About the Poems - DW
About the Poems
by David Wolach Thank you for asking about the ways these poems have come to be, their points of emergence, as well as the processes by which they've formed. Of those that appear in No Tell Motel, all but “{eulogy for a purchase}” (from Prefab Eulogies) are part of one full-length book, written in sections, called Occultations (two sections of which have come out as chapbooks through Dusie and Ungovernable Press, respectively). The poems here are part of one section, the longest, called “modular arterial cacophony.” Occultations has been at least three years in the writing, and part of it is due out at the end of the year from the poetry/artist book collective, Black Radish Books. Though the work is writing me more than it, or anyway the two are appropriately confused now, I did come into the project with specific interests in mind, a poetics I wanted to explore in more depth than I had in other smaller books, questions about use and poetry, poetry and the body, how (if possible?) to decenter and detour and transfer (thinking here about the fact that "metahpor" = from Gk. metaphora "a transfer" or “to transport”) the occulted by occulting. In "Alarms & Excursions" Rosmarie Waldrop asks what the use of poetry is, which is to put an intense weight on what one's poetics are, and her answer is deeply provisional: poets are, for Waldrop (perhaps) "the maintenance crew of the unacknowledged life of the mind." As generative as Waldrop's poetry, translation, and poetics has been for me, I've always felt, as I read it, something quiet, not quietist, but quiet and lacking in that provisional thesis, one that interestingly begins with asking what use poetry might have and ends with what being a poet might consist in. I've wanted, and still want, poetry to have greater potential as a cleaver of normative social discourses than negative poetics is willing to give itself, i.e., to be more contiguous with our daily and bodily movements, to be precisely the opposite of, or at least in contrast with, the written, with writing, for isn't it? Might Oppen have not produced more “poetry” during his 25 year hiatus than when he was “writing” Of Being Numerous? What does it mean to ask poetically what a poetry that has yet to be is (extant now) if not a kind of writerly “uselessness” or “protest” or “lament” (where “lament” comes from a particular transcendental lyric, what I’m here counting as negative poetics a la Andrew Jaron, Waldrop, and others whose work has had a primary influence on this engagement)? Perhaps I should rather begin by asking what use we might have for one another as multiple subjects, resisting the attempt to define the subject as having use as, which is to acknowledge the instability of that subjecthood while unearthing, and tracing, our affective labors. The work of those who have contributed to Nonsite Collective—Rob Halpern, Taylor Brady, Kaia Sand, David Buuck, Jules Boykoff, Thom Donovan, Eleni Stecopolous, and others--gives us a related, but higher-stakes and, I think, richer poetics in this regard. A couple years into exploring these questions, Rob Halpern invited me into the conversations that Nonsite was (is) having. The discussions have been enormously generative, as Nonsite was (is) asking, in various ways, those very questions: what the use of our explorations might be, how metaphor (here, in contemporary experimental poetries) obscures and yet has the potential to reveal that which is obscured—those sites and nonsites (i.e., systems of power/powerlessness mapped or made perceptible) that are socially invisible (Zukofsky: "As the eyes / near wreck / to create"). In their draft proposal, Nonsite affiliates write: "[Nonsite] will activate affinities between an array of efforts to make perceptible, apprehend, map, or narrate consequential social phenomena and occulted disasters." Reading this, having a book called and dealing with occulted disaster, really excited me, and nearly immediately Nonsite conversations complicated the project. And so Occultations, indeed the poems here, have become more than insular explorations; they've become conversations and at times critique of how and whether poetry is in a position to "make perceptible" or "narrate" "occulted disasters." So, beyond the more obvious interest in the occulted disaster—here, in these poems, the languages of "news by internet" and "poetry while fucking" and "shotgun healtcare" and “pharmaceutical discourses” rehearse a flaccid attempt to lay bare to a capital-driven wartime suffering and know if not acknowledge the econsystems of those who are completely other—I'm also interested in poetry as occulting itself, or, perhaps more precisely, the degree of inertness the contemporary western poetic black market expresses in the face of systemic/global disaster—what Buuck (The Shunt) dubs “war dash time.” Are we, in fact, in asking these questions, our own category errors? Last, a note about the construction of these poems. The section "modular arterial cacophony" has an alternating 8 / 4 line structure, and moves in and out of a 4/2 metric structure, and though in "prose" form, the poems are actually sort of fractured quasi-reportages. For the book, each of these is a central block of writing surrounded by three to four rings of separate text (commentary-like, quasi-Talmudic), which at times bleeds into that main block of poetry. Each section appropriates language from at least one source, often more, be it a poetic line, or a line from a bus map, or (often) a news item. The work, for me, is as much inter-poetical conversation, essay, as it is poetry per se. So, some of the work here will appear later in a slightly different form: the text sometimes overlaying other text, doing more overt occulting work than the occulting that is going on via other means. I've gone on far too long, so I won't say anything about "(eulogy for a purchase)" except that these poems are interested in the strange fetish market of the poetry world, and in some ways the book is interested in things not dissimilar from Occultations, though in form and medium it's quite different. The first of three volumes—Prefab Eulogies Vol. 1: Nothings Houses—is due out from BlazeVox [Books] later this year. For more on the multi-media project, feel free to check out the Prefab Eulogies website. http://prefabnotes.blogspot.com/