Digital Poetics 3.27 On ‘New Weathers’ by Kashif Sharma-Patel
New Weathers (Nightboat, 2022), edited by Anne Waldman and Emma Gomis, is an important and useful document for situating the multiple tendrils of poetics that coalesce under the rubric of innovative, contemporary poetics. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, founded by Waldman and Allen Ginsberg in 1974, has been a key site for developing poetics as part of the legacy of the countercultural modernisms of the 1960s. Waldman and Gomis sourced these lectures from the audio archive at Naropa, most of them from the last fifteen years or so. The transcription of these oral sources generates a conversational sociality within the text.
Similarly, the relatively recent nature of these lectures allow us to track and understand the proliferation and decentred nature of contemporary poetics, away from the sealed nature of the avant-garde in its historical institutionalisation. This allows us to think both horizontally and vertically: across lines of inquiry and interest, and up through historical genealogies and lineages. Waldman and Gomis also theorise the intermedial nature of these literary practices, quoting Dick Higgins of Fluxus fame: “recognize the dissolution of boundaries, the expansion of liminal spaces between traditional modes of art making, and the open field for new forms that cannot be compartmentalized.” (Intermedia, Fluxus and The Something Else Press Selected Writing, p. 2) This is perhaps where the concept of poetics opens itself out beyond the confines of just poetry, a consequence that provides generative tension throughout the collection. The five-part structure of the book attempts to highlight the major themes serving as a useful frame to make sense of various voices present; moments of both resonance and discordance are easily identified and left for the reader to process.
The commons and communally-driven practice figures highly; this idea of poetry as a site of clandestine activity, creating contact and sociality that somehow critiques the hegemonic force of society through social and linguistic organisation. Lisa Robertson’s text from the ‘Communal Action’ section is illuminating:
‘Part of their work was to learn how to recognize new desire, and carefully to separate it from hegemonic compulsion. [...] There was conflict because there were many desires, erotic imaginations of new forms of intellection, interlocution, composition, and political movement in the city. To bring these multiple desires into temporary resonance was the repeating collective task. Fights could erupt. In this way, an undulant social harmonics was composed, a vibration that provided a buzzing ground for the individual compositions. [...] But their living-together opened the certainty that a part of political practice is immaterial.’ (163-164)
Tonya M Foster takes this into the realm of the poem itself where ‘The poem is a community of voices and impulses and linguistic structures and maneuvers’, moreover, ‘[t]he community is in the poem’s possible configurations of now and when, of singing anyhow.’ (261) The social structures of poetry are intertwined within the radical syntactical thrusts of poetic form that become encapsulated in the very community of poets and writers themselves. Social contact and network functions through the practice of poetry, or at least this is a strong insight pushed forward by many of the contributors.
Amiri Baraka’s lecture in the ‘Against Atrocity’ section is perhaps more direct. He recounts a history of his involvement with poetry countercultures, from white hippiedom through to Marxist and Black radicalism. He cites Mao Zedong in saying ‘art is the ideological reflection of real life’, (390) the implication being that everyday reality is part of poetic practice, and provides the frame to position poetics in general. That his reality was one riven through with white supremacy was quite the point, ending with a rhetorical jibe: ‘which side are you on?’ This is a deadly-serious undertaking.
Robert Gluck tells us, ‘disjunct writing describes a fragmented self [...] a break in narrative expectations [...] mixing of genre, working with the sentence as a palette, working below the sentence, working with collage and appropriation, seeing character as an environment’. (324) This formulation he details as a response to Althusser’s supposition that, ‘ideology is the imaginary resolution of real contradictions.’ Disjunct writing reflects, and enacts, the disjunctive self, resisting dominant tendencies of sovereign individualism and the alienation of self under racial capitalist extraction. The disjunctive self as a modality for writing–being–is found across the edited collection. Ronaldo V Wilson’s piece follows in a similar vein seeing the practice of poetry as a test of the limits of the fractured self, while Roger Reeves analyses Aime Cesaire to trace marronage and the restructuring of the French language as part of a radical tradition of fugitivity.
Similarly, Fred Moten dives into the theoretical depths of anti/un-sovereignty:
‘‘Is there a dispossessive/non-possessive modality of resistance that disrupts the standing of one’s ground, that refuses standing and the possession of ground by way of another metaphysical sociality, one that is, in its irreducible difference from itself, like something going through a double slit, both before and after the fact of colonization, so that what comes out is nothing at all, nothingness as all?’ (339)
Contrapuntal resonance is found in Tongo Eisen-Martin’s virtuosic piece seems to convey this dispossessive/non-possessive modality of resistance: ‘When I write poems, I peel back material reality and get the feeling that a genocidal superstructure is satisfied with disaster, but only for now.’ (366) These threads between that connect the decentred self–one that works within, through and against identity–to collective action demonstrate the strongest and most developed elements both in the book and in the wider poetic discourse of which the collection reflects.
It is no wonder that Black and queer writers are at the forefront of self-experimentation and disjunct writing where radical forms of dissent have developed a shared consciousness with attendant intellectual and cultural networks and infrastructures. Poetry does not exist in a vacuum. The danger, of course, is that poetry becomes a site of faux nationalism, where the form itself is privileged and endowed with powers far beyond its social making, constituting identities that merely reproduce self–aggrandising maxims for the advancement of ‘Poetry’. We see these calls, invocations and celebrations of the power of poetry, and writing more generally, throughout the book, from Alice Notley (‘poetry is our conscious attempt to reshape the world’ [39]), for instance, through to M Nourbese Philip (‘as long as we breathe and as long as there’s poetry, that maybe that is the antidote to the despair.’ [24]), as well as from many of the aforementioned writers.
Perhaps the weakest areas, and arguably most pressing, are the sections oriented around ecopoetics and capitalocene. It is evident the neo-spiritualist tendency is still operating in the wake of countercultural orientalism with a strong emphasis on alternative knowledge systems that arguably obfuscate more than elucidate. Conversely, Peter Lamborn Wilson provides a good study of utopianism and its faults through the hippy movement, while Lisa Jarnot sets the tone of urgency in light of climate catastrophe. Forrest Gander’s formulation is also useful:
‘—how does poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world?[…] I, myself, am less interested in “nature poetry”—where nature features as theme—than in poetry, sometimes called ecopoetry, that investigates—both thematically and formally—the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception.’ (80)
The development of poetic thought and form is still underway, developing a self-consciousness around the ecological concern as one embedded in various forms of social and aesthetic lineages. Interdependency, that Gander purports, extends to a wider theory of intersubjectivity that provides a model of nonnormative poetics that could take hold, aligned and intersecting with different nodes and threads that populate the social text that we find ourselves engaged in.
In many respects the problem of naming what this (sub)culture of poetics is also reflective of its multiple, and sometimes discordant, social bases. Not all subjugated knowledges are the same, nor can they necessarily be understood within the same framework. The various discordances should be as generative as the resonances, if one understands that these questions of disjunction, resistance to bourgeois individualism, climate catastrophe and communal action are always being worked-on – with no easy answers. New Weathers represents a great step in embracing the various nodes of dissemination that are countering canonisation within poetry and poetics, enabling organically-formed conversations and social practices that are critically engaged with both literary heritages and wider socio-political contexts. Poetics provides a space and frame for the articulation and dissemination of radical, nonnormative thought, however it remains far from the only site of such entanglement, and we would do well to keep that at the forefront of our minds.
*
Kashif Sharma-Patel is a poet, writer and co-founding head editor of the87press. Kashif has written criticism for The Poetry Project Newsletter, Los Angeles Review of Books and more, as well as an academic essay for The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetics. Pamphlets include relief I willed it (Gong Farm, 2021), fragments of mutability (Earthbound, 2020) and Suburban Finesse (Sad Press, 2020) co-authored with Ashwani Sharma and Azad Ashim Sharma. Kashif runs a newsletter culture hawker https://kashifsp.substack.com/
*
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
