This essay also appears in print on page 211 in the Forum pages of Issue #40.
There is a form, that is not form, and that can be found in many collections of American poetry. This not-form is the arrangement. Rooted in the Romantic fragment, French prose poetry, palimpsestic modernism, Benjamin’s Arcades, Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, its unit is the line or the paragraph, whose sequence is determined by chance or free association, or by more artful choices which mimic aleatoric and dream logics. The arrangement-poem is structured as series of disparate propositions, convening under a title. It has the character of a reading journal, a bundle of apperceptions, a catalogue of surprises, an inventory of gimmicks, a cross-section of digital strata. The arrangement-poem assembles the worlds happening to the poet as a sequence of events or objects whose coherence revolves around the poet as (sometimes absent) centre. Opposed to a version of lyric as urn, it resembles lyric as box grater. You scrape a block of life against it and life-strips fall onto the plate. Diaristic, anacreontic, astonished, ironic, the arrangement-poem waits for readerly synthesis.
In the literature of the baroque, which ‘pile[s] up fragments ceaselessly’ in a process of accumulation, ‘the writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principal impression which was aimed at.’ Objects in decay, ruined monuments, ‘the events of history shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting’ – this was Walter Benjamin’s judgment of the Trauerspiel (Origin 178-9), the baroque drama of a world without eschatology, from which is extracted ‘a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation’, bringing them violently into the light of day in order to destroy the world ‘with catastrophic violence’ (66).
The contemporary arrangement-poem seems motivated by the same melancholy, and same desire to overturn the existing world whose violence is embedded like shrapnel in the commodities that surround us. The speaker is lost in an array of broken monuments to a capitalist totality beyond its grasp. Feeling its way through the detritus, the poem conveys the bewilderment produced by objects and relations that swamp judgment and make the possibility of meaningful action seem like infantile fantasy. This bewilderment can appear to be a virtue, a performance of innocence in the face of the desperate proliferation of stuff. But if infantile fantasy is not innocent, nor is bewilderment; it is an affect laden with antagonism towards the mystifications in which it participates, towards its own passivity.
The arrangement-poem is not far, in a sense, from Jane Bennett’s description of human actants as simply one element in the ‘confederacy’ of materialities whose agencies are distributed across an assemblage like the electrical grid. ‘Autonomy and strong responsibility seem to me to be empirically false, and thus their invocation seems tinged with injustice,’ she writes; ‘a theory of vibrant matter presents individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects’ (Vibrant Matter 36-7). But matter’s vibrancy is merely an animist way of conceptualising the living labour that has congealed in the commodity. Read through Marx’s critique of the fetish, the bewildered passivity of a subject fated to remain, restlessly, at the centre of an aesthetic arrangement of contingencies begins to resemble the mystification at the heart of capitalist processes of valorisation.
Placed within the arrangement, the poetic subject gives up on the trope of ‘strong responsibility’ and transforms the fatalism of capitalist accumulation into song. And yet autonomy, the autonomous act of choosing to make a poem as an expression of some, even if damaged, capability, in the face of loss or impossibility or bewilderment, is central to the claims of lyric across millennia. It is probably ineliminable from the poem once it has come to exist. Writing a poem testifies to the belief, however naïve, that this autonomy is related to the possibility of justice, and of forms of subjectivity that extend beyond the triviality of making arrangements.
2.
To say ‘lyric’ in that last paragraph feels a bit embarrassing. But the poetry economies in which we sell or give away our aesthetic labour are not post-lyric, despite widely advertised claims about that genre’s demise. (Even theory/criticism have become more lyrical, have you noticed?) Some of us have inherited a stern post-subjective aesthetic and call this a politics. Others of us inhabit a poetry ecology where the subject is operationalised to designate a position of sufferance bandaged in similes. I am being provocative. The arrangement-poem gets beyond this impasse, because it needs no subject; or rather, the subject is just the designated assembly point for fragments, a by-product of appearance.
But the good fortune by which a subject can accumulate a superabundance of objects and relations is no accident; is socio-political; is shaped by economies of prestige, and actual economies. That American poets inhabit the centre of wheeling circuits of surplus is also not accidental.
Let me give an example of an arrangement-poem: Kaveh Akbar’s ‘River of Milk’
from Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017). The poem appears towards the end of this vividly confessional collection, which explores addictions and recovery, layered on a ground of diasporic loss of language and homeland. To use the terms Lauren Berlant invented to discuss a poem by John Ashbery, Calling a Wolf a Wolf materialises the collapse of the moment of lyric suspension (‘in which the subject can no longer take his continuity in the material world and contemporary history for granted’) into the nothing of cruel optimism. Here, the relation that exists ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ is tuned in to the agonies of consumption and religion. The fullness of these poems, with things, reflects the absolute hunger of the subject whom the world is supposed (but fails) to nourish.
‘River of Milk’ begins by asking for forbearance: the reader should wait while the poem assembles itself, while its subject – a lyric I – arranges the display of objects that connote its psychic state. At first, this I is an eater: eating fireflies, digesting their bodies, turning them ‘into pure light’. Then the I becomes food, the surplus sweetness of the sugar cube. Then the I is a barn on fire, stuffed with ‘everything’: mustard, porch chair, birth records, even the earth. The poem next remembers an ancestral ‘dervish saint’ who was torn apart, Orpheus-style, for failing to nourish ‘his people’. The dead saint decays into other things: goat bones and azalea. Substitution follows substitution. The poem asks if we are confused or deceived, either by the dervish’s miraculous powers, or its own metonymic sequence. Next comes a montage of tricks: a butcher’s thumb on the scale, a strange blue dress, the night. It apologises, to the reader, and to the mother. The speaker is now sitting on the remnants of a ‘drained pond’, throwing peanuts at squirrels. Their mother tells ‘happy myths’ in response to the speaker’s declaration that they ‘wouldn’t live through the year’; these myths are contrasted with the poem’s own (Orphic sparagmos etc.). There are ‘fizzy pistons and plummy ghosts’. Finally there is the proposition that the ‘creatures you create’, whether the mother’s child, or the poet’s images, are loved, though some express derangement (‘pupils swirling’) or the desire to bite (‘with teeth’).
Throughout the book, Akbar’s subjects climb up and down the chain of being, from grub to saint or angel. The lyric I is reduced by divine neglect and its own appetite to the status of a ravenous animal. The firefly in ‘River of Milk’ is one creature in the book’s menagerie: animals appear singly, in captivity or farmed, prepped for consumption like a lamb with its jaw twined shut ‘before it’s roasted on the spit’ (52). These animals are not companions in what Donna Haraway calls sympoiesis. They are a bunch of things, materialisations of insatiable hunger or its satisfaction.
In another poem from the collection, ‘Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober’, the speaker remembers in childhood watching a lamb that took ten long minutes to die – her blood coagulating on the porch ‘a good omen for the tomatoes’. While this memory made ‘the barbarism of eating anything / seem almost unbearable’, the need to drink remained insatiable: ‘A garden bucket filled with cream / would disappear’, I could ‘guzzle down whole human bodies’. The world is a massive thirst-trap. The desire to consume everything in it must be translated into moral asceticism and aesthetic omnivority. Eating animal light in ‘River of Milk’, feeding squirrels with peanuts, the speaker himself is reduced to food, or calorific energy – sugarcube, mustard, milk, goat bones – that can in turn feed the ‘creatures you create’ who will gnaw at your integrity with their teeth.
Like the subjects in Swinburne’s poetry, Akbar’s poems fetishise mouths as sites of pleasure, aggression and song. The book is fixated on mouths – mouths full of hors d’oeuvres or cake, chugging milk and honey or alcohol; the greedy mouth, and the bitter mouth of abstention. Mouths are the sockets into which the book’s thematics of addiction and prayer get plugged, but they are also sites of aggression. The poems attack other mouths, feeding on them, pleasuring them, ‘biting their tongues.’ ‘In my dreams I am a cannibal eating long pig / in a strange unmappable country… if you move even a little I will take you in my mouth’ (44). The cannibalistic speaker offers to ‘eat even your baby fat’, so ‘collect your meat / and deliver it to me, I’m tired // of chewing the same bones’ (62). He asks: ‘Are you / going to finish that tongue, my love? / I’ll chew it up for you, spit it / down your throat’ (64). You end up as nothing but a ‘still-twitching vein pulled from a neck’ (65).
This is the catastrophic violence which emerges in a cosmos without eschatology, in which God is nothing more than a bored audience member, fanning himself with an elephant ear. The subject, entranced by animal appetites in a disappointing secular world, accumulates and arranges stuff. But this stuff antagonises the subject who needs to insist on its distinction from what has been arranged. The more haphazard a poem’s collecting, the more clearly does the poem demonstrate the irrelevance of intention to surviving that world, whose surpluses serve anything but our needs. The banalisation of intention violates the premises of recovery and faith; but it turns out to be a good way of writing lots of poems.
Swept along in a torrent of objects, the subject responds to their own passivity with aggression, resisting the infantile nature of this position in a typically infantile way: through oral sadism. In ‘I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude’, near the end of the collection, we find the good and the bad breast (‘when I touched two breasts each one / was my favorite’) and language as milk that is drained from them: ‘I drank an entire language’ (88). In Kleinian terms, the entry into adulthood entails the renunciation of the infantile desire for limitless milk and surrender to the depressive acknowledgment that others exist for reasons other than one’s own fulfilment. But Akbar’s lyric subject ‘was promised epiphany, earth- // honey, and a flood of milk’ (81); ‘I remain a hungry child / and the idea of a land flowing with milk / and honey makes me excited’ (58). The poems multiply from this unrelieved hunger and thirst; their lushly metaphorised inquiry into the psychic and somatic legacies of addiction compensate for the way the breast leaves the sucker unfulfilled.
In her essay on ‘Envy and Gratitude’, Melanie Klein defines greed as ‘an impetuous and insatiable craving, exceeding what the subject needs and what the object is able and willing to give.’ The greedy baby aims ‘at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast’. ‘River of Milk’ contains multiple points of ingestion: the mouth eating a firefly, the body compacted of random things and burnt, the ‘people’ wanting ‘a thick river of dark milk’ and ripping up the saint then being ‘filled’ with remorse, the butcher’s thumb, the mother and the self ‘filled’ with creatures. The book as a whole thematises insatiable craving by arranging worlds around the devouring subject who cannot, finally, suck it dry. The poem replaces the exhausted breast; it allows us to cling to the fantasy of a land of milk and honey. If its referents remain unintegrated, this is simply a sign of the poem’s endless liquidity, far exceeding the capacity of one mouth to digest.
3.
I want to hold out for the continuing value of poetic argument.
Lisa Robertson’s Anemones: A Simone Weil Project is an essay, a translation of an essay, a translation of Occitan poems by Bernart de Ventadorn, and a collaborative art project; above all it is a poetics. It is seeded by a remark of Simone Weil – ‘to make six shirts from anemones and keep silent: this is our only way of acquiring power’. That sentence appears in Weil’s student essay on the Brothers Grimm story of the sister who sews six nightshirts for her brothers who have been turned into swans. Weil says she sews them out of anemones, though in most English translations they are made of nettles, a commonly available fibre used by poor people.
Robertson nominates six poets and artists to receive bouquets of anemones from the artist Benny Nemer along with letters from the poet. The gifts are occasions for celebrating their recipients, and expressing gratitude for fellowship: ‘I learn from Erín [Mouré] the passionate elasticity of a linguistically gregarious bodymind whose joy is verse’ (99). The project is publicly documented, though the performance of giving flowers is quiet and intimate. Robertson wishes ‘to reframe the performative event so that it faces away from the notion of publics’ (18), the event which also includes reading.
This generosity frames the book’s encounter with Simone Weil, a complex figure about whom Robertson expresses ambivalence. ‘Many of Weil’s core concepts at first seemed to move against the grain of my intellectual habits’ (22), she admits. Weil’s belief in ‘the social and historical potency of spirit’ is opposed to Robertson’s own ‘emphasis on language’s materiality… a stylistic aesthetics of corporeality’ (55). Weil’s Christianity, her valorisation of suffering have made her less available for thinking-with than some other of her contemporaries. What to do with Weil’s ascesis, her insistence on ‘purity’ as a form of ‘a non-volitional consenting agency’ that can resist fascism? How to allow ourselves to admire Weil’s apparently naïve argument that love ‘is the opposite of force… a social practice of consensual relationship’, that ‘resistance… finds its impetus and lineage in the abundant practice of love’ (22)?
Robertson answers her hesitation with another kind of generosity: ‘What can I learn?’ (33). The answer is to ‘unbind my habits and begin with nothing but trust’ (57), to allow a thinking-near to emerge, which is embodied even by the book’s mise-en-page, with its fading-in colouration marking the embrace of Weil’s translated essay by Robertson’s commentary. She asks:
How can we bear the present? I believe that we share this question with Weil, and that thinking near her can help us to open our ways of coexisting, and so our mentalities, if not always to hope, at least to a discernment that evades the market-driven flattening and squandering of our intellectual and spiritual beings. Such discernment must underpin any lovingly committed living in the world, where the world is the inconceivable, irritating, stimulating manyness that will persist nonetheless to the end, whether personal or global. This many-ness is what I will now begin to call pure… (25)
Reading and translating Weil exemplifies Robertson’s argument, made elsewhere, that poetry ‘is the site of the generation of sociality’, a sociality in which the contradictory or less immediately hospitable figures of the past can be included and reframed. Within Robertson’s socius, Rousseau, Virgil, Baudelaire, Réage, Carlyle, Wortley Montagu, Sitwell, and Lucretius, are guests of a feminist, poetic critique.
By spending time with Weil in a practice of open willingness, of immanent and reparative reading, Robertson learns that ‘the techniques of the practice of spirit must be transmitted and reinvented. The urgency of this hidden continuity in the world now haunts me. I don’t know how to proceed’ (56). That is to say, reading and thinking-near do not produce a readymade synthesis, but contribute to the unravelling of our nettle shirts.
I love that Robertson’s book is woven in its own time, a rhythm of discovery which illuminates the stupid mania of academic time in which I’m forced to dwell. Robertson remembers her immersion in troubadour poetry began in 2012, when she was kept awake at night in May by the nightingales singing on the ridge-pole of her worker’s cottage on the edge of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Her investigations develop in conversation with others, in books (Jacques Roubaud and Édouard Glissant) and in person (Abigail Lang and Vincent Broqua). The poetic work is collaborative; others are interested in these ideas, and offer gifts and wisdom. But as its expertise grows, the book also returns to a generative beginning: ‘a poet is an amateur, which is to say, a beginner, who works only in the company of language’s ghosts’ (57).
Robertson’s patient engagement with Weil offers a rhythm for thinking, in which historicity, criticality, grace, poetic making, myth, nationalism, translation, gender, imperialist violence, and intimacy elapse together, without an artificial attempt to integrate them, but not without synthesis. ‘The hidden body of the past, and maybe also the occult body of the future’ (57) might combine in the poem, if the poet can find a way to engage with the world’s ‘inconceivable, irritating, stimulating manyness’ not as a perplexing superabundance that resists all integration and leaves us stranded in the infantile paradox of infinite consumption without satiety, but as a space for recovering ‘the social and historical potency of spirit’ – wherever such metaphysical constructs can now be found.
