José Felipe Alvergue, scenery, a lyric

 

The fiction moves in where the absence of real reckoning
leaves a space unaccommodated with the words
                                                                        we have
                                                                        for naming the
exertion taking place there. The commons.

Wisconsin poet José Felipe Alvergue’s [see his ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] third full-length poetry title—after gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015) and precis (Omnidawn, 2017)—is scenery, a lyric (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2020), a book-length layering of text, akin, visually, to a scrapbook of archives, notes and effects. Utilizing language and language structure as the poem’s driving force, scenery, a lyric is an expansive, structural collage of text that writes on systematic racism, slavery and the prison industrial complex. “The convict becomes recollection, which labor / gives over to the grammatical. A body is bent and / turned weight on the shovel, a muscle pulls an arc / an extension at the hoe, the hammer.” Alvergue writes on an America torn between the ideals it claims to hold and the divisions of class and race, holding entire swaths of its own population as “other.” As he writes: “to what extent is his race the marker / of a consciousness, adaptive with the / world that springs in a cycle—history / and repetition and discipline—when / it has yet to be forced into position [.]” Alvergue’s is a lyric of investigation, composing sections on “CONVICT LEASING,” “RIOT,” “LYRIC” and “SENESCENCE,” attempting to articulate a lineage of long-held structures deliberately constructed or even repurposed to hold down and back and percentage of the population. He writes through an American history both foundational and contemporary, and the impact it can’t help but have upon not only his experience, but that of his children as well:

My son’s voice at times, pressing as it does to the limits of his body, is an investigation. How far will ribs expand. What is his. Who is it that is that his. Who is the one feeling skin stretch or the bones move. A word without contrast fills the rooms during his research. Like a cheek, or greasy finger imprinted against windows facing the street. Fills the smallest spaces between fur on cats, surprised by how voice might travel like fingers along their spines. His language is a filling that seems to not end until spontaneously consonants break the song of a voice. One that until then was the universe itself.

Alvergue arranges and breaks the edges of text via visual collage as well, akin to the work of Susan Howe, offering aesthetic overlay and overlap to denote breaks and contradiction. Through Alvergue, we see how language holds and breaks apart, from the language of legislation to one of empathy and compassion, two sides often set in direct opposition. “Despite my aesthetic obsession,” he writes, “I / don’t think there is a we who can / theorize genre without also what / sounds out after all the study. / What resonates and is systemica / lly real no matter what. The beats / following the disclosure of the / clearly sung cannot be archived / without the speed of capture. / Such a poetics would give form / to the collaborative, cooperative / speech from scenery as an act / against the humming of continu / ity. Such a poetics is elusive.” He writes of the conflict between legislation, human considerations and theory, writing the American Civil War to more recent events in Charlottesville, layering a legacy of division and racist action that culture has not yet been able to move beyond. There are no easy answers in Alvergue’s texts, yet it is the process of his very investigation that requires the reader’s attention. As he writes:

When a system has stopped
asking to be fed. This is a
death. There is a word for it,
senescence. Which is,
I think,
equal parts literal and
metaphorical. There is
a senescence to
any scenery looked upon.

 

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Dwibedy, Izsak, Duncan, Alvergue, Clayton, Bennett + Drescher,

Anticipating the release next week of the twenty-third issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the twenty-second issue: Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett and Julia Drescher.

Interviews with contributors to the first twenty-one issues (over one hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming twenty-third issue features new writing by: Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Michael Cavuto, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese and Dale Tracy.

And of course, copies of the first twenty-two issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

P – Q U E U E #16 : R U I N

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

12 or 20 (second series) questions with José Felipe Alvergue

José Felipe Alvergue is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015) and precis (2017). A graduate of both the Buffalo Poetics and Calarts Writing Programs, he teaches and lives in Wisconsin.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I suppose that depends on what I consider my first book. I’ve moved recently and had to take stock of old things I might throw out and came across some very old projects. One in particular reminded me of a chapbook I made back in the early 2000s. I’d taken a video camera and walked down a particularly busy street in my hometown, San Ysidro. I remember taking the footage and drawing portraits of faces and then writing short prose/poetry pieces. Really just descriptive passages of place and person. If that were my first book I’d think that it changed me by revealing new ways of envisioning a politics. I’d been a political theory major in undergrad and I’d planned on becoming involved with both law and later politics, but writing offered me something that a life in politics wouldn’t have, which is a sort of immediate availability to the symbols through which politics becomes ‘the political’ identity of a group, nation, community, etc. I think I’ve been tracking this throughout. Even with my last book before precis (gist : rift : drift : bloom). On the surface it’s described as a book on the last wild passenger pigeon, but it’s also about gun law, space, and the religio-moral impressions left behind by the various cultures that have settled the Midwest, and their etymologies. I’d say precis feels different in the stability of readership that comes with the publisher. Omnidawn is an amazing press and they work very hard to promote both their authors, but more importantly poetry. And poetry as a plural and diverse poetics at a moment when commodification puts a lot of pressure on various art forms to accommodate to the consumer. I feel like I’m part of a larger community than I’ve ever really been a member of before.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I remember two impactful events. First, reading Leaves of Grass in a political theory course taught by Tracy Strong––I remember reading it at Monument Park, which is a park at the border wall where it recedes into the ocean (where I did most of my reading for school while in college). And second, I remember becoming acquainted with the Taco Shop Poets in San Diego and getting involved in local projects, meeting artists and poets. Even then, however, I understood poetry to be about story telling, even if in a performatic, or non-fictive disclosure. In fact before writing mostly poetry I’d been writing sort of macabre short stories all taking place at the border––both as an actual geography and imagined space. So it’s not so much that I don’t see genre. I do and I think genre is important in many ways, but the boundaries are more porous than we, culturally, recognize. In short, I came to poetry later, but even while writing short fiction, I was I think already writing poetry throughout the syntax and movement of the pieces. I realize now that my MFA advisor, a novelist (Steve Erickson) might’ve been telling me all along to try poetry more concertedly.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I wouldn’t be able to say one way or another as all of my projects have had different lifespans. I start with research and sometimes this takes a long time, sometimes it takes less time. Then the writing. After, sometimes during, also the arranging. I don’t writ- discrete poems. I work on sustained projects that are from the beginning a ‘whole’ so I think the most time-consuming aspect of how I work is the arranging––the making it all into a book so to speak.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Definitely the latter.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

For a short period I became really invested in performance art. It was a way of interrogating terms I was also writing about critically, like ‘the body’ or ‘space’, ‘becoming’, etc. So a lot of my work involved my body and temporality rather directly. My readings now continue to think about the relationships between language and embodiment I suppose, and they have involved different interruptions to sonoricity, space, breath. I’d say that I enjoy doing only a few readings because they take a lot from me and each one is very specific. I read differently each time. I basically re-compose or re-arrange the work so that I truly feel like I’m performing the initial response of the poetry each and every time.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I have many. I try not to distinguish between scholarship and poetics, though obviously there are many important distinctions. But my questions pertaining to voice, place, and personhood are always coming from the same place of my experiences with politics, diaspora, alienation, and force.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writing is essential now. Communication is essential and relevant. The problem I think is that we don’t tend to value communication in the moment––as a wide community––yet later we orient ourselves to lasting words and sometimes even make national holidays commemorating their events. I hope that contemporary communicators can change this and we should be open to how communicators use media, for instance, to interrupt the temporality within which intimacy becomes public. Some problems that I see, especially in academia, is a distance between thinking and the community. But this movement towards the public humanities offers an opportunity to re-work the affective binds between what takes place in the classroom and what takes place outside the classroom. We need to “feel (for) each other” as Fred Moten and Stephano Harney write in The Undercommons, and by this I mean to both invest in the reality of the theoretical discourses we create, while permitting ‘the real’ world to trust in the intellectual labor of clarifying authentic histories from the fabricated narratives meant to gloss over historical reality.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think it’s great because they see or hear what I miss. And they’re invested in aspects of the poetic that as a writer I can sometimes miss while being so focused on certain parts of the project. Gillian Hamel was my hero at Omnidawn in this regard.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I don’t know about best­­­––I think anything that inspires work is good. Though I think the worst advice I often hear poets give creative writing students is that poetry isn’t about ideas. It’s always about ideas. Even if this is not what we mean when we say it to students, we shouldn’t really say it so carelessly in that it’s utterly not true.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between text and performance? What do you see as the appeal?

See 5. As for appeal I don’t know. It’s a fairly old tradition I think and at many points in literary history readings have signaled the emergence of Community. I think a cool trend that’s come back are house readings. David Hadbawnik re-invigorated this practice in Buffalo while he was there, and Jordan Dunn and Andy Gricevich run a series in Madison called Oscar Presents. I think the appeal of house readings is more authentic for me than bookstore readings, or things of that nature. Then there’s the collaborative events Susan Howe and David Grubbs have been doing, or Cecilia Vicuña readings that disrupt what readings are or have been in many ways. Different readings have different appeals I guess is what I’m saying. What I don’t like are readings that are just sort of impersonal, industry-necessary readings. I think also the kind of stuff Douglas Kearney has been doing for a while, which might explain his turn to experimental opera now, has also pushed out a new space for performance/text to explore each other.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

My day begins with changing diapers, making breakfast, dancing, and singing songs to my child. My routine now is about letting go. Treating time in a less compartmentalized fashion and being present where I am needed by someone else for however long that takes. I’ve been working on a project from my research on casta paintings and casta in general throughout Latin America, and it started before the birth of my son, and from me thinking about his being biracial in America today. So my being present for him I think is an extension of the thinking I was doing in his prenatal absence (though he’s always been present as an extension of his mother’s body). My present as unconditional love is now the impossibility of writing from the same or towards the same unconditionability of love despite the over-conditioning obligation of position, race, body, labor, colonialism, etc. While I haven’t written as much as I’d like to have written, I’ve felt the project in a way that I hadn’t realized I should be during the time when I was mostly writing.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Netflix.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Contaminated water. Seriously. Rotten beach smell, and onion fields.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Always the natural world. But in terms of books, Jean Toomer’s Cane and Theresa Cha’s Dictée are books I teach and think about often. I listen to a lot of music, and a lot of different genres and styles at different stages of writing––reading, composing, revising, etc. From son jarocho to EDM, Argentinian and Mexican punk/ska core to Kendrick Lamar, musique concrete, opera, Richard Skelton, post-rock, and so on. Different tempos are conducive to different moments of thought I think.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

See above I suppose.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Write.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I like observing so maybe something observational/conjectural, like a sort of animal biology (though I don’t like extreme temperatures so it would have to be of a rather uninteresting species).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

An urgency to draw attention to, to understand for myself, to regain myself from capitalistic and nationalistic obligations to give away my self.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

A tie between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on something that explores the racialized/sexualized body, land, and the emergence of civil laws pertaining to the governance of boundaries between them I’m calling casta for now. It started from looking into and teaching casta paintings in my classes, and from a collection of ekphrastic poems I had lying around related to baroque paintings I’ve had the opportunity to stand in front of throughout the years.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;