The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Poets On Poetry) by Joyelle McSweeney

Author:Joyelle McSweeney [McSweeney, Joyelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780472120741
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2014-12-21T23:00:00+00:00

Analogous to the unimaginable labor of Johnson’s unimaginable metaphysical poet, who nevertheless perversely executes diabolical, spasming, text effects, an unimagined reader is a kind of specter, produced, occultly, by a text that cannot imagine her and yet calls her into being by an ampersanding assemblage of continuities and discontinuities, a vertiginous pulsing cluster of exclusions and inclusions. The blubbering aspect of Muse & Drudge, its ampersanding violent, gibbering, gibbeting, ligatured production, might be seen as the signature of this violent yoking pulsation and withdrawal: “it’s rank it cranks you up / crash you’re fracked you suck / shucks you’re wack you be / all you cracked up to be.”13 In this passage, political force is massively depersonalized as “it.” The damaging extractive industrial practice of “fracking” is implicitly linked to the damaging impact of “crack” and “crank,” as well as to the punitive regime of the War on Drugs, with its spectral personages of the Crack Whore and Welfare Queen. These onomatopoetic noun-verbs—“crank,” “crash,” “frack,” “suck,” “cracked”—all packing an assonantly and rhythmically synchronized beating, all falling on the “you.” Yet “you” is a notoriously fungible pronoun in poetry. It can refer to a singular or plural addressee, a specific person or a generalized yet informal and thus familiar “one.” “You” can even mask an “I,” a way for a speaker to refer to itself. Of course, in Mullen’s hands we have no way to stabilizing these surplus quantities of “you.” Instead, “you” is like the jelly in the vise of these damaging verbs. This shattering discontinuity, this cracked-out violence and fracking, can damage but does not cancel the “you.” “You” cannot escape this stanza. “You” keeps reappearing to register the damage. Elsewhere this spasming of sound has the opposite effect, creating a medium for staging spectacular conversion from negative to positive, a site where a shimmering, pulsating spectral presence may be configured, in Don Mee Choi’s phrase, as “positively holey,” as when “breaks wet thigh high stepper / bodacious butt shakes / rebellious riddem / older than black pepper.”14 It seems critical that this quatrain begins with no pronominal human subject, but in medias res, with a noun-verb, “breaks.” “High stepper” seems to supply a noun by force of idiom, but by line 2 no verb is supplied, only another statement, “bodacious butt shakes.” Now we must reread and wonder if “high stepper” is masked possessive—if the “high stepper’s / bodacious butt shakes.” The next line delivers us to “rebellious riddem / older than black pepper.” This answering couplet seems to me to be the correct and redemptive way to read this quatrain. Read all out of order, the quatrain supplies a “rebellious riddem,” a riddem that is itself embodied here thorough all the syllables and body parts it touches, a jellylike, resourceful flexing that is marked as political, “rebellious.”

In place of the dumbstruck reader of metaphysical verse imagined by Johnson, who considers the ride not worth the carriage, who cannot fathom through what perverseness of energy a text was

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