Aditi Machado, Material Witness

 

now you’re in the middle of the thing
beset by its obvious & lush features

mysterious garment draped across a low tree
you sniff its bouquet, it is an odor that goes
beyond description

who left this here & what do you remember
of persons, your hand going against the surface
tension ferns & false nasturtiums as you bend

to pick an arrant briar, your whole leg as tho
a bending filament, creepy tendrils spurting thru
the accursed growth of thyself

there are some prehistoric truths here
but where (“NOW”)

The third full-length poetry title from poet, translator and essayist Aditi Machado, following Some Beheadings (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Emporium (2020) [see my review of such here], as well as the chapbook-essay The End (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) [see my review of such here], is Material Witness (Nightboat Books, 2024), a collection set in six sections: “Material Witness,” “What Use,” “Bent Record,” “Concerning Matters Culinary,” “Feeling Transcripts from the Outpost” and “NOW.” Machado’s poems have a lush quality, but with an adornment that provides no wasted space. With poems set as extended sequences of stand-alone sections, her poems have a remarkable ability to expand and contract, furthering a dense, honed language across great distances. “To step into it,” she writes, to open the poem “FEELING TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE OUTPOST,” “time being / funnily sequenced or accruing // laterally: a botany tyranny / is moss, is how listening // dithers at the drum and I / follow it out to the fence. // There is a system to regress / in November.”

She writes on history, motion, starlight; she writes around and through subjects with charged lyrics, providing an electrical current even along the most direct sentences, as the lengthy sequence “NOW” includes: “inner time rises to meet the peach / you place your lips against // green rays shoot out // it’s only a pain & a pain’s a / direction dislocatedly pointing to / what’s pleasure & when // & where are you, pacific infant / that isn’t heart land [.]” Composed as what appear as direct statements, the quality of lyric emerges through the accumulation, allowing a nuance of sound pattern and rhythm to flow through the ongoingness, one step following further upon another. Listen to the underlay of rhythm and sound in the opening/title sequence, as she writes:

Then there was no motion.
Then it picked up again, the ‘always already etcetera’ rejects.
Your stamina of compost.
It was like things deferred their freedom to you. No.
It was their kinetic enchantments.
Haunted in an old mining town turning private investment.
Haunted in its distinct odor of data, the labored sound of its pipes.
In the absence of culture. In the reduction and juice of it. You spat on the
      inklings of flowers.
Death to suburbia and you began to think again, militantly aroused resident
      alien of every which nowhere.

Aditi Machado, The End

 

THESE DAYS I write only long poems. To compose a ten-line poem, say, with a good first and a devastating last line—it doesn’t move me. Though, of course, poems do have last lines and sometimes the last line devastates. But that’s not (really) the (only) tend of a poem. The poem’s end is to endure.

I’ll write the same poem for weeks or months at a time, composing almost every day at roughly the same time of day. it’s like extending a single annotation over an obdurate duration. I write to discover a form, but the form is also discovering the language and the thinking, and it happens out of order. (Lyn Hejinian in “The Rejection of Closure”: “Form is not a fixture but an activity.”) It is not decided in advance what the thinking will be, but inklings of sensuous and nonsensuous matters have been amassed in preparation. The system to writing is rhythm. Prosody prompts me to find ample instants of acuity to put together a structure in which thought and feeling can proceed/regress with an against the methods of time. then I rewrite for one year or several years. I rewrite by hand and practice the shapes of the text as I reshape it. The phrase “No precision that isn’t imprecision” haunts my practice. The whole thing drips with time.

I am very taken with Aditi Machado’s forty-page chapbook-length lyric essay on form, The End (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), an enviously-produced small item that exists in a series of chapbook-length essays by Brooklyn publisher Ugly Duckling Presse (other items on my desk from the same series, and published this year, include Magdalena Zurawski’s Being Human Is an Occult Practice, Claudia La Rocco’s Quartet and Mirene Arsanios’ Notes on Mother Tongues). The End is an extended lyric essay on poetic composition and endings, writing on elements of teaching and her own writing process, as well as critiques on and examples of poems by Paul Celan, James Wright, Lyn Hejinian and Rilke, specifically Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” As she writes:

“ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO” is a sonnet. Rilke wrote it in 1908 while working for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. It is considered an ekphrastic of a fifth-century BCE sculpture called Torso of a Youth from Miletus presently located in the Louvre. Mitchell’s translation of it is composed in loose iambics with enough consonance and assonance to say a sonnet-like pattern of end rhyme (ABAB CDCD EFE EFE) has been achieved: head/inside, torso/low, Otherwise/thighs, could/flared, defaced/fur/itself/life, shoulders/place.

Sonnets tend toward completion. Structurally, both the Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms whittle down (4-4-3-3 or 4-4-4-2) and synthetic toward a statement of some kind—the resolution of an argument. Thought arrives in tandem with the feeling of it having arrived. So it is with Rilke’s sonnet. It is also the case that here the ostensibly complete form of the sonnet accommodates the incomplete—broken—body of Apollo which, in the process of its contemplation by “us”—by “you”—becomes complete. And then more than complete. So complete that it obliterates itself out of completion, returning “(y)our” gaze with an injunction of such intensity it eviscerates you and me, the human, the living, the changeable. The torso is not incomplete—you are incomplete. Your manners and perceptions, your knowing, the sense you have of your own life—all incomplete.

The author of two full-length poetry titles—Some Beheadings (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]—Machado works a way of reading short poems even while discussing her own explorations into the form of the long poem. I am curious on the idea of her speaking of endings, when her own are so delayed, and so few; and her conversations around both delay and epiphany. As she writes: “Because I teach writing I am often required to help ‘solve’ the problem of a poem’s ending. I no longer use textbooks and attempt to rely as little as possible on the anodyne, increasingly fixed bodies of craft knowledge that continue to get ‘passed’ like DNA down the family tree of writing programs.” This is a remarkable essay, and one that rewards repeated readings; there is simply too much to take in all at once.

 

 

Aditi Machado, Emporium

I came along a silk route. I came low like low things. Slow, farcical

leaves rimmed the trees. Some chic birds. I came along a long way,

bolstered by merchants and prophylactics and an obscure shade

that became my practice. (“Herewith the prologue:”)

Aditi Machado’s second full-length poetry title, following Some Beheadings New York NY: (Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] is Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020), a book-length poem with a narrative framing, that of following “a merchant woman as she travels a twenty-first-century ‘silk route,’ trading her wares while becoming ‘lost’ in un-monetizable reciprocities and the sensory excesses of the marketplace: coins changing hands, the odors of food and sweat, the ‘noise’ of translation and multilingualism.” Winner of the 2019 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, as judged by Gillian Conoley, Fady Joudah and Cole Swenen, the structure of Emporium exists as a sequence of individual poem-suites, fragments accumulating into something more than the sum, all wrapped together as a single, book-length unit. “Amid the falling narrative,” she writes, in “collusion / cusp this,” “I go to the movies / and can’t say where in the mob I’m not, / the film so draws an endlessness.” Hers is a poem on margins, most of which never end up affecting the centre but in turn can’t help but be affected by that centre. As the poem “Experiment with Aspic” begins: “It commences. Here / it is endless. Mostly / poverty. Parallel to / the railway track. / Manure, procession, / conniptions. It is crisp. / A labyrinth. It is here / it commences. Lac, / it is said. Or albumen.”

Hers is an expansive lyric, one that exists as a sequence of sections broken into postcard collage, lyric fragment, prose exploration, billboard phrases and doctor’s notes. I’m delighted to see her chapbook-length Rhapsody (Albion Books, 2020) [see my review of such here] included as part of Emporium. “Let us stumble around, humming, stumbling, humming.” she writes, “Then something in the shape of leaves, / something in the touching of ‘red.’” Emporium is a story told through the collage, the accumulation-collage of fragments, lyrics and prose-structures, one with not even a narrative centre or even the character of the merchant woman, but a seeking, searching, lyric heart. “Or did I mean history?” she writes, “Did I mean shale? / & of what is it collaged? How does it cohere? / Sudden queries, sudden as vendors, do they sell / fruit, sell textile? I’ve been so exact / I’ve cut corners. O obsolenscencec, o light brain / siting the accidental tree, I desire cinema / in a sense all factories sense / the dilemma. Ought I / shove off?”

Emporium

As if I could simply pass through

the carts, hand myself over to some notions

piled on a cart, trade away certain desires

amid the silk & squid, certainty

like a quality of gems & cautious doctrines,

trade away myself—wouldn’t be

too unlovely, in derivative light, lamps all

succulence above the general meat, would it,

butchers?—for tartan weather or any gridlike

complexity of time & back to square

home,

  the sugar makes a mound there

as once bright pyramids & the smells here

are superlative, all brine & depth as though

one upon the other we effloresced. &

the tapestries descend & wouldn’t we

endlessly such velvet landscapes buy?