Nuyorican tradition. The intersections between experimentalism and political consciousness underlying these traditions have been identified and theorized by Amiri Baraka, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Lorenzo Thomas, and Alfred Arteaga, among other groundbreaking critics.²⁰ The Black Arts movement was, after all, the first literary movement in the United States to advance ‘social engagement’ as a sine qua non of its aesthetic.²¹

In recent years, critical studies in poetry and poetics have demonstrated the myriad ways in which poets have combined innovation with investigations and assertions of ethnic, racial, and gender subjectivities. Contesting the idea that multiethnic poets are limited to narrowly representational forms of identity politics, which excluded poets of color from the avantgarde and kept poetry generally within a depoliticized realm of pure aesthetics, recent anthologies and scholarly studies indicate that the shift Hong identifies had been in motion for a number of years prior to the apotheosis detailed earlier.²² In addition to offering aesthetically attuned readings of socially engaged poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Chin, Herrera, Pietri, and Sonia Sanchez, these studies illustrate how ethnic and cultural studies paradigms might reshape rigid understandings of poetry as either (a) art for art’s sake, that is, idealist; or (b) sociological critique, that is, culturalist or materialist.²³ Three critics highlight the approaches taken in this volume while offering additional ways to read its poets and their contemporaries. Wang, in Thinking Its Presence, insists on the inseparability of the aesthetic and the sociopolitical; Urayoán Noel, in In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, demonstrates a way of reading raced, gendered, and otherwise marked poetics that can move back and forth between formalist and culturalist concerns; and Anthony Reed, in Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, advances a mode of criticism mindful of the radical implications of formal innovation as a mode of social engagement.²⁴ Broadly conceived, this volume’s poets do not consider poetry a thing apart. Instead, they create sites, forms, modes, vehicles, and inquiries for entering the public sphere, contesting injustices, and reimagining dominant norms, values, and exclusions.

Beyond their shared commitment to poetry as a space of social engagement, these poets also share some poetic approaches and literary tools. Several trends emerge. First, their work shares an orientation toward the past, in particular as it relates to literary traditions, cultural archives, and official histories. Perez dramatized this orientation at a public reading in 2012. In theorizing a Pacific avant-garde practice, he explained his interest in the Anglo-American avant-garde ironically, as a form of decolonial reappropriation. White modernists, he deadpanned, stole Oceanic cultures to make their work less boring. Now, he concluded, he is stealing it back in order to make my work more boring.²⁵ This tension between skepticism of and openness to received literary traditions is reenacted across global networks of exchange, underscoring the fraught reckonings with the entanglements of poetry and history, the powerful and the powerless, and desire and revulsion. Such tensions structure, for instance, the multilingual Pinay (Filipina) poetics of Barbara Jane Reyes and the mimetic desires and decadent stylings of Tejada.

In describing Borzutzky’s poetry, Johannes Göransson outlines a corollary aspect of this historical orientation: the fugitive transport of unknown, disavowed, and discomfiting traditions and histories from the occluded spaces of American empire, all of which challenge the dominant order.²⁶ These traditions threaten equally the ahistorical nihilism of some modes of conceptual poetry and the ironic detachment of official verse culture, in Charles Bernstein’s well-known term. Transporting these histories into the archive exposes a lacuna in US culture, where the ongoing consequences of US imperialism, especially in Latin America, are obscured. In this volume, such transport takes various shapes, though each shares a suspicion of convention. Introducing a poetry forum, On Race and Innovation, in a 2015 issue of boundary 2, Dawn Lundy Martin wrote,

Poetry in this historical moment that takes up race as a concern or poetry written by racialized subjects must, almost by necessity, step outside of conventional knowledges, languages, and approaches to the poem if it is going to say anything of any importance at all. Convention, really, is a killer. […] If there is a possibility for poetics and poetry that innovates something outside of this embedded dichotomy [of marked and unmarked bodies], together the writers and artists included in this dossier disrupt the rules, crack open the game, in a kind of collective disorganization.²⁷

Another way of putting this collective disorganization is that the fourteen poets gathered here, in various ways, embrace the spirit of Alice Notley’s poetics of disobedience.²⁸ Consider Kapil’s aspiration to a literature not made from literature. Take Torres’s diasporous poetics, Urayoán Noel’s term for writing that is exposed on all surfaces to unexpected, even unwelcome, languages. Sift through Mauricio Kilwein Guevara’s densely woven palimpsests of Colombian history, which his poetry encounters but refuses to explain to North American readers. And brace for Borzutzky’s grotesque fables in which historical atrocities haunt and torment.

Second, many of the poets use documentary forms. Mark Nowak has described documentary poetry as a set of aesthetic practices with a range of tools, most prominently appropriation, quotation, and the use of multiple media. For Nowak, these practices can be placed along a continuum from subjective first-person auto-ethnographies to objective third-person documentarian tendencies.²⁹ As in The New Poetics (Kevin Young, Spahr, Nowak, and Goldsmith) and Poetics Across North America (Philip, Lisa Robertson, and C. D. Wright), many of the poets gathered here (Alcalá, Borzutzky, Hong, Kapil, and Perez, most explicitly) work on this continuum. Poets and critics have recently begun taking up in earnest the questions raised by and the aesthetic possibilities presented by docupoetry, with renewed critical interest in Muriel Rukeyser and other groundbreaking documentary poets. In addition to incisive writings by Susan Briante, Philip Metres, and David Ray Vance, Joseph Harrington has examined how the rise of documentary forms and impulses has put tremendous pressure on Poetry as a generic category and utopian ideal.³⁰ Harrington identifies the ways in which documentary poetics challenges the subjective individual experiences that are the realm of lyric by engaging collective histories, which are often bound up with the forces of alienation and oppression related to conquest, colonization, and global capitalism.

This shift from an ostensibly pure poetry untainted by facts or events (Romantic and Symbolist lyric ideals, respectively) has, Harrington notes, produced a long trail of critical dismissals of documentary poetry (and topical political poetry generally) as artistically inferior. Given these contexts, Harrington proposes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a new (non) genre. Like creative nonfiction, he writes,

creative nonpoetry defines itself over-against a genre which historically has refused its content, but which it often resembles quite a bit. Creative nonpoetry borrows and burrows from the traditional conventions of the poetic; or mashes them up; or disclaims them altogether, by turns. It can contain verse, prose, dialogue, pictures.

‘Creative nonpoetry,’ Harrington concludes in Docupoetry and Archive Desire, is a way of describing what actually-existing poetry has become in the US, over the last twenty years or so—an indeterminate space where the histories of genres clash, combine, morph, or dissolve. We are not advocating for the use of Harrington’s (non)generic designation.³¹ Rather, his description of actually-existing poetry and his emphasis on creative freedom foreground how the poetic ferment in recent decades has overflowed and undone generic boundaries. In sum, Harrington’s partial remapping of contemporary poetry sheds new light on some influential precursor texts for this volume’s poets (that is, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera).³² Most capaciously, it provides a sufficiently wide aperture for viewing the writing praxes of creative freedom of each of this volume’s fourteen poets, who collectively borrow from, mash-up, and disclaim numerous genres.³³

Similar generic concerns entangled in the politics of representation and memory have given rise to undocumentary practices among Latina/o poets. Juan Felipe Herrera has theorized an undocumentary writing, while Alcalá’s first collection, Undocumentaries, investigates the limits of representational language key to documentary forms. Her title also alludes to undocumented persons, who are paradoxically invisible, anonymous, and rightless, even as their marked bodies function as media and political spectacles. Undocumentary poetics thus calls into question the clarity and lucidity typically valued in lyric and documentary forms, while also troubling the narrow epistemological foundations of nation-state citizenship. Such poetic practices make space for radical ontologies that emerge from outside of the state and circulate in and out of (and beyond) genres. In reading Perez’s poetics, the critic Paul Lai calls the unincorporated territories of the United States (colonies such as Guam and Puerto Rico) the discontiguous states of America.³⁴ For many of these poets, poetry of witness (what Perez refers to as writing from) and documentary poetry offer necessary tools, with notable shortcomings, for writing against the dissolution of their communities.³⁵ On many political and cartographic maps, Perez writes in the introduction to his first book, from unincorporated territory [hacha], Guam does not appear at all.

Third, this group of poets has often turned resolutely to narrative forms, to prose, and to the sentence as the basic unit of the poem, over against the syllable, image, or line. Although many write prose poems (see Alcalá, Hedge Coke, Hong, Hume, Kilwein Guevara, Reyes, and Tejada), this sort of sentence is both more systematic and more dissonant and unpredictable than the prototypical prose poem. For one, it often structures entire books, rather than discrete poems. In the lineage of writers such as Juliana Spahr, Maggie Nelson, Laura Mullen, Claudia Rankine, and Lisa Robertson, these poets’ sentences vary among sinuous, matter-of-fact, fragmented, and elliptical. Borzutzky and Kapil are self-described failed novelists who foreground the dual meaning of sentence in their writing—to compose in its logic and form, and to endure its punishment and isolation. Giménez Smith and Kilwein Guevara are writing novels. Blanchfield’s autobiographical essays, Proxies, like Giménez Smith’s prose memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, employs lyric intensity, affect, and condensation. The title of Hedge Coke’s prose memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, charts its poetic tools—archetype, list, parataxis, myth, symbol.³⁶ Like Kapil’s fragmented sentences and Borzutzky’s accretive sentences, Moten’s shaped prose in his collection Little Edges and Perez’s islands of haibun (similar to concrete poems) move, at different paces, into paragraphs rather than into stanzas. Anne Boyer’s equation of literature and pornography, in Garments Against Women, is instructive for reading these poets’ sentences—their density resists commodification, excerpting, and display.³⁷ What’s more, their turn toward the sentence is bound up in poetry’s increasing visibility in the public sphere, with prose offering traction for engaging more readers. But it is also part of the productivity culture of the United States, in which poets must have many sorts of publications.

In this sense, Maria Damon values poetic activity—processes rather than products—as a capacious index to the forms and locations of contemporary poetry. Poetic activity can be seen as the shared ground for the engagements and aesthetics of this volume’s poets. One significant mode of poetic activity identified by Damon toggles between poetic and ethnographic writing. Comparing the ethnography to its source texts (field notes, journals, diaries), Damon indicates that just as these sources embody the poetic, the ethnography embodies the novelistic. She describes their difference in terms of thin and thick description. The thin source materials display an affective welter of expression, allusive suggestiveness, parataxis, indeterminacy, and a nonhierarchical, depthless deterritorialized egalitarianism of information. In contrast, thick description is organized, narrative, novelistic, finished.³⁸ It is notable that many of this volume’s poets use both modes, juxtaposing and blending them in inventive ways. We might posit that thickness addresses the global circulation of capital, information, cultures, and bodies, while thinness entails the local interventions from sites of poetic activity. This dialogical process characterizes Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, where the Historian and the Guide use detached prose vignettes and Desert pidgin lyric speech, respectively. It is also exemplified by Hong’s frontier and speculative boomtowns in Engine Empire. Each book is globalized, polyglot, and hyper-colloquial, suffused with the tropes of capital, pop culture, high theory, and the corporate boardroom. And each wryly courts and subverts in inimitable fashion (ironically, in part, through Hong’s brilliant imitations) a stereotype identified by Wang. Poets of color, Wang writes, are assumed to produce writing that functions mimetically and sociologically as an ethnographic window into another ‘subculture,’ wherein the poet functions as a native informant, like a Chinatown tour guide.³⁹ For two final examples, this dialogic process describes the documentary field notes and journalistic meditations concerning the feral wolf-children in India that structure Kapil’s Hum-animal, a Project for Future Children,⁴⁰ and Tejada’s Art Institute Service Bureau guidebook parodies (recalling Lisa Robertson’s Office of Soft Architecture) in Exposition Park.

Most comprehensively, the poetic activity of this volume’s poets might be best articulated through Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation.⁴¹ Glissant provides a theoretical footing while also suggesting more direct, practical questions about how to read these poets. How do the social engagements of dissimilar poets, with divergent aesthetics, identities, and locations vis-à-vis the academy and the poetry world, relate to each other? How can they be viewed as participating in a common project or, to borrow Moten’s term, in the life of an undercommons? Several aspects of Glissant’s argument are salient for answering these questions. The main themes of a Poetics of Relation, according to Glissant, are as follows: the dialectics between the oral and the written, the thought of multilingualism, the balance between the present moment and duration, the questioning of literary genres, the power of the baroque, [and] the nonprojectile imaginary construct.⁴² A reader would be hard pressed to find a more apt, encompassing, and evocative collective description of the fourteen poets in this volume. At its core, poetry of social engagement embodies the movements of a Poetics of Relation: it would be multivalent, multidirectional, radically interrelational, centerless, constantly shifting and in-process, alert and sensitive, curious and bold.

Yet it is also crucial to point out that poetry of social engagement isn’t necessarily triumphant, meliorist, or even hopeful. In contrast, it often takes failure as the ground of writing, social life, and ultimately political possibility. In introducing Kapil’s work, Lundy Martin says that her writing succeeds in its inability.⁴³ Tejada opens his collection Full Foreground by articulating a failed practice that is [b]ent back more severely than the other moderns.⁴⁴ Torres, in his mock-manifesto The Theorist Has No Samba!, proclaims, I choose a revelry of failure. So, too, Blanchfield’s single source essays, Proxies, adapted here for his poetics statement, permit, even court, errors. Likewise, the preference for messiness that Borzutzky espouses in his collection In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy.⁴⁵ Such reconsiderations of failure validate, following Judith Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure and Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism, possibilities outside of the logics of success and failure with which we currently live.⁴⁶ For Halberstam, as for many of these poets, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, [and] not knowing create space for social engagement on very different terms and grounds than that of the dominant culture.⁴⁷

II

Because her surname comes at the beginning of the alphabet, Rosa Alcalá has in recent years opened several anthologies.⁴⁸ Her poetry offers a provocative entrée into many of the debates in this volume and in contemporary poetry generally. Alcalá’s poetics statement "Poetics of Not-Mother Tongue meditates on the contours of one of these debates: the slippery relationships among languages, origins, and poems. When the poem is estranged from the poet’s mother tongue, she suggests, the mother’s body, her language, and her myriad historical figurations will haunt the poem. Where and how, Alcalá asks, does her mother’s tongue—Spanish—reside in and circulate within her English-language poems? These poems, as Alcalá writes, seem so comfortable in their English-language skin. John Alba Cutler’s essay Rosa Alcalá’s Aesthetics of Alienation takes up these forms of alienation, multiplicity, and intergenerational tension. Indeterminacy is not valuable for its own sake in Alcalá’s poetry, Cutler argues, but instead serves as a way of posing and responding to material historical circumstances." From her first collection, Undocumentaries, to 2017’s MyOTHER TONGUE, Cutler traces in Alcalá’s poetry the development of an aesthetics attuned to the ways in which migration, class, and gender shape cultural production. In poems such as A Girl Leaves the Croft, Alcalá interrupts spare (anti-)pastoral lyric with incisive, disenchanted fragments. The poem ends:

[…] This is art in the age of ribbon

production. She stands so still

for the image:

A flash of pussy. The Industrial Age.

For Alcalá, gendered labor, particularly in the factories of Paterson, New Jersey, where her immigrant parents worked, comprises the specific historical condition from which investigations of the possibilities and limits of poetic language emerge.

Brian Blanchfield’s writing is also concerned with the relationships among class, belonging, and language, through a queer lens. He begins his poetics statement, excerpted from his essay On Abstraction, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source, by expressing his distrust of poets’ discussions of the materiality of language. Instead, he locates numina in Dickinson’s poetry and in the objects, locations, and words of daily life. These numina contain the enigmatic traces of a metaphysics wherein psychic, linguistic, spiritual, sexual, and communal energies gather. In his essay In the Dark with Brian Blanchfield, Chris Nealon examines the difficulty of beginnings in Blanchfield’s syntactically complex and densely allusive poetry. Nealon shows how the development of a gay male lineage—via Whitman, Crane, O’Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery—in Blanchfield’s poetry has produced an aesthetic that is elusive and multilayered, even as it is inviting: a deliberately difficult Whitmanianism. Echoing Cutler on Alcalá, Nealon argues that in Blanchfield’s poetry, spatial and grammatical derangement is not meant as an alienation effect in the traditional avant-gardist way, but is used as a means to startle us into recognizing our closeness to the poem. Nealon concludes that Blanchfield disorients in order to attract, a quality seen in the poems included here from his collections Not Even Then and A Several World.

In addition to sharing a publisher (Nightboat Books), Daniel Borzutzky shares Blanchfield’s preference for poetic series and his distrust of poets’ recourse to distancing phrases such as the materiality of language to explain their writing. That’s where their similarities end. While Blanchfield’s complex, decorous syntax conceals its sources and doubles back on its narrative turns, Borzutzky’s grotesque fables bare all. His narratives disorient and repel in order to jolt readers into recognizing imperialist and state-sponsored violence, from Chile to Chicago. At first glance, Borzutzky’s poetry is the most dystopian of this volume’s poets. And yet he is also determined to articulate a durable ethics that can be embodied in an aesthetics. In Pardon Me Mr. Borzutzky / If, Kristin Dykstra places Borzutzky’s search for an ethical language in a Chilean lineage that foregrounds the poet’s transnational, diasporic, and inter-genre forms. Her title alludes to a short poem by the Chilean antipoet Nicanor Parra, which itself alludes to the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. Borzutzky’s poetics statement likewise builds momentum toward continuums of language, borders, translation, genre, and identity, where an ethics emerges in the shifting relations between self and other, north and south, English and Spanish. Dykstra’s essay focuses on the ways in which Borzutzky’s sentences accumulate into a chant-like escalation of feeling through repetition and variation, often describing some blend of imagined and real atrocities. In Borzutzky’s long, looping sentences, the dystopic vein can also be airy, full of breath and luminous, as in Let Light Shine Out of Darkness. Here the unpunctuated opening sentences—I live in a body that does not have enough light in it // For years, I did not know that I needed to have more light—build pages later into a body that is paradoxically and powerfully dissolved into its own resistance, prepared to confront the forces of violence his poems chart relentlessly.

In her poetics statement, Carmen Giménez Smith cites Borzutzky as part of the living lineage of uncompromising agitation in which her work participates. Literary and political, this confrontational tradition nonetheless makes space for irony, humor, and raucous play. For Giménez Smith, this form of play, diablura, combines an irascibility sourced in third-wave feminism, Latinidad, and twists on (and twisted revisions of) the North American avant-garde, trenchant media stereotypes of fiery Latina excess, and the resourceful immigrant’s American Dream alike. Giménez Smith’s statement also foregrounds the way in which a socially engaged poet serves in many roles—as mentor, advocate, publisher, and editor—of which writing is but one part. Joyelle McSweeney’s essay ‘The Call for Reversal is Native’: The Paradox of the Mother Tongue in the Work of Carmen Giménez Smith places Giménez Smith’s writing in a lyric tradition, with several differences. Among these are the ways in which her sequences and list poems, such as the defining gender fables and Parts of an Autobiography, respectively, in Milk & Filth, stretch the limits of lyric inspiration and originality. While Giménez Smith joins Alcalá in exploring how mothers and mother tongues define subjectivity and art, she has been more direct in her attempts both to condense the lyric—as in the propulsive energy, tensile steeliness, and startling lucidity of the Be Recorder sequence excerpted here—and to expand it to its breaking point—as in her memoir of lyric prose Bring Down the Little Birds.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has also published in a variety of genres and forms, from her memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer to Blood Run, a free verse play. Like Giménez Smith, moreover, Hedge Coke embraces the multiple roles of literary citizenship, serving as an advocate for and editor of other poets. Hedge Coke’s edited volume Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, for instance, collects the work of Indigenous poets from across the Americas.⁴⁹ Beginning with the collection Dog Road Woman, Hedge Coke has plumbed the conjunctions between working-class and Indigenous lifeways, dramatized in the autobiographical poem The Change included here. Alongside Perez, she is the poet in this volume who is most directly invested in combining art and activism, in her case on behalf of Indigenous communities and environmental causes. Chadwick Allen’s "Resurrecting the Serpent, Reactivating Good Earth: Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run" decodes the book’s intricate mathematical forms, forms that figuratively reproduce and decolonize an Indigenous earthworks, Blood Run, on what is now the border of Iowa and South Dakota:

[The] structural complex Hedge Coke builds for and between her Snake Mound and Stone Snake Effigy personas, intricately designed to juxtapose animal and geometric forms, exemplifies her larger project: to build a contemporary poetics between an activist witnessing of destruction and the explication of an older form of Indigenous writing, an expressive Indigenous technology based in Indigenous science.

Allen’s exacting intellectual labor reveals Hedge Coke’s own labor in modeling the large-scale geometric earthworks of the Blood Run site and the monumental scientific and physical labor of Indigenous workers and thinkers that has been subsequently erased by conquest, colonization, and the ongoing systematic repression of native histories and presence in the United States. Although Allen does not make this argument, Blood Run is site-specific conceptual poetry of the highest order.

Like Giménez Smith, Cathy Park Hong has reshaped the lyric, and like Hedge Coke, her persona, voice, and narrative poems build monumental structures. However, she is more explicitly interested in the languages of globalization than is either of these poets, and her use of frontier tropes and speculative forms (the American West, the Vegas- and Dubai-esque Desert, the Chinese Boomtown, and the World Cloud) differentiate her mother figures and tongues from Giménez Smith’s and Alcalá’s. In Building Inheritance: Cathy Park Hong’s Social Engagement in the Speculative Age, Danielle Pafunda contends that Hong’s poetic boomtowns disenchant us of any pre-Google romanticism. In this light, consider this passage in Engine Empire, which dramatizes the migration from the countryside to Boomtown Shangdu. Hong’s inventive global pidgin distills thorny truths about the gendered and linguistic valences of capitalist globalization:

Ma has passed the village gathered and wailed w’ trumpet lungs,

while I daydreamed of leaving these parched shriven hills,

traveling far into the mirror cast of Shangdu’s

chandeliering lights,

Then that melon-bellied landlord, a genius

for making tithes, skulked by and tithed me, tithed the grievers,

who quickly scrambled to escape the tithe,

tithed our ma for the burial.

Even the dead don’t escape the tithe.

In Thinking Its Presence, Wang argues that the exclusion of Asian Americans from the category of ‘native speaker’ of English […] surfaces as much in the formal structures as in the thematic content of Asian American poetry.⁵⁰ Like the passage just quoted, Hong’s poetics statement dramatizes this process. It displaces the centrality of whiteness and of standard English by reveling in the prolific use of bad Engrish. Pafunda examines how Hong’s three collections mash-up numerous bad Englishes by developing, with rapaciousness, a vast range of aesthetic tools (slang, dialects, accents, pidgins, K-Pop, and hip-hop, as her poem Notorious, included here, shows) and literary modes (lyric, parodic, speculative, ethnographic, frontier). Pafunda ultimately shows Hong creating an innovative poetics that, like Giménez Smith’s and Moten’s, charts its own vanguard path, disavowing the raced and gendered gatekeeping of the avant-garde.

Christine Hume’s poetry initially reveals fewer clues to its modes of social engagement. At the outset of Utter Wilderness: The Poetry of Chris tine Hume, Molly Bendall notes that Hume’s work is difficult to place, due in part to her focused exploration of wildernesses, both physical (Alaska, in her collection Alaskaphrenia) and metaphysical. Hume’s sound experiments, along with her associative and interrogative poems, instantiate her abiding interest in the methods of scientific inquiry, in cognition, and in preverbal perception. Her poetics statement Hum underscores the centrality of voice—not in the lyric, expressive sense, but rather in the aural properties of sounding, hearing, and processing—to her poetics. She writes, My attempts to reproduce the shadow voice are all hostages of paradox: unfathomable source, surplus effect. Hume’s auditory practices, lullabies, primordial humming, and hypnotic effects all dramatize the paradoxes attending the limits of human cognition, the origins of the self, and the porous boundaries between self and other. Joining the thread taken up by Alcalá, Giménez Smith, and Hong, Hume’s soundings offer further insights into the maternal body and mother tongue. Bendall posits that Hume’s poetry can be read through the lens of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, which asks "what language does rather than what it means. In this sense, Hume’s performances, which replicate the doubling of voices or a ‘duet’ […] by superimposing other voices or sounds over her own voice," highlight and magnify the active social dimensions of even the most seemingly private, embodied experiences.

Bhanu Kapil is also interested in sound effects, preverbal experiences, and cognitive disjunctions, but in the ways that they characterize the violence endured by immigrants, women, and people of color.⁵¹ In her poetics statement, Kapil explains, The parts of immigrant life that are harder to write about—sexual trauma, physical violence, gender violence towards women—take up a different block of narrative time. She goes on to show how her writing creates a syntax to match this disjointed narrative time:

I wanted to match—roughly pinned to the sentence: the contractile-extensive tissues—throes, convulsions, peristalsis—of the body: in these moments—which are not moments: a syntax. But also: in the same place—the paragraph, you could say: the rough, overlapping and acoustic arcs of the violence to come.

With Borzutzky, Kapil shares a content (violence, disgust, abjection) and a form: the sentence and the paragraph, which build into disorienting narratives. Like Hong, she reinvents speculative modes, in Kapil’s case via the figure of the monster. As Eunsong Kim argues in Perpetual Writing, Institutional Rupture, and the Performance of No: The Poetics of Bhanu Kapil, Kapil’s five books overthrow generic conventions. Kapil’s meditations on the immigrant as an inassimilable figure that blackens, and thus radicalizes, literature, Kim asserts, can be understood via the critic Lisa Lowe’s immigrant acts, which reject the immigrant’s vertical relationship to the state.⁵² The novel—the assimilationist immigrant form par excellence—represents at once the idealized imperial dream of literary production, the condition of failure for black and immigrant bodies, and a polite form of institutionalized violence. As the excerpts from Kapil’s five unclassifiable books show, her failed novels resemble field notes (à la Maria Damon), offering glimpses of what may come after Literature.

Mauricio Kilwein Guevara also addresses elements of immigrant life that are harder to write about. His poetics statement begins in the vein of the immigrant narrative, but quickly veers into the more unusual (and entangled) territory of coal barons and publishing titans, cancer and sputum, Gertrude Stein and John Berryman. These moves are instructive for reading his poems, which resist closure, wholeness, and clarity: in other words, the tropes of assimilation. Instead, Kilwein Guevara’s poems are frequently opaque, surreal, fragmented, disorienting, and evacuated, exploring what he calls the epistemology of loss. In Mauricio Kilwein Guevara’s Scavenger Infrapoetics, I argue that his infrapoetics is an aesthetic variation on a politics from below. That is, the poems sift through cultural detritus for the discarded and disavowed, composing a scavenger poetics from waste and compost, and through masks of anonymity and dissimulation. These features explain, in part, his poetry’s uncategorizable store of allusions, radiating outward from his native Colombia and his childhood home of Pittsburgh. They coalesce in Kilwein Guevara’s theory of the poem, poema, as a combustible and miniaturist form. Paradoxically, he writes, the tinier the space, the greater the poem’s expansive energy. If you want to write about violence, is there a more fragile cosmos than the testicles of a small child? Across his prose poems, disjunctive lyrics, and associative and performance pieces, poema is paradoxically constituted via what it excludes.

Combustible aptly describes Fred Moten’s poetry. From the congregation of proper names in B Jenkins to the shaped prose of Little Edges, Moten writes poems with propulsive melodies, intricate rhythmic syntax, and sinuous enjambments. Take the poem Metoike, from Hughson’s Tavern, in which Moten creates a portrait of one of them impossible domestics, an enslaved woman whose labor finds an impossible rhythm between revolutionary strategy and selfless love:

Her hand blew up inside blew up

the house inside where she work

to blow it up and somehow love

them while she be cleaning up

and scheming. Sewing seeds from

reading laying out with reeds her

hand blew up inside. In her air

she have a migrant curve her hand

blew up inside. She harass the

sheets she fold by singing

hellhounds in the crease. This

was her air and hand.⁵³

Like this volume’s selections, Metoike animates via the abundant resources of black speech and black music the inquiries in Moten’s poetics statement. With a nod to Charles Olson’s projective verse (by way of Amiri Baraka), Moten asks how a black poet can juggle contradictory impulses and imperatives, all in order to create a poem that is committed to as much going on as possible. As Brent Hayes Edwards argues in Sounding the Open Secret: The Poetics of Fred Moten, Moten’s writing participates in the tradition of black radical poetics that is attuned to a dizzying array of sonic forms. It is in precisely this sense, Edwards shows, that Moten’s poetry and criticism converge: It is a poetry that refuses to relinquish the impulse to theory even in the throes of its music. Both create space for a black undercommons (of which impossible domestics are part) to enact fugitive soundings and departures, where, as in Borzutzky, ethics and aesthetics are in parallel play (it’s not that I want to say). While Moten’s fugitive poetics shares some characteristics with Kilwein Guevara’s infrapoetics, his poetics statement asks a question at the heart of many of this volume’s poets: Can we protect the block in breaking it? Moving between tearing down oppressive institutions and building liberatory structures, Moten’s poems are contrapuntal, rowdy, and joyous. His focus on a black maternal ecology, alluded to in his poetics statement and in the title of his collection B Jenkins (his mother’s name), moreover, puts Moten’s writing in dynamic conversation with this volume’s women poets.

Craig Santos Perez shares with Moten Olson’s influence and the impetus toward an emancipatory poetics. Just as Moten’s radical energies emerge from and invigorate a black undercommons, Perez’s innovative poetic forms delineate their source—the island of Guam (Guahün), an unincorporated territory (read: colony) of the United States. Perez’s four books comprise an ongoing series dispatched "from the colonial palimpsest of Guam, which has been conquered and colonized by Spain, Japan, and the United States. His book series draws on Chamorro language, mythology, history, and culture, along with avant-garde poetics and cultural theory. This volume’s selection, from aerial roots," is drawn from his second book, from unincorporated territory [saina], where the sections are interspersed among other series. "from aerial roots exemplifies the typography of Perez’s poetry. In his poetics statement, Perez describes his work as book is lands and song-maps. These poetic archipelagos create a powerful documentary poetry that juxtaposes appropriated source texts, including tourist literature and military documents (Nowak’s third-person practice), with autobiographical writing (Nowak’s first-person auto-ethnographic practice). In Tidal Poetics: The Poetry of Craig Santos Perez, J. Michael Martinez explores how the anthropological concept of preterrain" that is advanced in from unincorporated territory [saina] constructs a solidity without ground. Martinez argues that Perez’s tidal poetics produces a unique decolonial epistemology and ontology with manifold consequences for our understandings of history, philosophy, and poetry.

Like Perez, Barbara Jane Reyes combines autobiographical writing, documentary pastiche, and decolonial practice. As in Hong and Perez, moreover, Reyes’s multiple languages decenter English, as her poetics statement To Decenter English announces. With eight short poems included in her selection here, Reyes’s collection Poeta en San Francisco established her singular version of a Pinay poetics. The title’s allusion to Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York simultaneously orients and misdirects the reader.