T.C. MARSHALL Reviews
Transnational Battle Field by Heriberto Yépez
(Commune Editions,
2017)
and
Miximum Ca’ Canny: The Sabotage Manuals by Ida Börjel, Translated by Jennifer Hayashida
(Commune Editions,
2016)
Parts of the Problem Staying on the Job
“Poetry is
part of the problem,” writes/says the
poet formerly known as Heriberto Yepez in “Poetry in a Time of Crisis” (72),
and he means it. He demonstrates it. He has explained it much more sharply
elsewhere (“Notes” in 2015), but he explained it logically in his UCSC talk in
2004. His examples ran from Whitman to Bush. It’s the Bush part that shows his
seriousness, and of course his humor even as he says: “Part of the problem is
laughter” (73).
In
a way Bush does poetry too.
I
may say his poetry is bad but it’s poetry too.
Bush
tries to cling to meaning. He tries to make the audience feel the ecstasy of
words. He performs.
(72)
This approach to poetry is not new.
We’ve seen it in Nicanor Parra
and others, but here we have poetry making itself of an
anti-poetry that is not just charged with politically critiquing poetry but now
with poetically critiquing politics. That makes it both fun and smart, apt and
a crack-up especially when you’re trying not to laugh because the poet told
you: poetry’s “not part of the solution but just part of the laughter” (73) and
“’America’ is a comical nightmare” (74). He also says that “a post-colonial
self-critique stance implies a going beyond ‘poetry’” (74).
So, let’s
look at how that is done in this book, and then in another one by another
writer using concepts of “sabotage.” Going beyond doesn’t mean going around; it
implies a going through and getting beyond. It may imply a ”sabotage” of the
old means. In Yépez’ case, the sabots are being hurled into the machinery of
belief—and not just technique—in poetry. “Poetry should unveil where its
authority comes from,” he asserts (75), and as poets we should “very openly
contradict ourselves until the laughter stops, until there’s no credibility
left in the authority we inherit or won ourselves, until it is made clear those
who have authority have stolen it” (76).
In the poems in this book, we get a
critical look at many things, from being inside crossing the border at Tijuana
in a poem called “Nada. Nothing” that is insightful and almost funny, delivered
in prosy sentences. We get a series of poems “on how | Mexicans and Americans |
can know | they have | a body” that is more lyrical and yet also enters
questions about language shifts, torture, and other attacks on bodies. We get
another series called “A Song from and to the Native Informant” that mocks the
scholarly, and a series that fits with that as it critiques “Ethopoetics” that
reaches its sharpest point in a meditation on the assassination of Neruda (65).
That set of poems begins with
What
kind of poet
Can
you make
OUT
OF
The
poet
You
were made
INTO?
(49)
and the Neruda poem, near the end, ends with
And
what kind of poet
must
you become in knowing
the
CIA dictatorship killed Neruda?
(65)
Focus on discourses and critical thinking, especially
regarding poetry’s place and role, replaces imagery in most of these poems.
This is one of their ways of going beyond poetry. They are rhetorical poems in
that way but they are not just rhetoric; they seek serious effects.
There are pieces that are clearly
“criticism” as much as poetry, but of course they are criticism of poetry as we
have known it. “Bad Tripping the White Dream Poem” is an extension of Yépez’
challenging book about Olson’s romanticizations of the Mexican Other (Empire), now (in 2015) focusing on
Ferlinghetti as the voyager and intellectual conquistador. In a brilliant
moment, Yépez parenthetically says: “(For practical purposes, I will call this
military-complex lyrical subject here “Ferlinghetti.” But Ferlinghetti is not
just Ferlinghetti)” (81). Maybe all of us poets should be perking our heads up
here. Yépez goes through Ferlinghetti’s imagery to explicate his “Hegemonic
Whiteness.” It is close reading that comes close to exploding as it explodes
the Poet’s myths about himself and Others. At one point, Yépez appropriately
compares Ferlinghetti’s writing to Hernán Cortés’ letters home from the “New
World.” “It is precisely through poetry that the imperial gaze is justified,
sublimated, and aestheticized.” Sharp.
That this book as a whole is very well
composed becomes obvious as it next moves to a piece on Baraka’s defense of
Olson against Yépez’ critique. Laughter returns as a central topic when Yépez
quotes Alcalay’s introduction of Baraka at an Olson event and recounts the
laughter at the expense of ”whatever his
name is”—“the ‘dude’ from Mexico.”
You
and your audience can laugh
all you want. I’m
Mexican.
North
Americans, of all colors,
are State-trained
to laugh at us.
I
have heard that laughter
so
many times
I
have managed to break
some
of its sounds down.
I
can now, for instance, hear the pain
and
the xenophobia co-giggling
along
with the arrogance and self-sufficiency
of
finding ridiculous any claim
about
the existence of imperialist poets
in the USA.
(94)
The critical insight runs strong, addressing Baraka:
You
could both sing against them so tremendously
--suffering
their attack—
and
on the other and be even incapable
of
hearing or repeating
a
Mexican name.
(98)
The piece
delivered as a talk at Buffalo’s conference on coming poetics in 2016 is here
with only one illustration. I remember it but also others during the
performance. It wasn’t just Goldsmith’s experimentalisms that Yépez attacked.
To
separate experimentalism from national leukotropisms
Is
historically impossible. The (Neo)Avant-Garde
And
the Colonial Library are intertwined
Once
post-national and post-experimental
Take
charge of new-writers’ bodies
“Exprimentalism”
will not be the driving force of innovative poetics.
(110)
Back in the “Crisis” talk, he had begun: “I can only stand
poetry in the context of prose” (71). By the end of the book, this makes more
sense: it is an outside critical context that Yépez brings to poetry. It is not
technical perfection or innovation. It may be a new function, or dysfunction.
The function of poetry is to lose
its function. The function of poetry is to diminish the general notion of
authority.
(76)
Ida
Börjel’s Commune book uses several techniques to bring in critical perspective
and contradictory contexts that shift the function of poetry. The first couple
of sections delightfully sourced from political pamphlets and factory-workers’
diaries, are fun to read and make sabotage seem like something we can do
literally or metaphorically throughout our lives—even in poetry. The practical
suggestions and strategies provide an imagery and reflection that seems poetic
but is dedicated to interference. The book’s title comes from a passage in a
poem called “Communication” that gathers ideas for messing with what the bosses
want communicated. One goes:
distort
telegrams so that additional ones need to be
composed sometimes simply by
changing
a letter from “minimum” to
“miximum” then they won’t know if
minimizing
or maximizing is at stake
(25)
Such bits make us chuckle, but mostly in wondering if we’d
be so brave. As the book moves on, some sections are less brave, less funny,
and less apt. One is allegorical and based on an odd occurrence of sabotage
reported in Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s IWW handbook: Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial
Efficiency. This reference is given at the end of the section, where it has
the effect of making us look back and laugh instead of a better possible effect
of having made us laugh all along. Börjel has taken her allegorical figures for
personages in industry and Capital from Flynn’s anecdote about
printing-plant workers who mixed the story of a high
mucky-muck’s speech at an international peace conference with the circus news:
“they reported the lion and monkey as making speeches in the peace conference
and the Honorable Mr. So-and-so doing trapeze acts in the circus” (65). Börjel
has fun with this and makes some apt points about political and capitalist
ways, but the fun hasn’t got all the focus it could have. It’s the first parts
that are the strength of this book. There are even sabotage suggestions for
executives. And the last pieces say a lot about the place of sabotage in our
moral and ethical regimes:
MORAL
FIBER
work
twelve hours a day seven days
a
week for two dollars a day in
the
Pittsburgh steel mills and they say
sabotage
would destroy my
sense
of morality
(33)
GENERAL
ADVICE TO LOWER MORALE AND CREATE CONFUSION
after
completed sabotage resist the temptation
to
linger
and witness the result there are
of course occasions when it to the
contrary would seem suspicious
if
you walked away
(34)
Sometimes, the poet has to stay on the job.
SOURCES
Börjel, Ida. Miximum
Ca’ Canny: The Sabotage Manuals. Trans. Jennifer
Hayashida. Commune Editions, 2016.
Yepez, Heriberto. The
Empire of Neomemory. Trans. Jen Hofer, Christian
Nager, & Brian Whitener. Chain
Links, 2013.
---. “Notes on art’s crap.” In Hache blog, as part 2
under
“Against the Police-Concept of
Art.” 23 June 2015. http://hyepez.blogspot.com/index.html#291136051933501245
---. Transnational
Battle Field. Commune Editions, 2017.
Photos of Heriberto Yépez, from the Buffalo
conference on “Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years,” by T. C. Marshall
*****
T. C. Marshall has never been retiring, but he will retire soon from teaching to take up the full-time work of knowing what he knows.