PERMANENT RECORD: Poetics Towards the Archive, ed. Naima Yael Tokunow

 

            Before coming to this project, I had spent nearly a decade thinking critically about the Black American record (or lack thereof), and how my understanding of myself as a Black American, my family, and my culture has been shaped by what I can, and do, know through searching archives. These archives include materials from my family and the state, from papers and oral histories, and from political and artistic recordings. Many records are missing, misremembered, or unfindable. Some are full and jumbled, hard to decipher. Most are couched in death, grief, and loss. This cannot be and is not the “full story,” although we are socialized to understand records as such, rewarded for reinforcing its “wholeness,” and often penalized for pointing to its deficiencies. Many have written beautifully about the wound of not-knowing—our homeland, our people, our tongues, our separation from culture.
[…]
            And so, Permanent Record hopes to apply the kind of pressure that turns matter from one thing to another by asking hard questions: How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to health? How do we pull blood from stone (and ink and shadows and ghosts)? What do we gain from our flawed systems of remembrance? How does creating a deep relationship to the archive allow us both agency and legibility, allow us to prefigure the world we want? Through this reclamation, we can become the ancestors we didn’t have.
            Permanent Record wants to reimagine who is included in the archive and which recordings are considered worthy of preservation, making room for the ways many of us have had to invent forms of knowing in and from delegitimized spaces and records. In doing so, we explore “possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity” (thank you, Trisha Low, for this perfect wording). This book itself is a record. The book asks what can be counted as an epistemological object. What is counted. Who is counted, and how. (“INTRODUCTION: Archives of/Against Absence: exploring identity, collective memory, and the unseen,” Naima Yael Tokunow)

Newly out is the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), edited by Albuquerque, New Mexico-based writer, educator, artist and editor Naima Yael Tokunow. Since being announced as Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow back in 2023, Tokunow has put together an impressively comprehensive anthology on loss, reclamation and the archive, working to gather together elements of what had, has or would otherwise be lost, pushing through conversations on what might emerge through and because and even despite those losses. “you spend a lot of time thinking about loss,” writes Minneapolis poet Chaun Webster, as part of “from WITHOUT TERMINUS,” considering if what is missing has / a form, wondering if there is a method to tracing what is not visible. there was / a time when you thought that if you just had greater powers of imagination, or / if you could somehow place yourself securely along the tracks of family and / cultural history that you could gather sufficient evidence, collect all the bones / to make something of a complete structure.” Across a spectrum of lyric by more than three dozen poets, Permanent Record speaks of a range of cultural and personal losses, from a loss of language, home and family, reacting to colonialism and global conflict to more intimate details, writing against erasures both historical and ongoing. There is an enormous amount contained within these pages. “In the obits mourning the billionaires,” writes Hazem Fahmy, a writer and critic from Cairo, in “THE BILLIONAIRE / (ARE YOU BOAT OR SUBMARINE?),” “it is mentioned that they paid / $250k to die before the eyes of the entire world // a laughably cheap ticket / compared to the cost of carrying // a child onto a floating grave. Whose mercy / would you rather stake your life on? The ocean’s?”

On the back cover, the collection self-describes as a “visionary anthology that reimagines the archive as a tool for collective memory. Reflecting on identity, language, diasporic experiences, and how records perpetuate harm, this collection seeks to reframe what belongs in collective remembrance.” “When the ceiling drops / the rain stops / beating down but / now you’re beaten down,” writes Okinawan-Irish American poet Brenda Shaughnessy (one of only a handful of poets throughout the collection I’d been aware of prior), as part of the sequence “TELL OUR MOTHERS WE TELL OURSELVES / THE STORY WE BELIEVE IS OURS,” “though it’s the beat / that drops now / and we dance / in the rain / like sunbeams / made out of metal cloth, / tubes of blood, / and scared, sewn-up eyes.” The anthology includes writing by more than forty writers, most of whom are based in or through the United States and further south (with at least two contributors on this side of the border in the mix as well: Hamilton, Ontario-based Jaclyn Desforges and Toronto-based Em Dial). The work in this anthology is rich, evocative and very powerful, even more impressive when one considers that the bulk of the list of contributors are emerging, with but a single full-length title or less to their credit. Tokunow offers an expansive list of contributors from all corners, with an eye for language, purpose; one would think if you want a sense of the landscape of who you should be reading next, Tokunow’s list of contributors to Permanent Record is entirely that. Listen to the lyric of this excerpt of the poem “QUADROON (ADJ., N.)” by Em Dial, that reads:

QUADROON (adj., n.) language of origin: once again, linguists spit their bloodied air: from Spanish cuarteron, or one who has a fourth. i pinch the linguist’s tongue and gawk at the way they betray themselves. not one who has three fourths. not the haystack with a needle inside. instead, any drops of life in a sterile lake are isolated and named. the lake’s volume is doubled again and again and again and again until science feels faultless renaming them Statistically Insignificant.

The anthology is organized in a quartet of loose cluster-sections—“MOTHERTONGUED,” “FILE NOT FOUND,” “THE MAP AS MISDIRECTION” and “FUTURE CONTINUOUS”—each of which, as Tokunow offers in her introduction, “begins with an introduction of sorts—a lyric map legend to the work within, inviting you to pull the threads of the framework through the pieces.” The approach, as one essentially lyric, is intriguing, offering a collection of writing sparked by purpose, but driven and propelled by a core of stunning writing: Tokunow clearly has a good eye (part of me wants to ask: where are you finding all of these writers?), and knows well how to organize material around a thesis. The introduction to the final section, for example, reads: “We have your number and all quarters. Fortune folds us up—without a line to the dead we can hear the blood rushing, a cup against our drum. The gifts we make ourselves (destiny or doom) hold up in flat daylight, some familiar oath, some new contract: we are finger-deep in the sand, spinning and spiny, no new lines but this soft, fat earth. Still falling off the page, we ziiiiiiip. We hold the mirror slant—sky and her big feelings bounce. What can we mine of the future and if, oh not extraction, then what can we lift, whole and breathing, over our heads?” As San Francisco-based poet Talia Fox writes, to close the lyric “NOTES ON TIME TRAVEL / IN THE MATRILINEAL LINE,” as held in that same closing section:

the curse is simple, and it begins with water

  the water my mother bathed me in was crab water (it is, after all, the water
alotted for soldiers and the children of soldiers and their children and especially
their children)

like a spell, like a spell !

when i close my eyes i am wading through a shallow river at evening. i come|
across a forest clearing where bodies have been strung up, faceless, bobbing
in the trees

As I mentioned earlier, more than forty contributors, and I was previously aware of only a few, such as poet and translator Rosa Alcalá [see my review of her latest here], Jaclyn Desforges [see her ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview here], Em Dial [see her ’12 or 20 questions here], multimedia poet and author Carolina Ebeid [see my review of her Albion Books chapbook here], Phillippines-born California-based poet Jan-Henry Gray [see my review of his full-length debut here], Minnesota-based poet and critic Douglas Kearney [see my review of his Sho here], and Brenda Shaughnessy (all of whom I clearly need to be attending far better). The wealth in this collection is incredible. Or, as Brooklyn-based writer, playwright, organizer and educator Mahogany L. Brown writes as part of the expansive “THE 19^TH AMENDMENT & MY MAMA”:

The third of an almost anything
is a gorge always looking to be
until the body is filled with more fibroids
than possibilities

Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, The Telaraña Circuit

 

i am looking for the form she said or the raw material specifically from the plane of its existence it was a search for a perceptual practice like the sensation of matter over the surface of your skull or water as the architecture of memory a game of awareness or profusion allow the ecstasy of thought to come inside the pipes while your jaw is locked thinking of perception expanding like a future transmission or the actuality of mystery now i see her tactile mind flowing in the conduit of experience

Mexico City-based Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola’s first book of poems is The Telaraña Circuit & other poems (New York NY: Tender Buttons Press, 2023), a descriptor that doesn’t even begin to hold the multitudes within this expansive multimedia conceptual work that includes lyric, performance, photography, visuals, descriptions of video stills, typewritten script and physical experimentation. As she writes, early on in the collection: “experiment the moving shape of memory the archaeology of sound this vacuum is / our thread relation a series of questions that are also open like breath to breath your / deathbed in your mother’s room your whole life an archive of inhalations you were / unearthing a city covered in / deep time [.]” There is a way through which this collection exists as a collage-experiment on form itself, working perception and shaping that seek out its form through a collage of overlapping approaches, almost as changing states in mid-stream, from one to another. This is a book that studies form, means, memory and perception; if hers a book of water, it is one that includes rain, evaporation, lakes and tears, snowfall and the glacier. The Telaraña Circuit & other poems exists as not purely collage, but a kind of layering, one that sees further layering through a foreword, “ANTEMANO / BEFOREHAND,” by poet Carolina Ebeid, that offers:

The Telaraña Circuit opens with a video still of the poet’s hand performing a ritual at the mouth of a cave in the archeological site of San Martín Huamelulpan. In the recording, we hear rhythmic scratching on the site wall as Lucía’s fingers transcribe the bits of tepalcates, ceramic and rock patterns from an archaeological illustration and text her aunt, Margarita, produced decades before disarticulated kinship story told in palimpsetic time, as they both, years apart, inhabit the same slanted light hitting the wall in jagged angles. It’s an ancient music, the scratch-scratch, recorded in these poems. We also sense it in the scans of her handwriting, the crisscross back and forth of the eraser the hand impressing itself on the page. “Every mark on paper is an acoustic mark” Susan Howe affirms. Lucía’s work itself proposes that to listen involves the whole body.

As Gaxiola describes, early on in the collection, this collection, this project, is an examination of, and even a collaboration with, her late archaeologist aunt’s archive and work. “Some of these works were triggered by my aunt’s archeological investigation from 1974. Margarita Gaxiola González. […] Her investigation became a map of intimacy, a generative symbol of fragmented memory (both intimate and historical) locating an impulse during my poetic/somatic research. I translated some of the book’s archaeological illustrations into scores: a notational method to create and reimagine her exploration as sound, as open energy, as continuation. This document transmuted into direct experience as I started working with the tracing and erasing of memory, and simultaneously working on other projects, using poetry as a fieldwork method.” There is something quite fascinating in Gaxiola’s approach, and one might even see this collection as simultaneously either or both the final product of a large, ongoing project, and the fieldwork report of her investigations.

I’m always intrigued when poetry titles appear from those from a visual art background or perspective, often providing far more expansive considerations of form and structure, whether Andrea Actis’ full-length debut Grey All Over (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s SIR (2019) [see my review of such here], Michael Turner’s Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp, 1995) or even any of the work by Canadian poet Christian Bök (an artist I’ve long considered to be a conceptual artist who happens to work within the considerations of the poem). There is something in how the visual, the image, is shaped and approached, well beyond the boundaries of language itself. These are not simply words on the page, but the page itself as a visual, concrete and conceptual space. As she writes towards the back of the collection, as part of her “notes on sound encapsulating the conditions of remembrance”:

Some years ago I started a process work that turned into a series of rituals. The first one was titled cámera crema / nueva. These were two old metallic suitcases that belonged to my father. For many years, he stored his 35mm cameras in these suitcases. One of them was labelled cámera crema and the other nueva. I decided to place film-slides of family images that were shot in Mexico in the year 1993 in cámera crema and pour water over them every day for a year. The suitcase could contain the water that began to transform into the images, absorbing their colors and smells. Once all images became part of the water, creating rivering, fluorescent colors, I decided that the transparent slides belonged in the other suitcase, the one labeled nueva. I then watered the plants in my studio with it: they survived. Through the plants resilience, I was surrounded with disembodied images that were alive. How is a process of degradation recorded? And where is absence located. Memory has a vibratory aspect which extends beyond the image and our experiences as individuals. It amplifies while listening because every time we remember we are listening. Can we produce more memory with its residue? An archive might record its own decay.

Ongoing notes: late May, 2023: Emily Tristan Jones, Carolina Ebeid + Jordan Davis,

There’s so much going on! There’s even a reading on Thursday in Ottawa with three above/ground press poets—Stuart Ross, William Vallières and Jessi MacEachern—hosted by Bardia Sinaee. And you saw the big above/ground press 30^th anniversary fundraiser, happening right now? Or the fact that the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair is coming up in a couple of weeks? And don't forget my enormously clever substack, where I'm working on one or two or three ongoing non-fiction projects. So many things!

Montreal QC: I was first directed to Montreal poet and editor/publisher (Columba) Emily Tristan Jones’ chapbook debut, HAND (Cactus Press, 2023) thanks to Hugh Thomas, who offered her as a poet worth paying attention to. I’m intrigued by the curious patterns of her lyric, and intrigued at the fact that she has a full-length debut, Buttercup, out next year with an unnamed press (at least according to her biography in this particular title) in Chicago. “A crow, inserting its hands into the air,” she writes, to open the poem “CROWNLAND,” “descends / by my human head / to low red shrubs [.]” The narratives of her scenes unfold across narratives of straight lines and deflections (the Blomidon and Bay of Fundy references I quite enjoyed, having experienced such myself), even through the fact of a chapbook titled HAND that bears the cover illustration of a foot: one thing is not necessarily another, aiming instead for the ways in which these thoughts connect. The poems are playful, specific and simultaneously tethered and untethered to the ground, akin to a kite. “My whole body, like a skeleton, music in the air,” she writes, early on in the collection. I am interested to see what her work is able to accomplish through this forthcoming debut, across a wider, broader canvas.

~

A large number of my thoughts were broadcast in the woods

I ran in every direction, leaving little to the imagination
I was like a racehorse. The wind whistled behind me
Animals whistled behind me

I was a free man
My soul fanned like the hair on the body of a wild thing

Philadelphia PA: Further to Brian Teare’s remarkable chapbook series through his Albion Books is Carolina Ebeid’s latest, DAUERWUNDER (2023), subtitled “a brief record of facts,” published as the fourth title in Albion’s series eight [see my reviews of 8.1 here, 8.2 here and 8.3 here]. The poems collected here are set, or tethered, between two words—“WINTERNET” and “TRANSGRACE”—and employ a sequence of an exploration around the accidents of language that technology spark. She writes of the glitch, of audio, text and meaning (something east coast poet Lance La Rocque explored as well from a different angle, across his chapbook glitch a few years back), from the literal glitch of audio to the recombinative. She explores the elements of what remains and what is rebuilt, reconstituted; she writes of telepathy, telephone calls and the “Hollow of a torso”; she writes of what is left behind, lost or added, from digital recordings to “something about our / neighborhood dust [.]” As she writes, mid-way through the collection: “how do you know you are remembering / an event or remembering the pictures of / an event, do your dream in the first or / third person?”

“Attention” as an imperative but without exclamations, the way one lowers her voice in the sensitive part of conversation making you lean in. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer” (Simone Weil).

Brooklyn NY: I’m only slowly engaging with the work of New York poet Jordan Davis, having produced a chapbook of his through above/ground press (full disclosure, naturally), and now through the publication of his Hidden Poems (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2022), a small chapbook of sixteen short poems produced in an edition of one hundred copies. I’ve always been a bit envious of those poets working in miniature, from Nelson Ball to Mark Truscott to Cameron Anstee, for the possibilities that can exist in small spaces. Through Davis, the short form is less a compact form of held meaning, as in the works of those three examples, but as poems composed as pieces that exist beyond the boundaries of a single moment. Some poems here are akin to a wave of the hand, suggesting but part of an unseen and far larger space, or as accumulations of phrases that mangle and mix in the imagination, offering something far else. These are poems of possibility, including what might fall into contradiction, across what might otherwise be impossible. His directions are as evident as through the opening poem, that reads, in full:

BAD POEM

Put that rock down