P-QUEUE #18 : Glitch

 

Last year, we explored movement—we moved together and saw how the pieces moved us—in our thinking as the pandemic took hold. This year, we only had the present: any sense of futurity was unknown and remains so. Our collective uncertainty propelled us toward the reliance on technology and redefined how we experience community. To glitch is to interrupt the present and imagine a future. The glitch evades time and makes time visible to us. It opens us to chance and possibility, calls on us to respond to its behavior. This issue, we experimented with an open-call, glitching P-Queue and its editorial process. Opening ourselves to how people might respond, we left the theme and its interpretation to our writers. P-Queue itself was a glitch and it demanded a response from its contributors and editors.

A glitch is a slippage, something that finds its way through the crevices and into shared space, the networks that pull us together. In lieu of our insights into each writer’s work, this editor’s note leaves guided explanations behind the interface, makes visible the reader’s own attention and proposes the act of thinking as remedy.

In the spirit of glitch, the works have priority in staging their own interruptions while imagining futures otherwise. (“EDITOR’S NOTE”)

Given it took two attempts for editors Dana Venerable and Zack Brown to send me copies of the latest volume (originally I received an empty envelope in the mail, as the glue-seal had become undone), I was highly amused to realize that the eighteenth volume of the annual P-QUEUE out of the English Department of SUNY Buffalo is subtitled “Glitch.” I mean, that’s just perfect, right? (Maybe too perfect: was that original mis-mailing part of a larger promotional ploy?)

This is the second volume edited by Venerable and Brown, after last year’s “Movement” [see my review of such here]. I’ve long been a fan of the journal, and am still hoping to fill the holes in my collection, if possible [see my reviews here, also, of sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, ten to thirteen, seven and eight, and five], so if anyone has copies of, say, issue nine or six or four or three or one (I had work in volume two), please let me know. The excitement of seeing a new volume of P-QUEUE comes from knowing there is a consistent level of quality and highly engaging work in every volume, predominantly from writers I’m being introduced to for the first time (most of whom seem not yet to have produced a full-length collection, so this really is an opportunity to catch work by emerging writers around SUNY Buffalo as it is happening). This volume includes the same, as well as two writers I’m already familiar with: Rebekah M. Devine, J.B. Stone, Courtlin Byrd & Brent Cox, Alice Hall, Ariana Nadia Nash, Nathan Austin, Kathy Lou Schultz, Jed Munson, Brooke Bastie, Nat Sufrin, Callie Ingram, Barrett White, Corey Zielinski, Katie Naughton and Nathan Alexander Moore. There is always such an enormous amount of energy in the works contained in each volume, always with an impressive range of style and structure between the poets included, offering an incredibly high quality of work.

I’m fascinated by Los Angeles poet Nathan Austin’s (who apparently had a publication recently from Kyle Flemmer’s The Blasted Tree) four poems included in this issue, which offer a simultaneous play of visual and sound, working to potentially disrupt and entangle meaning while possibly even offering a phonetic play of what could be mispronunciation or a heavy spoken accent—I immediately imagine someone versed in Scottish Gaelic, for example, being phonetically translated from their spoken English into written form.

if-”ou want

if-”ou want. Illllt be olnuhly rIIorning-glories
                                                    properly markt”t

Hw pl’esput paper            ei a lesiless night, lie 

All ‹‹lif- e

                        for the wilter hits All-tinsel
submerged by the iII’l’lad conceptionis of myriad

in the icy confetti sent from the skies

‘crease

  

to hear it ag:lin,

I’d already been aware of some of the work of Buffalo poet and critic Katie Naughton, having produced a chapbook of hers, so it is good to see further work. I’m fascinated by her poems included in this volume, such as the poem “from Paralegal,” set as an evocative tower of phrases, one set on top of another:

When the contract workers leave the office
at the end of the day and exit like
anyone into what might be called life
if you aren’t so cynical as to call it leisure
or luxury though there are many fees
this is the payment for
being unasked that is
slipping out of corporate existence
from five to nine every day and
into everything else there is for
people unauthorized to work overtime
the paralegal does not know
where they go when they take
the train through the jostling speed
of the tunnels or the light or
skyline breaking through its windows
over the bridges what kinship
might exist in the city what
decades of neighborhoods places
made without consultation of market
research firms but because
of what one person knew how
to make or do it might
be romanticization the paralegal
remembers her landlord-neighbors
raised in the boroughs working for
the MTA the old man with
her same birthday across the street
leaving packages at the corner market
and also what she did before this
at the job without overtime or
a company cellphone leaving into
the city with the ten dollars left
for the day the donation yoga
the meditation circles the falafel
sandwiches the place to buy
a half-pint of beer friends and just
walking the lights the streets
were for everyone in summer in snow

I don’t know how else to convince you that these volumes generally, and this one specifically, are worth picking up and reading if you aren’t paying attention. I could mention the staccato lyrics of Buffalo poet Alice Hall, displayed in the handful of poems included here, as the poem “F.T.L.” opens: “the water leaking in Penn Station, dressed / like arm loops. such / collapse in the knees of revision.” There are the long, languid contemplations of Austin, Texas-based Nathan Alexander Moore (another recent above/ground press author), including the opening to “Looking in the Mirror as a Form of Time-Travel,” that reads: “I look at you & wonder what it’s like on the otherwise of / sharpness. / Are you coming to meet me from some distant past or an / unsettled future? / Does time flow backwards or forwards for you?” There is the sense of structural play on the visual/lyric “glitch” of Callie Ingram’s “To Me Good Used To Be,” and some very cool erasures by Ariana Nadia Nash. Or the powerful rhythms and thoughtful cadences of the poems by South Dakota poet and scholar Kathy Lou Schultz, such as her piece “Peaks,” that reads:

Sentences give rise to duration. Dilation. An opening.
How many centimeters measured.
            Counting not consciousness.
Duration. Or waiting. The medicine doesn’t arrive.
Women have been doing this.
            Haven’t we figured it.
Waiting. A black line peaks. A pressure. Rates race, reduce.
            Oxygen: Saturated. Or unsaturated?
Pain peaks unrelieved. Only needles then. If only a kind word.
Why couldn’t you?
            You had one job.
Peaks or piqued. Stimulated or irritated? They do this every
day so they don’t
            See my face.
Irritated skin rubs cuts. Taped together like a broken doll.
You don’t
            Hear his cries.
Cuts unform the body. Not dilated but opened. Exposed to air.
The body
            Reforms angrily. A scar.

P-QUEUE 17 : Movement

 

today the news
stays
      won’t you? 

I have been possible
      once
      and for all 

I who can’t fight
      feel it
      even name it
anymore

that’s how it has to feel

or I have thought so
I have thought
      that
out of the light
comes what I think 

and what I think
is I
      would
love you (Rachelle Toarmino, “What Kind of Love is That”)

Anyone who has been paying attention to my reviewing over the years already knows that I’m an admirer of the annual journal P-QUEUE out of SUNY-Buffalo, having reviewed most of the volumes-to-date (see reviews of sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, ten to thirteen, seven and eight, and five; and I’m still hoping that copies of the first few volumes might be possible to find at some point). Edited by incoming editors Dana Venerable and Zack Brown, P-QUEUE has always provided a high quality of experimental writing by an interesting mix of emerging and established writers, in no small part, I’m sure, due to the strong writing program that exists at the university (and issues deliberately don’t repeat authors). For similar reasons, I used to be a big admirer of the annual Headlight anthology as well, produced through Montreal’s Concordia University, another university with a strong creative writing program, but I haven’t seen an issue there for about two years [see my review of the last ones I saw,here]. This issue of P-QUEUE includes work by Nathan Alexander Moore, Aimée Lê, Julianne Neely, Tracie Morris, Claire Tranchino, Will Alexander, Edwin Torres, Rachelle Toarmino, Amy Catanzano, Julie Patton and Jiwon Ohm, most of whom I had been previously unfamiliar with. For their introduction, editors Venerable and Brown include an exchange between them on their thoughts on approaching the issue, and on the work they’ve chosen to include. The conversations reads as a bit long and meandering, but provides an interesting overview of what they’re working towards as editors, writers and simply creative humans living in the world (all of which becomes even further relevant when one considers that most editors of the journal-to-date are involved in editing multiple issues, suggesting an attention and aesthetic towards not only what we are currently reading, but what is to come). As Venerable writes as part of their exchange:

[…] The movements of judgement, of racism, are too urgent, too forceful, too violent. Dare I/we go on? Ohm shares that we must. Lastly, in “Apologies…” Ohm’s list of revisions / revised thoughts—emphasis on #11 and #12—inspired by T.S. Eliot moves through a constant state of stability within instability, something that I think about a lot within my own life and writing. “The rock which forms in your throat when you look at one’s back.” Is this “love,” always in flux?  I agree with Ohm’s notes that I may also never grasp what poetry is, but it is that searching for meaning, that processing, that allows for poetic conversations, musical dialogues of care, very much present in this volume. The task at hand, or at body, is to put as much work into our actions, our ethics, our lifestyles as we do in our artistic creations.

Z [Zack Brown]: Agreed! The pieces in this volume, each in their own way, work at the fulcrum between language and body, which shows (to circle back to the beginning of our discussion) that political life and poetic life are perhaps not the same, but nonetheless forcibly entangled. What we do with our bodies is guided by our language. […]

One of the first pieces in the journal to jump out at me was the  ten-part sequence “An Elegy for Unsaid Things,” by Nathan Alexander Moore, a recent SUNY-Buffalo graduate currently pursuing a doctoral degree from the University of Texas. The fourth poem in the sequence reads:

What does it mean to be moved?

To run from the present?

To move toward uncharted geography?

To pack your life into parts,

                        Leaving behind big & small moments,

                        Dumping all your desires & detritus into boxes

                        Affixed with the promise of packing tape?

To remember to not say goodbye?

To know you will fade into a barely realized recollection?

To get into a car & refuse to hold (back) your tears?

To wonder if the future even exists

                        As you watch the present crumble

                        Into a fine point in the rearview mirror?

To ponder how you will get to the other side of the horizon?

I am also very taken with (and amused by) Vietnamese American writer and artist Aimée Lê’s selection of prose poems, such as the piece “WHY AM I ALWAYS FALLING OFF A CLIFF?” that opens: “Why did I think if you missed a meal, you might die? I asked, ‘When you’re diabetic and you miss a meal, do you, like, die?’ Notice I only said that after the banana was secured in your jaw. I am very brave. I don’t like to be a cause of panic. I walk very calmly out the door and then break into a run. I didn’t used to run during the day because I was scared that the drivers of cars would see me trying too hard. Why do all these insects, flower petals and ash keep sticking to me? Do they think I am an altar?” I clearly need to read more work by both of these authors. Award-winning poet Julianne Nealy, author of chapbooks through Slope Editions and Garden Door Press, includes this note at the end of her poem “Miracle”: “After learning of the theme—MOVEMENT—I was interested in learning about what it takes in our bodies to actually make a movement occur. What I quickly learned through an overwhelming amount of dense and abstract scientific language, that is a miracle our bodies move at all. This is the meditation on that, that follows.” Her poem includes:

Side of muscles acting on either biaxial
Or without bending of

Articulation allows for rotation causes
The ulna into contact with a

Type of a circle it laterally away from
Circumduction is suddenly

Movement that take place within the
Contraction or thigh either the

That help to stick out the limb laterally
Away from side

Produced by the limb superior rotation
Causes the opposing movement such

Synovial joint returning the neck or elbow
Allow the elbow knee

Joint gives the ball and involves a joint
Allows the coronal

Determined by combination of inversion
Than eversion of inversion is extension

Structural type while adduction and gives
The summation of movements identify

And so on, moving at quite a pace for a number of pages. While it would be entirely possible to move through the whole issue, suffice it to say that this is worth picking up. You should probably pick up a copy. Why haven’t you picked up a copy?

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