There is
space around
a heart. Sharp
frequency. Current,
thread. A smooth
stone
pocket.
two stones. No pocket
sound
on this side of
the event
no one could
say what
touch what sound
happened
never
the word “abide”
until
to fly
the urge
away. (Jill Magi, “WITHOUT/A RUIN”)
I’ve
long been a fan of the annual P-QUEUE
[see my review of the previous issue here], run out of the English Department
at SUNY-Buffalo, both for the strength and the variety of writing included (I am
frustrated that the first couple of issues, the only ones I seem to be missing,
remain out of print). The latest volume, #16, is subtitled “RUIN,” existing as
the third volume edited by poet Allison Cardon (she had a chapbook out a while ago with above/ground press, remember?). With new work by Christina Vega-Westhoff, Jill Magi, José Felipe Alvergue, Declan Gould, Aja Couchois Duncan, Dana Venerable, Robin Lee Jordan, Kayley Berezney, Zack Brown, Ken Chen
and A.A. Spencer, the poems in P-QUEUE
#16 seem to have been, if not composed to suit the theme, were certainly
selected (and possibly even solicited) around such. Referencing a sequence of
big screen disaster films in her introduction, editor Cardon writes:
I’d like to propose this volume as an antidote
to these disaster scripts. Ruins persist against the cultural wish for
guiltless destruction. Ruination do not just happen—ruins tell a story. How that
story goes—what sort of testament ruins make—is, of course, to be determined by
who is looking, what they are looking at, when and when their look occurs. Ruins
are not mute—like the poems in this volume, they speak volumes—and they also
enable and invite a particular sort of gaze. The work in this P-Queue locates this gaze in so many different spaces and animate it in
ways that challenge ready-to-hand ideas about ruin and responsibility, heroism
and progress.
Given
I’m new to the work of Jill Magi [see my review of her latest here], I’m
fascinated not only to see new work, but her statement on her extended
sequence, suggesting a shift in her thinking and her poetics, one that I look
forward to seeing further though. As Cardon writes of the piece in her
introduction (she writes briefly on all the work in the issue, which I find
glorious and impressive): “Jill Magi’s eviscerating elegy is also about
dwelling—how to stay in the vacuum created by loss—to faithfully map the
contours of that space without giving it borders, means or ends [.]” “My idea
of poetry changed at the bedside of two loved ones as they passed.” Magi
writes. “One passing so sudden and unimaginable, our family was turned inside
out. I saw myself failing, many times, to be present for those I love. There
was no blueprint.” She continues:
Until this event, I thought that poetry should
be for something political and I was wary of personal writing. Until I understood
that to sit with what is impossible is absolutely what poetry is for. This understanding
allowed me to see how untrained in poetry and in the political I actually was
and how difficult it was for me to abide with grieving, with the impossible,
which transcends whatever we call personal and whatever we call political.
This is to say that I do not have one
definitive thing to say about this topic. The poem comes from the middle of
this prying open but not opening into light—into something else red, hot,
nearly stifling.
I’m
also, obviously, rather fond of work by José Felipe Alvergue [see his recent Touch the Donkey interview here] and Aja
Couchois Duncan [see her recent Touch the Donkey interview here], so am pleased to see them. Alvergue’s work in the
issue, “Senescence,” exists as a cut-up, akin to Susan Howe’s work, but more
overtly political, as Cardon writes: “Geographically (in multiple senses), he
lays out the legal and political linkages of disease, insanity, communism, and
racial purity. Pointing to the transformative qualities of cultural amnesia and
starvation, such that ‘nothingness passes for its own memory,’ Alvergue argues
that borders and boundaries of various sorts pose as though they came from
nothing and yet have always been.” Duncan’s submission is another extended
selection “from The Intimacy Trials”
[the first “chapter” appears in the most recent issue of Touch the Donkey], as Cardon writes: “Meanwhile, in Aja Couchois
Duncan’s The Intimacy Trials we
witness a denial and erasure of historical and social reproduction that enables
many to avoid responsibility for the ongoing history of colonialism—not to
mention its reproduction and repetition in climate disaster [.]”
Some would say we live post life as if a
ghosting of. But we still taste the blood on our lips, still feel the crippling
longing for.
We are as real as any manifestation of the
perpetual present tense. Our dreams are sensorial. Cloaked in darkness we
rummage through our bodies until something settles into place. An elbow or
breast. The declension of a belly unfed.
Some nights we stuff our ears so we can’t hear
the calls. Switch, you say. You have warned us not to monogomate. But we our
soothed by these attachments. The habit, its echo, rests deep in our bones.
The
remainder of the issue is made up of names I was previously unfamiliar with,
which is always exciting (and a big part of why I return to the journal). There
is quite the range of impressive work here, but the names that really jumped
out at me were Buffalo, New York poet, translator and arielist Christina
Vega-Westhoff, for her “Three Poems,” and Buffalo, New York poet Zack Brown,
for his “Poems,” that Cardon describes as “ruined by reference, a semantic
allegory for the epistemology of ruin itself: as we shuttle back and forth
between the poems, their blanks, and their footnotes, we’re forced to look
backwards to recontextualize and to determine whether or not we hav made any
progress.” His poems include:
what ruins
in me
my perfect home
becomes useless
its fenestration
the result
of missing gambrel
chasm
blemishes
veil in ivy
sustain in stone
the rootless
stability
can be undone
as can sainthood
—ask Eustace!
I’m
really appreciating that most if not all of the included writers have short
notes or statements following their sections, allowing both a way of seeing
their individual selections and larger works, as well as a glimpse into how the
issue was most likely shaped (a call or solicitation for works relating, whether
directly or indirectly, to the stated theme). There is such a fine prevision to
Brown’s poems, one I appreciate, even as it falls apart, as Brown begins in his
“Notes”:
These poems follow the logic of ruin—the logic
of the sign of ruin to be exact, though it is always in and as language that
such things come to pass. Ruins fall. A ruining is a falling and a ruin is that
site which falls. We should say that falling is kept alive in the ruin, which
itself ruins. The relevant entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, insofar as
they guide these poems, may be of some use to the reader. Ruin, as linguistic
signifier, is both internal synchronic logic and external diachronic history. The
wager in these poems is to think that signifier not only by describing its
history, but, further, by embodying that signified in the text iself, setting
to motion the unfolding of its event. These poems are both ruined and ruining:
they have fallen and continue to fall. Within them, there is falling and
falling is.
On
her part, Christina Vega-Westhoff’s three poems actually open the collection,
providing both precision and accumulative expansion in intimate, ruinous terms.
As Cardon suggests, in Vega-Westhoff’s pieces, “ruin is woven through
maternity, natality, and the question of the nation: we are invited to consider
the relationship between home and ruin—which and what is here, which and what
over there really is. Is the hysteria around porosity a question of relation?” For
her part, Vega-Westhoff is one of the few sections sans notes, perhaps allowing
the work to speak for itself, as her opening poem “THAT LIGHT SOUND OF LITTLE
RAIN” begins:
or
melting
into debt
or
something that rhymes with it
the inability to seek the exact
the
condition of
into the night
tossing
but no feeding
breasts filling
the
condition of
returned toddler
tab
additional entry
into poet and boxer
and
merge
to be professional and paid
to
say whiteness is the indoctrination
of bedtime story
land
filled by
extraction principle
here
comes the a(bn)(ggr)egation of
request
if
in the
removed treaty
in
the felt
in the museum
the
ruins of
set examples of
dwellings
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