P-QUEUE #15 : BLOOD

Hello Some

We all know that some cook & some clean some cut leaves gather stones some pick them up some others open & close & unravel

Some eat quickly some take breaks some list grievances & others say them out loud

Some dream of violence & murder & some dream nicely some take triggers & wait by the road some clean their afterthoughts

Some protest & some watch walking on the other side by the hour some hold hands & some travel tell stories some are the stories some count for much longer and whose some, hello some, whose some. Hello. (Eunsong Kim)

I’ve long been an admirer of SUNY-Buffalo’s annual P-QUEUE (I’m still seeking copies of the first few volumes, if anyone has copies or suggestions of how to procure), and the latest, their “BLOOD” issue, Allison Cardon’s second volume as editor, includes new work by Biswamit Dwibedy, Joan Retallack, Eunsong Kim, Petra Kuppers, Travis Sharp, Renee Angle, erica kaufman and Soham Patel. Throughout its history, P-QUEUE has held to an idea of a loose “theme” for each volume—“Anomolies” (2), “Space” (6), “Polemic” (7), “Document” (8), “Mourning” (13) etcetera—an idea that has, throughout the journal’s five editors-to-date, has existed as a thread to connect sometimes disparate works, as opposed to any thematic bludgeon. Fundamentally, the strength of the writing has always propelled each volume, and has done so quite brilliantly. As Cardon writes to close her introduction:

In this, P-Queue’s fifteenth issue, blood conveys a wealth of information that is less in need of discovery than of care. As blood covers the intersection of history with finitude and relation, these poetic, polyvalent explorations of this viscious and revelatory bodily substance help us imagine a form of vitality disarticulated from blood’s labor time, net work, or progression.

[photo lifted from Allison Cardon's facebook page] 

I’ve always been fond, also, of journals that provide enough space for a writer’s work to stretch out, and reveal itself, as opposed to including only a couple of pieces, or even a single poem (for the sake of getting in as many writers as possible). Even beyond the variety P-QUEUE is traditionally known for, I’ve appreciated the journal’s interest in including multiple pieces, even longer singular, extended works, by fewer authors. Highlights in this volume abound: erica kaufman’s work is stellar—sharp, rich and smart—writing: “when i say i’m driving through / mountains i mean not just words / or filth, skepticism, & pronouns. / staccato is ordinary reception / like rabies or powerpoint or generic / welcoming verbs who need punctuation.” (“Post Classic”). Eunsong Kim’s work is powerful, and makes me want more, as she opens the poem “Tithing”: “This city’s symbol a woman who killed her colonizer // Woman is euphemism for recorded state property.” The authors collected here write blood and discomfort, trauma and progress, and Cardon’s introduction outlines the issue both generally and specifically quite beautifully. Basically, there is plenty here worth paying attention to, continuing a strong presence for an annual I have long learned to pay attention to.

Alabama Is a State on Mars #3

In the hospital twice in two years, first a heart attack and now a mugging. Sitting in his van outside his daughter’s pharmacy, he is dragged out of it, pistol whipped, punched repeatedly, possibly kicked. Daughter and coworkers inside lock the door and call the police. In the hospital face already swollen beginning to bruise. He smiles when he sees me.

Now staying up late and with a machete under his chair. Now circling the yard with the machete. Now asking everyone in the house if they, too, saw that light across the lawn. A flashlight? Do you think it was a flashlight? (Travis Sharp)

Aufgabe 11

What am I doing—catless—here,

level-headed and certain,

without cause to judge?

What am I doing without my own face,

without either feet or staggering? Who is it that seeks me out

and doesn’t discover my telephone on its tiny coffee table?

    I am but scarcely

the description of someone that knows me,

an identity card that has cast off first one foot

and then the other

and who will sleep until it is far too early.

(My flesh does not know of flesh. The saliva

coagulates and, oh, once again it is mid-afternoon

and the rain has not arrived.)

What time will I be born, that I don’t remember the light?

What time will I be dead, that my hands don’t hurt? (“Untitled,” Rafael Menjivar Ochoa, trans. Emily Abendroth)

I recently received a copy of the eleventh annual Aufgabe, a journal produced out of Brooklyn, New York through Litmus Press, and edited by an editorial board of E.Tracy Grinnell, Julian Talamentez Brolaski, erica kaufman, Jen Hofer and Canadian poet Nathanaël. Along with their usual generous amount of poetry and “essays, notes, reviews,” this issue features a section of Salvadoran poetry, guest edited by Christian Nagler, including translations from the Spanish by Emily Abendroth, Karen Lepri, Christian Nagler, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brian Whitener. In Nagler’s lengthy introduction to the section on Salvadoran poetry, he writes:

‘The quest for identity’ is a concept that perhaps signifies anachronistically in the intellectual climate of North America, where a ‘post-identity’ discourse provides some semblance of a contemporary mood, even if is not embraced or fully elaborated. We—some of us—are perhaps experiencing a milder form of what Huezo-Mixco cites as the presiding trend of the 1970s and 80s in El Salvador, when the “collision of social movements with entrenched power tend[ed] to displace identity issues.” In his lecture, Huezo-Mixco tracks the continued vitality of the concept of identity with regards to mass-events that have served to vitally confuse the idea of interior and exterior, namely a thirty year mass migration that now locates a quarter to a third of Salvadoran citizens outside the national borders. At the end of his lecture, Huezo-Mixco, arrives at a provocative conclusion that the younger generation of writers “re-creates the catastrophe of a fragmented and impoverished society.” It’s a gernation that does not write with “any enthusiasm for the political gains wrested from one of the bloodiest periods in Latin America.”

I’m impressed that a journal would so heavily and regularly be involved with translation, interested in engaging with other poetries, poetics and cultures, and in seeing the differences of subject matter, cadence and the line, as the issue features not only the special section but translated works within the section of general works. Some of the highlights of the issue include works by Noah Eli Gordon and j/j hastain, as well as Mathieu Bergeron (translated by Nathanaël). The pieces by Gordon are from a work-in-progress I’ve seen sections from before, his “The Problem,” which feature drawings by Sommer Browning. Given the drawings appear to be tailor-made for the work, one can only hope that a trade edition of the finished work might also include drawings?

What is to be done? A note on a page torn from a notebook says: a note in a defused cage. Further along, as a matter of fact, the grey skeleton of a human cage: a whole series of sawed, twisted bars. At the back, in the hay, as they say, lies a page torn from a notebook. From here, it is impossible to read it, but the repeated patterns trick the field: we are holding the page in our hand, we have already, necessarily, entered. On the front, we read: Turn the page; on the back: Turn around. Do you follow me? (“The Unformed Suite,” Mathieu Bergeron)

From the previous issue [see my review of such here] to this current one, there seems an entire different flavour, a different cadence of the works presented, and I’m uncertain if this is accident of submissions or a deliberate attempt to shape different issues (or if the difference is entirely in my own mind). 

Still, a particularly interesting feature of the current issue is an essay by Ariel Goldberg, “Selections from The Estrangement Principle: A Poetic Criticism,” which questions a number of different directions of art and writing, in regards to definition, self-definition and the question of “queer,” writing “NPR tells the news with clips from an old interview, with no mention Ryan is a lesbian. If there is nothing about being a dyke in her poetry then should the word lesbian be uttered? Is Kay Ryan making history as the first out lesbian Poet Laureate with a Pulitzer Prize, or is this actively not being treated as history?” The piece continues:

The term “queer art” is both persisting and failing at a rapid pace, and for multiple reasons. Mostly the anti-definition catchall capability of the word “queer” sets the stage. For instance, I am resistant to a dead on defining of the word. Different queernesses float up here, and more specific identifiers inside of the “LGBTQ” acronym come in to sharper focus. I am working backwards, piecing together scraps. There is a sort of pact, in the word queer, anyway, to resist the task of definition. I am identifying with it, but also varying from it, throwing back to lesbian, or dyke. I pluck and examine. I am inconsistent. As important as it is to identify a gender or sexuality, so is it to name my race, my white privilege. My excellent education privilege. Being Jewish, whatever that means. The identifiers don’t exactly end. Being gender queer or a dyke or both collapses in this long exhale where it’s not important that I know the answer to a question someone is always asking.