OH DON’T
don’t valorize
oh don’t
valorize
strength
which hasn’t
actually
brought you
here
One
of the more impressive collections I’ve seen lately is Philadelphia poet,social work student and mental health worker Marion Bell’s full-length debut austerity (Philadelphia PA: Radiator
Press, 2019). austerity is
constructed with two short opening pieces—“OH DON’T” and “Five Years”—and three
longer assemblages of stand-alone poems, stretches of prose and lyric fragments:
“AUSTERITY I,” “AUSTERITY II,” “DEVOTION” and “GAY GROUP.” Bell’s poems are
expansive, powerful and sharp, and engaged very much in power—whether personal,
interpersonal or political—as well as the politics of work and working class,
queer identity and the failures humanity to properly care for itself, and the
limitations of the lyric, and the lyric “I.” As “AUSTERITY II” writes: “My poem
fails when the I that is the I of the poem or the I of my life fails to relate.”
Leah showed up that spring. The spring after
the saddest winter.
She showed up at a job I got fired from.
She appeared there out of nowhere.
(At the big gay doctor’s office)
a harbinger
I guess
of the nurses we would be
to each other. (“AUSTERITY II”)
Do you
think of your work as political and how does that manifest itself?
Yes, totally (though in the most idiosyncratic
way). Partly I think it’s important just to keep naming the reality of things
over and over again in as many ways as we can. There’s this violence we live in
and we’re not allowed to name it. White supremacy, heteropatriarchy,
capitalism. These are forms of violence that have the power but there’s all
this gas lighting about the reality of oppression. Naming is a gesture that
might allow us to begin to move toward another world. So I’m thinking about
structural oppression and I’m thinking of the kinds of feminism that could
teach us to ask the right questions. That work against all the failures of
middleclass white cissexist feminism.
Saying all those things, my poems are starting
from a very personal place. A lot of what writing is for me is an attempt to
make space. Like I’m actually a very repressed WASP. I keep myself on a leash.
I try hard to be “good” in the ways people assigned female are supposed to be.
So my writing is really a battle against myself as a mild mannered nice girl. The Abjector was totally my attempt at a
personal therapy, an exorcism of self hatred that was ruining my life. But part
of what I realized writing that was that my self hatred was coming from my
failure to be socially normal, to make money, to be successful. And that’s
totally political.
So I’m interested in the places social and
political oppressions manifest in psychic life. I’m also interested in the ways
oppressed people find to love themselves and survive and make art. I wrote a
weird long poem a year or so ago called Queer
Theory for Losers where I was trying to work a lot of these things out. I’m
trying to celebrate being a loser in some ways and it’s totally to try put a
counterbalance in my own life to an American hatred of failure, poverty and
weakness. My own version of “queer theory” is ways of thinking that honor and
make space for vulnerability.
I’m also walking lines. The political poems I
wrote last year, I’m not sure how effective they are. I was trying to get in
touch with my anger. Which sounds hokey but is actually a matter of survival
especially for feminized subjects that are denied access to their own anger.
And I was trying to fight against a pressure to be post-gay. I really don’t
feel post-gay at all. I feel really gay all the time. They were attempts at
interventions, mostly interventions in my life but also micro interventions in
the world. Micro interventions against micro aggressions. Any time I try to
speak for experiences that I haven’t had I start running the risk of being an
appropriative self righteous asshole. But I have to try to walk the lines, I
have to try to see what I can say. I’m also interested in the shadow side of a
political desire. How easy it is to be self aggrandizing, tokenizing, myopic,
complicit and guiltily trying to cover your complicity.
Wait, are
you kind of saying that it's the feelings that make the poems political?
Ha, ha. Sort of, I think. I mean I always want
writing to be part of desire. Like the desire to have ethics and for that to
mean something in the world. It’s all about feeling, there’s not really a
division between private love and social solidarity. And there’s not really a
line between myself and my poems. And sometimes I think it makes sense to be
super emotional in writing as a kind of resistance. I could make an argument
that emotion is devalued because it is associated with femininity and I’m sort
of making that argument in Queer Theory
for Losers. So like fuck you white straight men with nice careers and
theories, all I have are my fucking feelings and I’m going to do what I can
with them. That’s kind of an abject position and I feel like I may have taken
it as far as I want to but it makes sense to me sometimes.
Bell’s
poems explore a variety of questions, large and small, including: How does one
build through reduction? What responsibilities do the individual and the
collective have to each other? How does one create, continue, couple and
possibly love and feel love through such stripped-down loss? How does one
manage both care, and self-care? On the Elective Affinities site back in December 2009, a self-description that doesn’t feel
entirely out of date, Bell described her poetics as:
maybe a lyric that’s been fractured &
reassembled & broken again=maybe how someone writes who’s obsessed with the
new york school & lives in philadelphia=maybe the noise of the newly poor
& helplessly millennial=very local & personal cause it couldn’t be
otherwise=interested in a personal poetry that somehow avoids narcissism=
toward “the mysteries of subjectivity” everyday
Bell’s austerity does seem composed of a
highly personal lyric set against large movements and big ideas, one that
structures itself as an expansive, book-length collage of poems, prose and
fragments, working a lyric assemblage large enough to contain multitudes, from
the political to the intimately personal, and the places where those two ideas
not only meet, but are intertwined. As she writes in the poem “JULY,” included as
part of “AUSTERITY I”:
the recognition of
strangers
becomes very precious
a mantle
a mantilla
a heavy thing to carry
to make love in this sadness
or this heat
i’m repeating my standards of care
i’m repeating the standard of care
to feel feelings in public
with strangers
is
becoming
the most important thing
This
is a remarkable book, and a remarkably rich, layered and complex debut, one
with an endless array of depths I have yet to fully reach: “to rediscover
something you lived – you loved/ rather [.]” she writes, towards the end of the
collection. Bell writes from an open, wounded heart, one wary of possibility,
even as she fully embraces it. There is something quite magical happening here.
As she writes to end “AUSTERITY II”:
Forgive me these fragments
the connections I begin
to make
but that are elided
I think I started to write narrative poetry –
here
the story of love
which stutters
& is material
that happens also
while looking for work
so you can keep living
to undo
what work doe
help me to continue the story
that is interruption
love that is interruption
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