#rodrigo toscano

[the-final-sentence]

We want reshuffling of all feelings and fortitude.

Rodrigo Toscano, from "Espectacularistas"

[archive-poetry]

—Rodrigo Toscano, Habilitas

2024.10.03 - poets.org poem-a-day

[x]

Habilitas

Rodrigo Toscano

One arm can be raised painlessly.

The other arm cannot be raised, painlessly.

One foot beautifully articulates to all sides.

The other foot is locked, causing a limp.

One glute goes unnoticed throughout the day.

The other glute is incessantly irritated.

         »

There’s a million gnats hanging around here.

Not all the gnats are in great shape.

Some more than others are more spry.

Matter of fact, you could line them up, one by one.

An array of nano-differences would emerge.

We might call that a scale.

Whatever.

         »

Primate that doesn’t heal, that’s the poem.

That’s the poem on a scale—of spryness.

It both can and cannot walk—without a limp.

But it moves through—the gnat space, the ape space.

It gears towards its own sun.

That’s the perception, at least

The minimally required deception

To get to sun not its own but felt as its own.

And how not? 

“Our collective sun”—that perennialist phrase

Uttered by limpers-in-life, alongside gnats

Agitated, swirling among, swatting each other. 

         »

The nerve endings of tendons are fueled by the sun

Not by the stars or the moon, well maybe the moon.

Maybe moving limbs are lunar tributes

Without our sunny consent. 

Maybe the gnats should calm the fuck down.

Maybe the apes should dote on more practical matters

Like, four limbs wiggling efficiently enough

Powered by hobbled hips

Happily venerating the sun among gnats

Curiously awaiting what moonlight might bring

What creature companions might emerge

What verse lines will reach out for reception

What painful or joyful range of motion might ensue

Among apes, gnats notwithstanding.

The sun, absurdly sunny, urging on.

About this Poem

“After years of reading poems by colleagues that explored the various facets of ableist discourse, I decided it was time to write one myself. I was quite injured at the time, also struggling with the mental aspects of injury. Since then, the poem has been well received when read in public, people consistently referring to it as ‘that gnats poem.’” —Rodrigo Toscano

[postleft]

The Zone • Protean Magazine

Poet Rodrigo Toscano's "The Zone" explores the entangled processes of imperialism, nation-building, and literary culture across the western

[ritualofoakandmistletoe]

Elizabeth Hughey & Rodrigo Toscano reading for Sacred Grove Reading Series #8.

[litmuspress]

Simple Future

tenacious stays conditioned moves reveals as it obscures ultimately craps out stoops before force the dazzling brightness of realism returns for a last stint tattered fettered committed

Or to what are we committed after peak oil. Or how do we continue to move about on the planet. Or how do we hold each other between movements. Or what does it look like when the air conditioning runs out. Or where does the power to cool the computers come from. Or which run is in tatters. Or how many potholes in the road. 

In “Simple Future,” Rodrigo Toscano opens up a fantastic can of worms by inviting us to stoop and be dazzled in the same sentence. Where he is talking about grammar, he is talking about economy. Here we find ourselves in the future, and it is simple:  

vyers for time for space

Language, too, is measured. Is transactional. Is about getting what you need for that with which you can part. Within the confines of the poem, Toscano calls out capitalism by juxtaposing dreams with duty. Reading this poem in 2015, it is understood that we cannot have both. Would that we could imagine a world where realizing our mutual dreams was our duty. 

[litmuspress]

Objects? often cloaked

Subjects? barely thrive

By breaths per hours per mass-work units

Through years

Through shelvefulls of impulses that came to...

So that archivists of scarcity were amending mutuality

Consciousness  of mutuality

“Literature”?

in a country that came to...

from Rodrigo Toscano’s “Past Progressive,” in Partisans.

To be a partisan is to be a strong supporter of a party, cause, or person. Or to be a member of an armed group formed to fight secretly against an occupying force. This, of course, according to the dictionary, which is the dictionary on my laptop’s desktop. Which matches precisely the definition Google gives me. But in this case, I wonder, which cause, or party, or person? Certainly not the archivists of scarcity. “Literature”? Perhaps.

In cloaking and barely thriving, through grammar and lexicon, Toscano creates an interesting world where subjects and objects mingle and redistribute their qualities. As literature comes to, rationale passes out in the “over-assuaged” logic of capitalism.  -wanna look? -wanna fuck? -wanna buy? 

Toscano mocks, so we know where we stand. And even if the ground is uneven, it is here, holding us, languagers languaging, saying that which must be said. As for what the team is, that remains up to the reader to decipher. 

[litmuspress]

Grammar and time in “Partisans”

There is something I find so compelling about a book of poetry that names its segments after grammatical forms. In Partisans, Rodrigo Toscano names each of the twelve chapters of the book after a form of verb. Beginning with the present perfect progressive, breaking into the simple past in the middle, and ending with the past perfect progressive, it might look, at first glance, like a linear trajectory through grammar. 

But the text is more complicated than that, and the present perfect progressive is, in fact, quickly followed by the future perfect. And the future progressive precedes the simple past, and the past perfect progressive is preceded by the future perfect progressive. Already from the table of contents, Toscano interrupts the reader’s sense of linear time.

Time and space and their material ambiguity make a persuasive background for this text grappling with notions of collectivity and sovereignty.

Toilers facing bankers realists approaching mystics referents clasping referents

Toscana uses the grammatical lexicon to address questions that arise questions of grouping-together in so many contexts:

By the time its course is run it might have forced an us from them a them from us a me from you a you from me

Already in chapter II, FUTURE PERFECT, we are struggling to find, with our divisions, our pulling-togethers. What compels us? What do we make? 

[spooksbyme]

I’m usually at a loss for describing in any satisfying way why or how the work I do as an artist matters.

The barely no-longer baby poet Lorraine reads Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself for a graduate class at UCSD and then writes something about it, also for the class.

October 25, 2010

The last time the annual Modern Language Association conference was in Washington, DC was in 2004, I think. That year, I’d been having many conversations with other writers about the relationship between innovative writing and political efficacy.  It was also a moment in my life when I was becoming impatient with both grassroots political organization and the public policy world I worked in. At one of the many offsite events, I read a revised version of Bernadette Mayer’s “Essay.” I no longer have a copy of my rewritten version, but I know I replaced Mayer’s line, “I guess it’s too late to live on a farm now,” with something like, “I guess it’s too late to free all the oppressed peoples now,” and went from there. I wish I could find a copy of it.

Anyway, that poem lead to a long conversation with Rodrigo Toscano at the bar afterward. We had a long conversation, most of which I don’t remember because I’d been drinking scotch since before the reading. I’m paraphrasing, but the one specific thing I remember was something like, “The revolution isn’t about the barricades anymore (I’d ironically commented in my poem that, “anyway, I don’t want to die on the barricades), it’s about how you and I treat each other, how we treat other people.” At this point, I don’t remember if he said it or I said it. The only other things I remember from that night are 1) that I made a bizarre proposition to someone as a joke, but they didn’t take it as a joke; 2) that Bob Perlman bought a copy of my chapbook, Dear [Blank] I Believe in Other Worlds, and I was very happy about that; and 3) that someone outside the bar grabbed my ass as I left and yelled “Baby got back!”

I’ve been attempting to write something that might be a memoir, except that instead of having the text progress through a time-based narrative, it proceeds by association. So, I can very easily move from a discussion of wigs and hairpieces to my aunt to the history of the Indian wars in Texas to the idea of Manifest Destiny. It occurs to me that what I’m doing might be something like what Kaitlin was thinking about last week: how might a novel or a text that is not a poem think about the implications of Ron Silliman’s “New Sentence”? However, it also occurs to me that Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself might more obviously offer prose and fiction writers ways of addressing narrative, non-linearity, and ethical responsibility.

I’ve been enamored with Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “Ethical Text” as discussed in Revolution in Poetic  Language since (the first time I was in) graduate school. I realize that I never fully understood why she used the word “ethical” to describe it. For Kristeva, the ethical consists in consciously and consistently reaching out to the other: “The ethics that develops in the process of negativitiy’s unfolding is not the kind of ‘ethics’ that consists in obedience to laws” (110). Her use of the word “Negativity” is Hegelian, but in the course of the book she links it more directly to the process of dialogue. Negativity “can only produce a subject in process/on trial” (111).

So, for Kristeva, as for Butler, ethics is a dialogical, relational practice in which one acknowledges the otherness of the other as well as the otherness of ourselves. Kristeva’s notion of an ethical text could be the kind of text I could make when, to use Butler’s terms, I willingly explore and even emphasize the way an inarticulable “prehistory” interrupts my narrative attempts. I like the idea of creative text as transference, as a constant attempt to examine and rearticulate the “scene of address”: “Here as elsewhere, the transference brings forth a scenario from the past, enacting precisely what cannot be given in another expressive form, at the same time that a new and possibly altered relation is wrought from this more archaic resource” (Butler, 67-68)?

And now, a huge leap. I am going to speak very broadly, too broadly perhaps, about political rhetoric in the United States. Liberals tend to believe that if they can construct a fact-based narrative, then their constituents will support them out of a sense of trust. Moreover, liberals also tend to believe that people make poor decisions because they do not have access to adequate information—to facts. Conservatives tend to ignore and reject a rhetoric of “telling the truth,” and instead focus on narrating various versions of a US equivalent to Max Scheler’s Zersetzung of ethical ideas—witness the rhetoric of the Tea Party. Recently, Democrats have done a wretched job of helping make the health care bill popular because they assume people will make judgments about it based on “facts.” Republican commercials about the health care bill blatantly lie about what the bill does. Or, rather, they create narratives about the healthcare bill based on a kind of nostalgic faith in the goodness of individuals and private entities and mistrust of government.

I bring this up as an attempt to articulate a specific example of how discourses which do not leave room for ethical debate—for revisiting the “site of address”—can be incredibly damaging and violent as Butler suggests.  However, I’m usually at a loss for describing in any satisfying way why or how the work I do as an artist matters. In the United States, asking whether or not something “matters” is code for, if you are conservative, asking whether or not something makes money and, if you are liberal, asking whether or not something contributes to the social good. These are unsatisfying questions that only allow for unsatisfying answers within in the systems of linguistic and social norms they support.  I don’t determine the value of my work by financial calculations, nor am I comfortable with a neat description of what is socially good—and I’m certainly not comfortable with the idea that the “results” or “effects” of my work can be measured (articulated) in any currently recognizable way.

My lack of satisfaction, I realize, is useful. I began this text by describing a conversation with Rodrigo Toscano because that one memorable statement which he or I or the both of us made is still the only workable answer I have for how to ethically proceed as an artist. It’s not a satisfying answer, but it does act as a site of address to which I can return and attempt to rearticulate. Writing is discourse and discourse is dialog. As a writer—as a human being—I can choose to approach dialogue as an opportunity for inquiry instead of requiring dialogues to be neat fixed explanations. Or, as Butler notes, “sometimes calling into question the regime of truth by which my own truth is established is motivated by the desire to recognize another or be recognized by one. The impossibility of doing so within the norms available to me compels me to adopt a critical relation to these norms” (24-25).

When I write, I always have an audience in mind—either an imagined one or, more often than not, a fantasy version of a person or group of people. For me, writing and reading provide opportunities to rearticulate myself and others (or to rearticulate my failed narratives of them)—regardless of whether or not I am playing the role of the author or the role of the audience-reader-listener.