Trapped in this high-performance culture, let’s
suspend,
all disbelief, ignore the elephants in the
room.
I won’t remember that avant-garde chaos frees
the writing
machine’s choked circuits.
Our abstractions stink of pure gibberish and no
one
notices the false pundits.
Look through the mirror, it’s the information
Age, where
every surface is 1793 brilliant urine requests
scum wolf,
and nothing shines. (“Human Resources”)
The
past few days I’ve been going through Social Poesis: The Poetry of Rachel Zolf, selected with an introduction by Heather Milne (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019), the latest title in the expansive Laurier Poetry Series of critical selecteds. Editor Heather
Milne assembled the collection Social
Poesis by selecting from Canadian expat poet Rachel Zolf’s five trade
poetry collections—Her absence, this
wanderer (Ottawa ON: BuschekBooks, 1999), Masque (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2004), Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007), Neighbour Procedure (Coach House Books,
2010) and Janey’s Arcadia (Coach
House Books, 2014)—as well as from her online digital poetic project The Tolerance Project
(http://thetoleranceproject.blogspot.com). I’ve long been fascinated by Zolf’s
project-based work, something that has become more overt as she continues to
publish, utilized to examine human interaction, and a variety of social and
cultural histories. The book-length Human
Resources, for example, was a magnificent examination of human interaction
and dislocation through the corporate language; a language, it would seem,
deliberately constructed to dehumanize. Zolf might utilize external means to
produce work, but her concerns are deeply human, from the intimate to the
professional to the historical, and the dark elements that so often are
deliberately set aside, as Milne writes as part of her “Introduction” to the
collection:
In
one of the poems in Human Resources,
Zolf cites fellow Canadian poet Anne Carson, who asks, in relation to Paul
Celan’s severely redacted poetry, “What is lost when words are wasted? And
where is the human store to which such goods are gathered?” Zolf responds to
Carson’s question with a question of her own: “When you ‘cleanse words and
salvage what is cleansed,’ so you collect what’s been scrubbed off or what
remains?” In other words, do you salvage the grime that has been removed, or do
you valorize the beautiful language that has been scrubbed immaculately clean?”
What
is helpful in this collection is the sequence of notes presented at the opening
of sections that provide some context to the book/project being excerpted, such
as the note on Masque that informs
that “Zolf has compared this book to a play in which multiple characters are
trying to talk at the same time, creating a polyphonic series of poems.” to the
note on Janey’s Arcadia, that opens
with: “Zolf makes use of optical character recognition software (OCR) that
scans PDFs of archival texts into Word documents. OCR often misreads words and
inserts strange symbols and characters into the text. Rather than correct these
errors, Zolf embraces them as part of her compositional strategy. The glitches
disrupt the poems that make them difficult to read, but they also become a site
where meaning is generated.” This book exists as both an impressive overview of
Zolf’s ongoing work, and a wonderful introduction to what she’s accomplished so
far, much of which, I would argue, hasn’t received the attention it so clearly
deserves. As Zolf herself writes, to close her “Afterword”:
One
wag famously suggested that “philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition,” and I’ll wag back that
the writer of any composition ought to take responsibility for the stance they
are writing from and how what they write relates to the world they live in. I
am a white-skinned, middle-class, Canadian, secular Jewish, genderqueer lesbian
poet and thinker and educator and lover and abuse survivor and also sax player
and other identities as well. I am here (like and not like Abraham) cloaked in
ambivalence. Do these words matter when forty-nine mostly Latinx and black
queer and trans people are massacred in Orlando while they dance? There is the
so-called constative and the so-called performative. There is testimony and
there are four chimneys blown beyond knowledge to deformed freedom. There is
author, vendor, rhetor … all witness and sometimes survivor. There is a poem
and there is un essai, a try, a
poethical wager. A traviler is made. There is a monster in the neighbour’s
face. That alien traumatic kernel of Das
Ding in the Nebenmensch adjoins
and hystericizes me as the both/and that exceeds and opens thought. yes and no
are unsplit neighbours housed in abrasive proximity in the poem. Du liest is you read and you glean.
There is a thinking encrypted in silence and a thinking encrusted in noise.
There is a listening to what is unsayable. There is blur when I try to see one
thing. There is a reach, a touch, impress. There is a limit and a limit and a
limit and, peut-être, a threshold,
break. As the impure products of America go crazy, there is un éveil, a queerly errant arousal.
There is a veil, (im)ovable. No One arrives to witness and adjust. There is an
experience that cannot be translated. No One can drive the car. There is an
experience that cannot be undone. I am undone. There is a time that could have
been then and a time that will have been now and a time always already to come.
These coincide. We are what we gain from this disorientation.
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