The Problem of Seduction: Willie Perdomo's reading at Cornell

It’s coming around to December, we’re well in the heart of a beautiful Ithaca fall now, and my first term at Cornell is coming to an end. It has been a lovely term. I’d like to close the circle by the returning to the very beginning of the semester, and recall Willie Perdomo’s fall poetry reading on August 30. In some ways this piece has been difficult to write, in some ways, the language falls short of what I really am trying to say, because it is difficult to go into political terrain without often being misinterpreted as being over-the-top.

Seductive, but problematic--is how I would describe Perdomo’s fall reading.

How can one not be seduced by Perdomo? He emanates a certain electricity, his voice transmits physicality and desire, when he breaks out into Spanish, every word he touches (for one who can’t understand Spanish) sounds surprising and foreign. He is funny and sexy, and lines like “if you want to be loved on the/ first night in more than one / position you have to help with / the cooking” (“Ten Pound Draw”) are immediate crowd-pleasers. The audience seemed a little drunk that night on Perdomo, certainly helped by Professor Ernesto Quiñonez’s generous speech: “Perdomo will use curse words. He will use Spanglish. He will use slang. But he will not corrupt the language.”

What is an uncorrupted language? What political implications are there in this obsession with a notion of “purity”? What are the implications of saying that a “pure language” is that of “ghetto” poetry (to borrow Perdomo’s own words in “Spotlight at the Nuyorican Poets Café)? The attaching of certain values (like “pure”) to certain types of identity poetry can encourage a type of poetry that promotes an us versus other split within the poetry community, and the larger community.

Of Smoking Lovely, The Nation writes, “Perdomo isn’t talking about the self-imposed exile of an artist, but a whole community that’s been disenfranchised against its will.” By exiling itself from the mainstream, does Perdomo’s work champion its position at the periphery or reinforce own marginalization? Does Willie Perdomo commit himself to self-exile and when his poetry becomes inextricably linked with East Harlem, where he is “home/ in the streets of this poem/ where I’m stuck” (Smoking Lovely, “Papo’s Ars Poetica”)?

I wished I were in some smoky, tired, slam poetry café in New York City, rather than in the imposing Hollis E. Cornell auditorium. When the initial energy and sense of novelty dissipated, I felt uncomfortable for Perdomo, as though he was on exhibit, a subject to be studied for race studies, Latin-American studies or some critical theory class. When the poet speaks, something takes place in the exchange between the poet and the audience. Academia is not entirely guiltless in this process by which a poet becomes compartmentalized and commodified. I felt uncomfortable for Perdomo because I know he was aware that that audience of Ivy league kids were just seeing how they could place him into nice literary theories they’d learnt in class:

I was just a poet
Wanting to read a poem
The first night I came here.
Since then
I have become a street poet
Then somebody’s favorite urban poet
A new jack hip-hop rap poet
A spoken word artist (“Spotlight at the Niyorican Poets Café”)

When he said “but…my spit is ready made real,” there was an odd moment of power and defiance against society’s and academia’s commodification of him as a poet. In that moment, Perdomo could belong to himself. Not a “ghetto poet”, not a “street poet.” But one wonders whether the audience allowed him to be himself.

Willie Perdomo was exciting and seductive, but how Willie Perdomo was framed was ultimately very problematic.

Autobiography of Red: Monstrous Beauty

In Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson resurrects Geryon, the doomed winged boy in the classical Greek myth Geryoneis by Stesichoros, in a contemporary verse novel on homosexual love and coming-of-age. On one hand, the “novel in verse”, composed of an array of literary genres, seems as much a monstrous and self-conflicted offspring as its winged protagonist of infrared vision. Yet on another hand, the ability of these disparate genres to coalesce together highlights how art provides a platform for the individual to contest, transgress, and reinvent categories. It is in this space that the individual is able to actualize his selfhood, testifying to the remarkable power of art to remake the self.

The protagonist Geryon, a winged human with red vision, is represented as a freakish amalgamation of human and monstrous traits: “Geryon was a monster everything about him was red / Put his snout out of the covers in the morning it was red” (9). Described with a “snout,” Geryon is an emblem of aberration and oddity, half-animal and half-human. His red vision depicts a traumatized psyche fraught with the pervasiveness of danger and treachery—a product of early sexual abuse by his brother, and irresponsible parenting by his chain-smoking, self-absorbed mother. The derogatory term “monster” shows the speaker playing the devil’s advocate, punitively and playfully reinforcing upon him a label of difference as well as suggesting Geryon’s internalization of his own difference.

Like its monstrosity of a protagonist, the book is composed of conflicting genres and characterized by a violent cataclysm of the classical and contemporary. The novel opens with a postmodernist essay on language. Its second section is composed of reconstructed excerpts of Stesichoros’ original poem. The three appendixes that follow are prose musings on language and art. The fourth and longest section, “Autobiography of Red: A Romance,” re-imagines the myth of Geryon through a contemporary gaze. Like a monster, “Autobiography of Red: A Romance” eludes mastery and classification by genre. Its narrative contains echoes of the picaresque novel, the epic tradition, a Künstlerroman and the romance novel. Composed of loosely structured episodes, the narrative follows a picaresque structure bound by the uniting motif of a journey. The aphoristic line, “sometimes a journey makes itself necessary” (46) captures the importance of the physical journey for the arrival at selfhood, highlighting the convergence of the spiritual, artistic and emotional in the emblem of the journey. Like an archetypal picaroon, Geryon moves through various cities, meets a succession of strangers, and through these encounters with the Other, moves towards the discovery of himself: “up against another human being [his] own procedures take on definition” (42). In the epic tradition, the poem celebrates of the deeds of the legendary hero: Geryon performs numerous feats, including making his journey to the volcano in Huaraz. His flight to the center of the crater of the volcano becomes a moment of trial as well as a crowning moment of strength:

He has not flown for years but why not
Be a
Black speck raking its way towards the crater of Icchantikas on icy possibles
Why not rotate
The inhuman Andes (145)

The metaphor of flight suggests an artistic triumph. Geryon is depicted as defying nature: “rotat[ing] / The inhuman Andes.” He reinvents the metaphor of his wings—a painful reminder of aberration—into a metaphor of strength. His status as a homosexual and an artist—moves from being a signifier of Otherness and exclusion into a signifier of individuality. The long, ragged line, “black speck raking its way towards the crater of Icchantikas on icy possibles,” dramatizes the protracted struggle against the elements and nature through its length and its harsh consonants, suggesting that Geryon’s flight is as much a triumph as it is a trial. Significantly, this transformation only takes place after a protracted period of shame and self-loathing: “he has not flown for years.” The book thus documents, in Künstlerroman style, the struggles of the artist to articulate selfhood.

The seemingly contradictory impulses of the text are to simultaneously preserve, destroy and recreate. The short lyric fragments in the text each freeze-frame and preserve specific moments, like Geryon’s artistic photographs. The text is a bricolage of different artworks, making it an extended ecphrastic poem, with each artwork compressing moments within a single moment. In the concluding lines of the section “Autobiography of Red: A Romance,” Geryon and Herakles become frozen in time by the poet’s gaze:

And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
night at their back. (146)

Time, “rushing towards them,” is presented as an assaulting force on a battlefield. Yet they form a solid fortress against time, “stand[ing] side by side with arms touching.” The line “night at their back” suggests their leaving of a temporal zone behind, attaining “immortality,” and resisting time through art. However, the narrative structure marks an arc of progress: by ordering each still frame into a larger sequence, the narrative structure places each lyrical moment within its larger temporal logic, thus destroying the timelessness of each moment. Similar processes of preservation, destruction and recreation manifest in Carson’s treatment of Stesichoros’ text. Carson preserves the characters and language of Stesichoros text, but simultaneously destroys and reinvents them. In the opening poem of the text, “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros,” we see how Stesichoros epic narrative is shattered into short lyric pieces, transfigured into a numbered poem, and loses its original, fluid unity. The disruption of end-stopped lines by jerky enjambments, the absence of punctuation, the use of italic and the novelistic all serve as modern interventions of tradition. The reference to “red meat” in the opening title “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros” suggests the offspring’s eating of his father and the artist’s liberation from the anxiety of influence.

The metaphors become remade in Carson’s imagination of the original Greek myth. In Stesichoros’ writing, the central event of Geryon’s history is his death by Herakles. In Carson’s re-write, the defining event of Geryon’s selfhood is his encounter with Herakles:

Have you ever seen a volcano? Said Herakles.
Staring at him Geryon felt his soul move
in his side. (46)

Like a volcano, Herakles is a metaphor of sexual energy. He initiates Geryon into the world of the bodily pleasure, inspiring an awe that is likened to that of a religious revelation: “staring at him Geryon felt his soul move.” When the face of death becomes humanized, the encounter with the death is not feared but desired because of the sheer eros of the moment:

Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb Made
The boy neck lean At an odd angle sideways as when a
Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze (13)

In a reaction-formation, the “arrow” is transformed from a metaphor of death into a phallic symbol penetrating Geryon’s body. The piercing of the skull by Herakles becomes an allegory of sexual encounter becoming branded into memory. The physical wound becomes displaced in Carson’s re-imagined myth. The arrow’s grazing of his head is depicted as a lover’s caress: “part[ing] Geryon’s skull like a comb.” Geryon is depicted as actively seeking death, rather than being a passive victim of death: “The boy neck lean[ed] At an odd angle sideways as when a / Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze.” The contortion of his posture becomes a self-willed, deliberate act. Here, art succeeds in emptying out the signified Death, from the signifier of Herakles. Carson’s text is thus is a palimpsest of sorts—while retaining the language of myth; it is simultaneously the site of the erasure of myth and the birth of new meaning. The processes of recreation and destruction of the genres in the text show how categories are not sacrosanct. This allows Geryon to break away from being the demonized product of myth and achieve his final epiphany: “We are amazing beings, / Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.” (146) He moves from the monster that he has been labeled, into a supermensch.

Autobiography of Red is a study in self-contradiction. It marries different types of genres to create monstrous progeny that defies tradition and categorization. In the remaking of the generic categories, Carson provides a statement on how art is the site of contestation of meaning. It is because art is not a closed system of logocentric meaning that it is able to provide a space where the individual can remake himself and actualize his selfhood. Parading as a monster of sorts, Autobiography of Red celebrates its own rupture of totalizing systems of meaning.

Works Cited
Carson, Anne. The Autobiography of Red. New York: First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, 1998.

The Odd Yawn

In Anne Waldman’s “How the Sestina (Yawn) Works,” the poem transforms from a tired medium of art-for-art’s-sake into a platform for revolution, occupying the thin line between “deadbeat” and “upbeat” connoted by the word “beat poetry”. From the bored opening of the poem,

I opened this poem with a yawn
Thinking of how tired I am of revolution

The speaker establishes the notion that poetry has become overused for the cliché of revolution:

The television
Whew! It was getting to me personally,
I think it is like poetry
Yawn it’s 4 A.M. yawn yawn.

The preponderance of “yawn”s throughout the poem, onomatopoeically dramatizes a sense of nonchalance. The cyclical, repetitive nature of the sestina reinforces the sense of monotony on part of the speaker. The title of Walden’s poem highlights this trivialization: “how the sestina (yawn) works” is both trivializing and bathetic.
The volta comes occurs without any build-up, too sudden to be convincing. After decrying the triteness of the revolution portrayed on television and the boredom of poetry, the speaker jumps up, unleashes a primal yawn, and glorifies the revolution and poetry. The envoi of the sestina describes art as a lethal but beautiful force:

O giant yawn, violent revolution
Silent television, beautiful poetry
Most deadly methedrine
I choose you all for my poem personally.

The “yawn” becomes a rejuvenating act; the privileging of the voice of the poet over the voice of media “silent television” suggests the triumph of individual creativity in a time of mass-produced art. This is underscored by the establishment of authority of the poetic “I”: “I choose you all for my poem personally.” The speaker’s conformity to the sestina structure highlights a respect of authority and subversive power of form and art.
But one can’t ignore the hint of self-ironizing that undermines this poetic triumph. It’s humorous how the speaker elevates poetry in poem that is filled with bathetic lines that trivialize poetry:

I really like to write poetry
It’s more fun than grass, acid, THC, methedrine.

Ultimately, Walden’s poem illuminates the tensions in the poetry and ideals of the Beats. The speaker glorifies and beautifies the notion of revolution, yet perhaps suggests the revolution must be an inward, individual act, rather than a political act that is seen on television. The drawing of the revolution into the self constitutes a resistance so subtle as to be unreadable. Drugs, sex and art come together in the Beat generation to articulate an affront to social morality, creating a rather ambivalent form of revolution. Despite the overwhelming desire to write the individual self and individual desire on the social landscape, the undertone of self-deprecation and pessimism towards arts in the poem is perhaps, the inevitable effect of an ambivalent Bohemian resistance.

Surrealism: Subversion and Fascism

It is apt that David Gascoyne writes that “Surrealism is not a style, it is not a school of literature, it is not a system of aesthetics” (Gascoyne, “Introduction,” ix). By failing to pin surrealism within a category, he departs from a logocentric notion of language grounded in “presence” and “absolute meaning” and reflects the spirit of Surrealism.

I sense inherent paradoxes within Surrealism. The positing of an alternate system of reality that is governed by the Unconscious presents another notion of a system of meaning that is grounded in the absolute. The “Unconscious” is marked with a capital U, showing a certain extent of logocentrism implicit in a movement that seeks to relocate itself from a logocentric notion of language and meaning.

On one hand the absoluteness of an alternate reality allows Surrealism to securely enact a resistance to ideology. The notion that it is the “Unconscious” that dictates our actions makes Surrealism subversive in that it questions the basis of assumptions and suggests a certainty of an alternate plane of reality. Rimbaud uses his art to “revolt [...] against old stupidities, conventions, morality—the whole life of the epoch of capitalist prosperity in which he lived” (Gascoyne 7). At the same time, the ability of one to exploit the notion of the Unconscious to impose a certain, arbitrary and indisputable (how can one argue against a theory of the Unconscious?) truth makes Surrealism a possible mode for facilitating fascism and totalizing worldviews. As Gascoyne notes, Surrealism’s associations with Orientalism confirms this rather unhappy truth.

Ars Poetica

After all those readings, I decided to write my own Ars Poetica. The winged thing metaphor is a bit old, but I think the old metaphors have a certain allegorical nature that new metaphors don't have. I think the last line might be a bit overbearing. I like that everyone else is asleep in this poem.


Ars Poetica

I didn’t sleep the night before flying
into New York.

I spent the night
spinning a roomful of silk.
So when I emptied the room of myself,
The room would not be empty.

I stayed awake
to see my sister awake.
Delivering her into the dawn,
her face disappeared
like a star.

I picked through the debris
of the years, deciding what to take
and leave behind. Finally,
I decided to take
nothing more than
a pair of wings.

I am leaving now, I nudged my grandfather, still asleep.
What? he said, turning
his better ear towards my lips.
Nothing, I said, Get back to sleep.
I left. He continued sleeping,
as though woken by nothing more
than the faintest impression
of some night thing in passage.

Language: the Site of a Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost maps the fall of Man. Although the text employs the language of Christian dualism and invokes a long-established epic tradition to place itself within a tradition of religious texts, the signifiers in the text become emptied of their religious weight. Thus the text too, enacts the fall of Man through the fall of language.

A radical instability is produced when pagan influences seep into the text, suggesting the infiltration of the pagan upon the religious in the text, and pointing to a culturally conflicted world. The speaker calls upon Urania, the patroness of astronomy and one of the nine Muses of Greek tradition, reflecting upon a departure from orthodoxy.

The theological notion of poetry is the site of God’s presence upended by the voice of individual subjectivity. When the speaker writes, “invoke thy aid to my adventurous song” (13), the word “adventure” suggests restlessness, curiosity, the desire for knowledge—that which was the cause for the Fall. One of the ambivalent moves of the poem is how the poet calls upon the spirit of God to “pursue [...] Things unattempted yet in prose and rhyme” (15-6). The appeal to the divine to steer one away from tradition seems an appeal to God for the permission to transgress established boundaries. The emphasis on original artistry on the poem is the privileging of the self or art above God. Poetic authority lands in the hands of the poet over the God, by the end of the poem, completing the coup d’etat that the poem enacts, “I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (25-6). The ars poetica in the preamble cleverly rationalizes why the lack of rhyme signifies a return to tradition, rather than the departure from tradition that is denotes: showing the ability of reason to rationalize any deviation from tradition. The absence of rhyme is a move towards the reclamation of “ancient liberty [...] to the heroic poem.” It is important to note how the meaning of “liberty” becomes altered in the poem from the original religious meaning of “liberty through sacrifice of individual freedom to God” to “liberty in individual freedom,” showing the privileging of the self over God.

Milton’s Paradise Lost shows how the religious word itself is fallible and characterized by its fundamental instability. His poem reveals the operations by which the signification of the word can become emptied. Like the barren religious landscape he seeks to depict, Milton’s poetic language is itself a kind of “paradise lost.” The question that the text begs is this: is a poem that is composed of fallen language able to portray the theological without enacting its fall? Language becomes implicated in the destruction of ideology. The next question to ask is then this: what comes first, the fall of language or the fall of religion? The text thus shows how, a worldview is structured by language and both challenged by language.

The impossibility of meeting

Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter” is about love and separation. It is a lamentation of lost love.

It is possible to link the theme of the inevitability of separation with the impossibility of the marriage of different language systems, the impossibility of the encounter with the elusive other. The work was adapted from Li Po’s poems and based on interpretations by Japanese scholars and notes from an American scholar. If we read the line “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours” as the speaker’s attempt to bridge the divide between cultures, the inevitable separation shows its impossibility. The chain of transmission of form raises the question, can a poet assume the identity of another? Is the assumption of another voice inevitably tied to the alienation that we see in the poem?

We are aware that the poem is an experiment in other forms. This tempers the authenticity of the voice in the poem. I remember when I was rewriting Rafiq Kashwari’s ghazal into another form for the last assignment. I felt powerful while writing it to be able to exercise the creative license to assume another identity, I also felt guilty for unconsciously imposing preconceived notions of race, gender and identity into the poem, and thoroughly distorting the original voice.