“In other words, the bodies dropped from airplanes entered the landscape and became a part of the country’s ‘natural environment’”
This goes back to violence and erasure – ways to erase memory – to disappear the things that you don’t want to see. I’m thinking – as the bodies become a part of the landscape the violence done to the bodies also becomes a part of the landscape – so that the natural and violence can never be divorced – the mountain, seas, lakes, rivers – all become one mass grave – a landscape of violence and bodies.
Paraphrase: why the recurrent appearance of the natural world in Zurita’s work:
I’m thinking: The dead/tortured/murdered end up fertilizing the landscape – the landscapes “eats” the bodies as they decompose and through agriculture we eat the bodies that have fertilized our crops – the violence done to the bodies is encapsulated in the body and we ingest the violence and their disappearance – a sort of loving nurturing cannibalism – but in the way that the decomposition fertilizes the landscape the bodies cannot be separated from the landscape and become a part of it physically – therefore we have to return to the natural world in order to return to the dead – to the body – to the self – to the people. So – are these bodies void of love? does it cycle back through? They are the disappeared, but has their love also disappeared? Like the violence in their bodies – does any love melt into the landscape as well? Is it absorbed and cannibalized too?
I’m thinking: of penetrability/permeability. The body enters the landscape – Zurita enters our heads – his poetry permeates – “now that you got in / here into our nightmares, through pure verse/ and guts” (3) – not only the reader, but the disappeared, those that remain, the criminals, the government, history, etc. The poem penetrates the heart – “can you tell me where my son is?” (3). Also a sort of morphing that comes with the undulation of identity. Though our interaction with this elegy we interact with the crimes of Pinochet, the time period in Chile, and (in a sense) become a part of this mourning: “to all of us, we are tortured, pigeon of love, Chilean Countries and murderers” (5).
Then again, Borzutzky’s introduction also reminds us that Canto a su amor desaparecido is also about the love that has disappeared. The second stanza focuses on this love – much of the poems focuses on love – “I was collapsed at your side thinking that if was the one who threw myself over you. the grass will be growing, I imagined. In reality I prefer the stones, I thought, no, the grass. I thought it was you and it was me. That I still lived, but as I crawled over you something from your life denied me. It lasted a second, because afterwards you crumbled and the love grew in us like the murderers.” (10)
“deserts of love” (8)
All of these proliferations of love – love that is desiccated – I am thinking “deserts of love” as a desiccated love that will rise when nourished – a dormant love like the desert – it’s just buried in the sand like seeds. Though I feel like this is a rather obvious metaphor (my interpretation I mean) – I still do think it’s generative for the poem.
"all my love is here and it has stayed” (8)
The people that have been disappeared and dropped on the landscape of Chile remain – love projected from those that love them – their love that the regime has tried to obliterate (feel like this is a bit contradictory to what I’ve said about obliteration and the existence of love in the dead but I’m exploring/examining more than wanting to make conclusions) the love that disappeared when they disappeared… but rather than denying the existence of love – Zurita magnifies the existence/permanence of love through sheer repetition, imagery, and calling on through incantation/invocation of the Barracks section of the book (12-19).
“but they never found us because our love was stuck to / the rocks the sea and the mountains” (9)
Likewise love cannot be captured so it cannot be destroyed – efforts at obliteration are useless. The love that has been dropped from the planes will never be found because the bodies themselves have disappeared into the landscape – their love soaks the earth (as much as the violence) – the palpability of the love – I think – flourishes/proliferates/undulates throughout Song for his Disappeared Love.
“I was collapsed at your side thinking that if was the one who threw myself over you. the grass will be growing, I imagined. In reality I prefer the stones, I thought, no, the grass. I thought it was you and it was me. That I still lived, but as I crawled over you something from your life denied me. It lasted a second, because afterwards you crumbled and the love grew in us like the murderers.” (10)
There is a sense of rebirth/re-creation and the natural versus the unnatural. Bodies thrown over one another – I’m thinking of them as copulating bodies but also bodies that protect one another – bodies that are natural – grass – not stones. Bodies that love like murderers – creating love like the murderers create violence – also a love that proliferates as the violence proliferates.
There is so much to write about this poem – this elegy – but I will try to keep this a bit shorter – the Niches/Barracks. The map – they are all at once formed like a graveyard/tomb but they are also seem like a sort of heaven/hell and sites for mass graves. Their appearance on the page makes them look like jail cells, very closed – suffocating the reader and the page. But within the individual niches there are huge spaces (absences – abcesses?) for the disappeared and for love. And as I was reading through each one I was thinking that they are also small history lessons – they are compressed on the page, compressed in language, compressed in time – I feel like I am getting a compressed violence, compressed love, compressed sadness – or perhaps distilled is a better word to describe all these things – histories – emotion, etc. in the poem.
One of the biggest things for me as I return to the text and read it again – I’m finding it to be always new when I read it. which is a strange thing to say after transcribing it and proofing it numerous times – but the text is always new to me. I see things I never saw before and notice images – sounds – words that I never caught before. There are so many details in words, in images, in their juxtaposition – in every molecule of the elegy that I think it’s impossible to read the same piece every time.
Unsure of what else to say (for there is too much to say) - I will leave you with this--
Written on the sky above New York 1982:
MY GOD IS HUNGER
MY GOD IS SNOW
MY GOD IS NO
MY GOD IS DISILLUSIONMENT
MY GOD IS CARRION
MY GOD IS PARADISE
MY GOD IS PAMPA
MY GOD IS CHICANO
MY GOD IS CANCER
MY GOD IS EMPTINESS
MY GOD IS WOUND
MY GOD IS GHETTO
MY GOD IS PAIN
MY GOD IS
MY LOVE OF GOD
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ReplyDeleteBefore I even read a poem in Song For His Disappeared Love, I was discomforted. I think my unease originated from being privy to the circumstances and the context of the book. Kim didn’t really discuss that much in her blog post, and maybe to others it’s not a pivotal aspect, but how does it affect our reading to know that the author actually experienced these events? That Zurita was tortured, kidnapped, and had his poems thrown overboard? To me, this external context is enormous. I’m not certain, but I think I want my poems to be complete objects. Maybe this is what Zukofsky meant by “rested totality.” I want writing that satisfies on its own, that requires no other accoutrement or accessory. When I read Plath’s “Daddy” I am completely submerged. I don’t need to read her biography, journals, or Holocaust histories, because it’s all in “Daddy.” The poem achieves a type autarky. I find this very comforting, like if I ever had to make a choice and only take one poem with me, I know I could take that poem (though there are others), because that poem can stand on its own: it’s independent.
ReplyDeleteBut maybe the idea of absolute autonomy is fanatical. Though it’s not that Zurita’s poems totally depended on knowledge of the Pinochet dictatorship, it’s that I think his real victimhood as a captive on a military ship continued to bleed into the work. Does this matter? Do we separate real life from poetry? Though I’ve only had four Theater and Theory classes I’m quite convinced that everything is performance. Freud’s Oedipus Complex, the idea that humans (who are supposedly “real” and not made up characters in a play) want to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers is no more of an invention that stupid males recapitulate then the play itself whose actors repeat Sophocles’ lines. What I mean to say is, that everyone is following a script: whether an actual playwright or a therapist is writing them. As Chelsea Minnis writes: “There is no differentiation between life and a costume party.”
But if I were to express such a sentiment to Zurita he might get displeased. He actually did experience having your family members taken away from you and seeing dead bodies drop from airplanes. This is where I become snared. What’s the difference between real experience and imagination? Do I care that Sylvia Plath wasn’t actually in the Holocaust? No, I just want to be enveloped. Sometimes I feel like I am taken in Zurita’s poems, and sometimes I feel like I am not. The parts that were most captivating were the verses affixed to dashes. I though these did a good job of emulating the confusion and chaos one might feel if they were suddenly kidnapped by dictator goons. The language just keeps coming, like the blows one might recive, and we have to always drop down to the next sensation, the next abuse because the dash (-) – the goons-- acts as a means of propulsion
But what’s happening? On one line Zurita is getting bayoneted, then he’s throwing up, then it appears someone is coming onto him, “What’s your name nice as little bastard bitch…” This compilation of scenes was compelling. The different voices and images placed me where Zurita probably was – in a confounded and agitated state. I think that’s what a poet should do. He should be able to infect your brain with his aesthetics.
ReplyDeleteBut then there’s love. Kim talks about the numerous mentions of “love”as if there’s a clear definition for it. I’m not so sure. Who is his “love”? What does she look like? What color hair does she have? Is it even a she? The lack of specificity leaves me uninvolved. I don’t feel like I’m seeing anything. There’s not attribute for me think about, to flood my mind with. So I want to know why is he singing to such an opaque “disappeared love”? Where did it run off to? Maybe the latter question is ignorant. Obviously, it was murdered. That’s the problem. The external context seems to give a Zurita a pass. He doesn’t have to tell me what “love” is, to build a specific costume for it, because, after all, he’s been through quite a bit. That sounds harsh, but I’m not really concerned. I mean, poetry, or at least the kind that I like, isn’t exactly famous for its empathy and love of humans beings. What if a teenage girl from a nice neighborhood in Long Island starting writing poems to her “disappeared love”? Would that context be given as much credence as Zurita’s? This is why I have had such difficulty with this book: I’m not sure about the relationship between reality and the made-up. Are they independent, dependent, or a little of both? Or does it really matter? If Zurita hadn’t gone through this, but, say, just read about it, how would it alter our reading?
I’m really interested in what Kim brought up regarding the appearance of the natural world in “Song…” The more times I read the text, the more it appeared to me that the landscape itself was a sort of undead ideal, attainable only through the act of resurrection – Christ like in the sense that the nation/landscape is a beautiful and revered figure through which its followers hope to be saved.
ReplyDeleteThere’s a really fine line, here, between a kind of terrifying occult figure and a savior, and I think that the landscape in “Songs…” continually treads that line. I agree with Kim’s assertion that the landscape “eats” the bodies, in a sense – only I think, perhaps, that “digests” might be a more accurate term as the bodies are not unwillingly consumed. Rather, it seems that they are willingly given, fed to the landscape –
“Our love was stuck to / the rocks the sea and the mountains” (9)
it isn’t stuck there because it was merely left behind and consumed, it is stuck there because the owner of the love, which is in a way the self manifest, is unable to extricate it from the landscape. So nature consumes and digests the bodies and the landscape becomes a new body. The physical body, then, is a kind of avatar or a statue, a zombie-figure. We’re left, then, with these two zombie figures:
The Landscape, which has been resurrected through the attachment of the love/self to the physical location;
The Body, which has been emptied of its essence but is still animated.
The beginning of the quote I mention above is “they never found us because…” So in a sense, this reappropriation of the Landscape as Body protects the speaker(s). By being so attached their physical forms are already dead/out of time, they are immortal in a sort of vampiric sense (The Landscape becomes fused with the Self through an action of consumption), so the violence performed on the Body is irrelevant.
I can’t help but think (and I don’t mean to de-value Zurita or his work in any way by making this comparison) of Twilight. I’m going to ease this blow a little bit by prefacing what follows with the statement that I am primarily interested in the visual components of the film adaptations…
Twilight Meadow Scene
In the above scene, there are all of these gratuitous shots of nature, a very zombie-esque landscape, misty and backlit and not quite dead but most definitely not entirely alive in the “natural” sense. There is an undeniably ethereal quality which is at once eerie and beautiful. The landscapes described in “Songs…” possesses a very similar quality:
ReplyDeleteWhat really fascinates me about this scene, though, is the way the bodies are made part of the landscape, and shot as such. Like the actual meadow, Edward and Bella don’t have any lines, they don’t move, they take no action – their contribution to the action is as a vessel for a nostalgic idea of love; their bodies serve purely aesthetic purposes.
Twilight Forest Scene
In this scene, Bella actually describes the ways in which Edward’s unnatural, undead body is, in a sense, a landscape. Behind these lines are more masturbatorily beautiful shots of mountains, misty forests, rocky seashores – all images which almost immediately call to mind a sense of melancholy produced by the absence of a love.
The other recurring image from the text that struck me is more related to the physical body/avatar than to the Landscape Body. Over and over again, we are told about these niches – in terms of the spaces themselves and the things that occupy them. Statues go in niches. The vampires in twilight are statuesque, pale, made of marble. They don’t die, they break, shatter. The niches in “Songs…” are like mass graves for statues, in that the bodies that inhabit them have left their selves behind with the landscape.
The thing that is yearned for, that is lost, is the Self. This is a love poem to that which it is impossible to maintain in times of great violence – a connection to the body. Because the body is constantly at risk, because it is fragile in an organic sense when the self is an inextricable part of it.
When the self is removed and reattached to the landscape then it does not matter if the bodies shatter. What matters is the land, the nation, the ideal – this is the wellspring of the passion of true patriotism, the kind displayed by the speaker(s) of “Songs…” The nation usurps the body, devours it, digests it, becomes it. This is this people are so willing to give their lives/bodies for a political cause. They no longer belong to their bodies, their bodies are mere objects; their selves become inexorably linked with the ideals of the nation, the country, the landscape.
13 – “The massacred the boys and the countries remained. We are them, she said. It was tough. Some are nicknamed the starving countries…My love: we were eaten.”
I think Kim's reading of the bodies as a part of/fertilizer for landscape is really wonderful and fruitful grounds for my reading of the text. I think it also becomes an interesting place to think about nationality a little bit, and the relationship going on here between person and place. There's a motherland, but also this setting for tremendous tragedy and these grounds become this loved and hated landscape. As the bodies of various loves disappear into this landscape, it becomes the grounds for this increasing tension, to an extent that it almost seems as though the mountains are going to open and eat the text alive. Against this, the actual mentions of the landscape's physicality is startlingly simple, more a mention of what it is than how, and so the landscape and these bodies become this kind of amorphous space of an abstract kind of longing, beauty, love, and hate.
ReplyDeleteI can't put my finger on it, and it isn't useful, but there's something about this book that is both so quiet and so loud.
Has the love disappeared? I don't think that it can, no. Loved bodies become the landscape and are eventually eaten, making for a love that is kind of disgusting and ultimately ingested. It becomes a cyclical thing here.
A note on Seth's question about how to approach the book for its basis in Zurita's reality: I've been pondering this too. Do we have to approach it with a kind of tenderness/sensitivity we might otherwise not? Would a conversation about last semester's much loved atrocity kitsch make its way in here? I'm hypothesizing that the only reason it doesn't is that we know that this is legit. I remember a lot of controversial discussions in the very first workshop I had here about whether or not one can be "too close" to a poem's subject in their writing process, and I have some anxiety about whether or not I am too close to the material of the poem to read it in a way that isn't to do with me sweeping across Chilean landscapes and wanting to cry for Zurita. Is my reading illegitimate because it is more emotional than intellectual? I hope not. Because this is my comment.
On the page: I think Kim actually mentioned at the end of last class about how the physical appearance of the poem takes on a quality like prison cells. I'm really drawn to this idea, as these blocks of text on the page seem so isolated from each other sometimes, but also appear in these list-y type things that bleed over with their dashes acting as what, exactly? Cell bars? For some reason, I associated it a lot with teeth or a mouth, that each chunk of text looked like a row of teeth blacked out, and the poems themselves became a kind of decaying love desperate to hold onto some vestige of its former enamel.
On the Spanish: I read about the first half of the poem in the Spanish and then switched to the English translation. (I'll go back and finish it in the Spanish at some point soon) I was initially interested in the book as a translated piece because I'm interested in translation in general, but I think where I sit now is more that the Spanish version has a seriously wonderful smoothness and kind of sweeping quality that I think Borzutzky pulled off pretty seamlessly in the English--a translation that seems to me more interested in keeping with ambiance than anything else. I wonder if this also ties into the poem's "authenticity" and the impulse to want to preserve the work/experience of the work as much as possible, without any impulse to transliterate/mutate the text too much. If anybody else read the Spanish, I'd be interested to hear more reactions to it.
Atrocities permeate memory, but love’s permanence is impermeable
ReplyDeleteAnd what is this Love? Of memory, of another, of the past self (Carina), of what could have been, what could be again? (Is there some resignation/submission, accessing a self-preservationist high ground, if only for the self, via this insistent love action?)
There is a merging of corporeality+terrestriality: bodies+landscape.
Crawling glaciers and unearthed dinosaurs render political regimes like geological/Paleolithic events. The omnipresence of crying/singing/howling/wailing signals, for me, a kind of incoherent, animal-emotional-unconscious response. Similar, for the repeated song-like stanzas, as though they are self-lullabies; and the child-like conceptualizing of death as sleeping.
And what are these two “impossible concrete sheds” (11), besides analogs for North and South America? The pairing of concrete’s obdurate opaque permanence and shed’s rickety dilapidation produces an oppositional juxtaposition I can’t seem to locate elsewhere in the piece. Perhaps, Zurita is trying to get at the mechanistic nature in which the atrocities were carried out (is this true? were they carried out in such a fashion? I don’t know.) and, yet, to communicate an attendant lack of ceremony, of due process, desert.
The parallel, cell-like, uniform blocks of prose in “From Sheds 12 and 13” (pp15-19) presents a cataloguing of atrocities endured by all the nations of the Americas. “The origins and complaints are noted” (15), done away with, erased and cleaned up in these efficient administrative memorials. This section has as an Edenic “In the beginning” quality at the start, however (”When they were raised in humane countries and animals obstructed the rivers but they were friends” [15].)--which deteriorates in the inventoried onslaught of like-events. I feel the tediousness of this accruing list, a tedium of suffering. Additionally, I sense a kind of romantic primitivism here, wherein “progress” delivers all things destructive (planes, “sieges by air, sea, electronic, contras and sabotage” 17).
At the end , after the mausoleum-like illustration, the speaker’s final words seem a call to arms, a fight song for to “Rise anew in the dead little countries/.../Rise up and deliver again your flight and your song” (22).
Similar to Seth’s concerns, I, too, read Zurita with an amorphous nagging sense throughout; something along the lines of “If the elegy didn’t center on recent-ish historical events, could one make as strong a defense for the subject matter, and this particular treatment of it?” The foregrounding of politics (...is it foregrounding? or backgrounding?) primes in me a willing skepticism, or cynicism, from the get-go for some reason. (I need to think on this a bit before expounding.)
Thanks, all for the great posts! I’m really interested, too, in this “landscape of violence and bodies.” As Borzutzky quotes Zurita in the introduction to the book as saying, “I began to feel in the face of the violence and horror that nature had something permanent. That it existed before and it will exist afterward”—and later, as Kim notes, “For Zurita, then, nature shapes its inhabitants just as everyone who lives under a dictatorial government is shaped and defined by its terror” (in thinking about this relationship, I’m reminded of Goethe’s description of the earth as “an eternally devouring, eternally regurgitating monster”). Carina makes an excellent point, too, I think, in considering the impossible and yet urgent nature of landscapes/bodies in the text; to contend with terror, the song must be both effusive and ethereal (as well as violent and grotesque).
ReplyDeleteHere I am most interested in the notion of wound(ing); the rupture happens even on the level of language. As Borzutzsky mentions in the introduction “This is a love song: a song not just for lovers split apart by disappearance, but for love that has disappeared”—(both a compression and a distillation—as Kim suggests); the text exists as a kind of cut and a trace—disappearing and disappeared—a haunting, bleeding (and—as in the CADA article to which Kim linked—political/artistic subversion serves as a kind of wound in the intimacy of merging artist and spectator—or in the interruption of the surface/cycle of the “normalized routines of daily urban life”; just as kids continue to turn over the sand for Zurita’s desert poem).
To participate in a kind of urgent and impossible search (to go from “hole to hole, grave to grave”—to become infected with art (song) and become an agent/transmitter of it—is to wound, to invert nightmare (a space generally assumed to be “private”?) and society/social reality (“public”?) –this inversion seems necessarily violent (as does the vulnerability of being “stuck, stuck”—though this vulnerability achieves/allows for a kind of permanence, ultimately) (14).
“Love” is a kind of cleaving (at once binding and separating), akin to torture in its effects (“their puppy is dying from love and blows in the old shed”) (11). “That’s how I bled the wound and as it gushed red the song to their disappeared love started,” writes Zurita—here is a kind of communication issued not on the level of sense or logic but on a more evocative one, “the letters opening up like graves” (12). Like the barracks emitting the stench (or leaking the fluids) of the human body, the poem/song might be a kind of (de)composition, which is not a testament but something volcanic—a kind of borderland, like a grave-digging that turns up a mirror and results in rain (which transmits the signal, a calling and being called) (19).
This might be less pertinent, but it seems, too, like the design of the book suggests a kind of wounding/perpetuating (if, as is the case with the landscape, inversion is violent or rupturing): one half of the book feeds into the next. We might consider inscription as a (necessarily violent) force here as well (I like Kim’s idea of the textual abscesses of the niches—and the Seth’s point about the “propulsion” accomplished by the dashes); the act of composing/speaking is foregrounded in a strange way in epitaphs—and here Zurita is writing across/into space and time (or: a refiguring of negative space?).
This poem for me lives in a space of beauty and horror, and that in some strange way the beauty can live through the horror. Kim’s discussion of the love within the poem helped crystallize my experience of the poem. Within the first pages of the poem the dash lines pulled me into violence not just in Chile. It is as if Zurita has captured the atrocities across time, space and political/cultural landscapes. It was a really overwhelming sensation, and it was if I saw the bodies of genocide in Europe, China, in gang violence in Chicago and so on…very disturbing. I was drawn into universality of violence, and to Kim’s point of bodies being absorbed into the land as a cyclical perpetuation. Even trying to write of the poem I find myself having a difficult time focusing my thought. I’m still in the landscape of torture and death, and I’m real squeamish. But the poem still pulled me forward rather than turn me away. Zurita was able to push me forward as a witness. …but four infinitely open eyes see more than two. //That’s why we saw each other… (p. 10)
ReplyDeleteI feel the song is to bring an audience or witness, and if disappeared love is seen by many people the love may in some way be reborn. Not sure how to say this effectively, but from what I know about the psychological implications of such horrific abuse, in order to be able to move on after living past the experience of the inhumane, there has to been an acknowledgement, a listening. …I cried all my despair. // The grass is as high as the niches. // I said to the country boys //take, this, take my shame and it will switch off. (p. 12) I’m afraid that this talk of psychology will limit this poem to some type of personal memoir seeking personal healing, and that is not what I’m really trying to say. The use of you, my, girl, boy, in Song For His Disappeared Love, I feel is used as a global reference. His love is not just his, it is the love of a nation, a collective, a world. And the speaker speaks for this collective and demands witness. He speaks for the bodies that keep fertilizing the ground. He speaks so that the bodies may stop being piled up, eaten and piled up again having been fed on decaying violence.
I’ll ask some pardon here for brevity and likely incoherence, I’m feeling rather horrid today and any minute spent sitting at this screen typing today is really a minute too long.
ReplyDeleteI don’t mean to lean too heavily on Seth’s post(s) for a second week running, but I can’t help it considering how much time I’ve spent over the last year or two really thinking about the way art objects exist in our world and how we come to them, how to they come to each other, etc. Liz touched on this as well, this kind of cynicism or skepticism. I think I just mentioned this in my post last week, my standard setting of being skeptical when coming to art or anything else. I think these conversations are interesting—not to light old fires but the idea that CJ brought up last semester of ‘exploitation’ seems relevant here as well, as whatever anxiety is present seems centered on questions of intention, of how Zurita used / mined / exploited / employed (pick your verb, but be mindful of their unique implications) his experiences (no matter how conscious it might be argued such articulation to be), and how his real experiences and history should affect someone’s reading of this book.
Well, one certainly can’t say that it doesn’t all matter. Bridging Seth’s metaphor a bit, if someone (say, me) that we might collectively know hasn’t experienced anything like Zurita has had published this book or brought it in to workshop or whatever, would the perceived fictionality affect it as an art object? Do we take it a bit less seriously, do we have conversations more about ‘why’ someone would construct those fictions towards whatever ends? The Zurita clearly resists this ‘why’, it has a seemingly intrinsic answer, ‘because it happened to him’, etc. Does he get a pass, consciously or otherwise, in anyone’s mind if a metaphor falls flat? If none of them fall flat to one’s reading, how much is rooted in the external knowledge? How much external knowledge affects to what extent? Which is to say, if you read the introduction, what effect does that have? What if all you knew was something Joyelle might have said in prefacing the book, about Zurita’s past? Does this affect less than the intro? What about both together? What about googling Zurita for an hour? What if all you knew was that Zurita had a reputation for being a powerful reader of his work? Do you then read it to yourself, pondering how it might be read, by yourself or Zurita, in public?
If you had no preface whatsoever, simply stumbled upon the poetry here with zero external knowledge, does it turn into something else? Is it better? Does it feel like it’s based on ‘real’ experiences?
All magnificent questions I obviously think, but unfortunately I feel like most really magnificent questions, they don’t have real answers, at least not answers that will work on any real scale. Just as there’s no right interpretation of any poem (just ones we can’t begin to have empathy for) the answer to me seems to be that there are just as many right ways to approach a poem. To me it’s like asking if knowing the story of Van Gogh’s ear adds anything to viewing his work (particularly the bandaged self-portrait). For some surely it does, others couldn’t care less; this kind of being informed seems not unimportant, just entirely individual and subjective. This still leaves room for people to discuss how these factors affected their reading, without needing to take it to the level of admiring or condemning a book / painting / song based on those reasons. Like the ‘external knowledge’, these discourses feel to me like a kind of artistic theorizing that exists far outside the art object—the discussions are their own object.
As for the work itself; I was compelled by it more often than I wasn’t, to simplify things. I was really taken by all the imagery of the concrete sheds / niches and the vocabulary they are used as throughout. I don’t think I quite took the naturalistic bits as any kind of salvation, and least not any kind we’d mostly recognize. I felt like there was a lot of weaving and conflating going in a way I enjoyed; the zooming out toward the end, the survey of all the sheds and what they contain, each its own unique little object internally despite holding the uniform outward appearance of all the other sheds.
ReplyDeleteI saw the natural landscapes and presences (volcanoes, glaciers, etc.) as markers of long passages of time, things that come to being and then pass over long stretches (like the mountains, there used to be as many as there are clouds, but now they’ve passed on while, of course, others are born). To me this was a broader alignment of the violence and changing human landscapes (political regimes, the faces of cities and countries on literal and metaphorical grounds) with these natural phenomena; to my mind this reads as Zurita coming to a kind of conclusion that despite the horror of it all, in a way that might (but probably isn’t) comforting, it’s all more of the same, a recognition of the potential in every person in every year of existence to enact or fall victim to violence and atrocity. It’s not the most complementary view of the human race, but one can’t deny the evidence of, essentially, every moment of history we’re aware of. There is the violence and hate, there is the love and comfort; so it all goes. Just as the love that has disappeared, one of the most complicated observations one can have, I think, is in recognizing that good or horrid, one’s experiences are, in the long run and in the big picture, agonizingly predictable and ‘normal’. With a big enough perspective, even the worst atrocities don’t stand out all that much; it’d be more surprising if they never happened. The panning from one nich to the next toward the end of the book, to me, was a way of channeling that perspective, or at least a way of trying to present that scale.
I wasn’t going to weigh in on this, but I’ve been thinking about it all day and can’t stop thinking about it, and after reading some other people’s concerns I feel like I’d like to.
ReplyDeleteSeth, Elizabeth, Ryan, other people who haven’t posted I’m sure, and perhaps some other people who have posted but just didn’t say so, are having difficulty with the fact that we know, without a doubt, that this piece came out of an actual act of violence. It was written by an actual victim in reaction to an actual atrocity. Because of this we perhaps cannot, as Seth said, fall back into our old, easy conversations about atrocity kitsch. Because it can’t be kitsch if it’s genuine, right? Or at least, not if it’s this genuine, as in, lots of people having died and been tortured genuine…
I tend to not like to acknowledge the outside circumstances surrounding a work like this, at least the first time through. We had this conversation last semester re: The Sore Throat. Having this really concrete, “real” context forces the reader to come at it from a certain way, and it perhaps forces the reader to sympathize with the speaker in ways that they otherwise might not, and forges a connection between the author and the “I” that is perhaps too close for comfort.
What makes “Song…” different, for me at least, is this idea of the poem/artwork as a kind of deliberate activism. There is an undeniable attention to craft, style, beauty, form – general artistry – obviously present in this poem. However, it also comes out of a context by necessity, and to fulfill a specific function.
In the Poetry Foundation interview, Zurita calls “Song..” “a denouncement.” There was great personal and political risk taken in its making and in its publishing. It was a kind of linguistic coup, a performance of freedom (I am a poet and I will write things and publish them regardless of censorship, damnit) in the middle of a totalitarian regime. It was activism. It was also art. These things can be the same but they don’t have to be.
Art doesn’t have to be activism, but it can be. And when it is it becomes, I think, a different thing entirely – the product of two different forms with different functions that becomes a third thing with forms, functions, and characteristics unique to it. As such, should we perhaps assess it in a different manner? I’m not saying that we should “go easy” on it or immediately forgive its faults/flaws, but that we should not look at it in the same way we would look at a text that was produced by, say, an MFA student in the safe haven of the academy and published by a nice, reputable press without any danger of bodily harm or political terror…
I think a reading of Zurita as this kind of hybrid is not only valid but is (potentially) very interesting, and in their own ways I think everyone here is mostly doing so.
ReplyDeleteI'd be skeptical (there's that word again), perhaps honestly wary is a better way to put it, though, about any idea that a work 'should' be read in any particular way, even if that way is ambiguous; this is just my general skepticism about the tradition of a poem 'demanding' a kind of reading. There will always be examples of works that seem to do just that, poets and books that explicitly state a certain reading or approach, but I just feel any artist can only have so much 'say' in that regard. It's simply to my mind part of the process of sharing artwork at all. I've always engaged with art with the parallel ideas that in as much as the artist can 'intend', I can not care. I'm not advocating always ignoring or reading in spite of those intentions (whatever they are argued to be), conversations of intention can be interesting no doubt, but any sense of obligation in this regard feels very limiting. The notion of utility / 'function' indeed floats around all that, which undercuts any interest I have in reading anything.
RE: where the art comes from (safe place / unsafe place), my answer would be that yes we should look at it the same way, which is to say look at the poetry. The external stuff is worth noting and talking about as its own 'object', as I said (i.e., we can talk about what it means to publish poetry at all in whatever context it appears) but that doesn't seem as much a discussion of the art itself as the context of it. Does Zurita's reality make one of his metaphors better or worse than mine if I write the same one, word-for-word? The subtle and complex implications of how those words came to be will change as much reader-to-reader as writer-to-writer. This doesn't mean any of them on either side are unworthy of discussion, but no work can ever truly obligate any ready to treating it with one particular set of gloves.
@ Seth: I am a bit confused about your argument re: the contextualization of a given poem changing our reading of it, specifically as it relates to Zurita. It seems like having the context here made the poem less…something. Just less. Is that because of the revulsion that real violence brings up versus imagined violence?
ReplyDeleteI do like your idea however that the forms (in your case, specifically the lines affixed to dashes) emulate the confusion of war etc. I was thinking something similar the second time I was reading through the book, because these dashes perform the act of disembodying the narrator in a number of ways that seem useful and germane to the poem. First, the way that “I” is fractured allows the I to become a multiplicity; the poem then is not an invocation of just Raul Zurita’s grief but also the National grief of Chileans. Secondly, this same section disembodies the single unit of the narrator, so it is as if his body is splayed to many pieces in the ways that bodies are often described in this poem. The narrators body fractures and allegorically stands in for many bodies. The form of the poem unites later on with the niches: these are like whole bodies laid out in a field, each separate, but creating a tapestry of foul destruction when taken in tandem with one another.
@ Amy: Your pondering of whether your reading of the text is illegitimate because it is more intellectual than emotional is one I’ve thought about lately as it relates to the reception of any art. I don’t think it’s illegitimate at all. Because I think of emotions as unadulterated, or at least ideally so, I would argue that an emotional reaction to a work of art is the most natural, as an intellectual response necessitates viewing through a certain lens/ framework which I think I can safely call unnatural (in that it is not innate in all (most?) humans). And the disruption of switching lenses disrupts temporality (at least for me…) so the intellectual reaction is not at “authentic” perhaps, because it is forceful in some way. I don’t know if this makes sense…but I am really interested in this question, as I ideally I encounter a work of art as a person rather than an academic. Or am able to forestall the academic-y things that come into my brain to experience the art in a “pure” way, though lord knows it’s probably impossible. This was sort of an aside from Zurita…..
@ Jen I totally dig this idea of the object of the book feeding into itself, cannibalizing itself. I personally have never seen a translated book done this way, such that doing a side by side reading forces the reader to perform these (relatively) intense physical gestures to turn the thing all the way over. The physical act necessary with all of the twisting arms keeps the text alive in some way (and also peripherally related to Zurita’s rewriting this poem 30 years later
This Friday, I was visiting Art Post in South Bend for Cuban political poster exhibition. The room was full of bold colors, sharp lines, demanding, mourning, and celebrating the ideals, fights and the fallen during the revolution. The air of the place was heavy in an odd way, as if the room was full of explosives. Pointing at these posters, the art professor who accompanied poster workshop class was explaining how that kind of opacity and color can only be achieved with the toxic kind of ink; That was when I noticed a woman staring at the book I had in my arms. As I smiled at her, she struck a conversation in timid, heavily accented voice, but interestingly, her body language exuded a sense of pride. She told me that she was from Chile, and that she was curious to see Zurita’s book in English. Delighted, I showed her the book, and she seemed to enjoy the reading experience, flipping the book back and forth, from her mother tongue to English back and forth. This happened in front of the vibrant orange Cuban poster that commemorating the anniversary of the death of Jose Marti. On the very same evening, I ran into my acquaintance who is from Bangalore, India, and he told me that he read this book in Kannad. I was really excited to experience first-handedly the influence over the world in such a short time, all by coincidences.
ReplyDeleteHowever, that was precisely why I was at first afraid of writing about this book. It probably is not the best reaction, projecting my experience too much on this great book of poems; nonetheless, I could not help but reminded of my experience with Korean literature classes that taught poems written under dictatorship. Korea, after going through a dictatorship from the very moment of independence from Japanese imperial power until early 80s— It’s crazy to think my parents lived under dictatorship that massacred students involved in demonstrations-- , has established literature curriculum that was mostly about fighting against oppression, Japanese, dictators, for democracy. There is nothing too wrong about the fact that people wrote about those issues; it was just that the school demanded that there was no more than one way of reading the text. You were to understand the political background, authorial intention, the tragedy, the vioience, and admire the ideology in the poem. Form did not matter, the text became the holy text, the printed page mere medium that transfers the ideology. The teacher would instruct us to read out those poems like soldiers would chant, and that memory is still remaining as one of the stressful memories—there is no sense of rhythm, no sense of music, but the ideologies, spoken with heavy, curt monotone voice—from my childhood. I was worried that this book would come through as that kind of experience, where the reading is all about political background, political correctness, not about the text itself.
Fortunately, the experience I had with this book was completely different from the experience I had with Korean poems written under dictatorship. Knowing the background-- Pinochet government, bodies being dropped from airplane, the aftermath without resolution where murderers and victims cohabiting—but the text reveals the complexity of the situation and experience by forming its own world, internal logic, rather than just being a medium or a mirror or “slice of life” that tries replicate but also melodramatize the situation under political ideologies/intention. Zurita forms this world by recurring figures, images, and phrases. There is a boy/boys, and he/they are dead, but reappears, being beautiful, he is now “my” boy, but he returns to death. And he dreams. There are these phantom-like figures that appears and dies, and then reappears, haunting, loving.
ReplyDelete(I will finish this post tonight. Sorry )
(Sorry this blog post is late—I wanted to go to the reading before I committed my feelings to official digital print! And then, of course, I had more to say than I thought I did, again.)
ReplyDeleteAs often happens, I feel like the more I like something, the less I have to say… Or, the more I like something, the less I want to discuss it critically and the more I want to sit around in stunned contemplation. I know that quite a few other people had the same sort of reaction to this work, and not only because its good (although that certainly is part of it). When I come across books like this—which deal with such personal and personally traumatic experiences—it seems almost as if my response should also be personal, or that I am guaranteed to fail at saying everything I really thought about the work.
But I’ll give it a shot anyway. I am glad I went to the reading before I sat down to write this post, because hearing him speak with such emotional charge fully brought home the painful reality of the poem, the state of the mind and heart that constructed it. It also was revealing in regards to its bilingual reading, the relationship of narrator and translator in person serving as possible reflection of the text in Spanish and the text in English. Yet, through all that, I have to say that what captivated me on my very first read through Song for His Disappeared Love remains the most captivating and emotionally moving element for me: the “disappeared love” itself. As the poem is marched forward, halting on its desperate repetitions and cries, the exact nature of the disappeared love is never laid out for us neatly (thank goodness). It becomes a girl, a boy, deserts, something (a body) stuck to the rocks, sea, and mountains, niches, countries, islands.
For something which seems so central to the poem—a part of the very time, repeated throughout the book—it seems remarkable to me that the “disappeared love” exists only as an indefinable multitude of concepts and images. It defies a simple or singular definition, regardless of how one might be implied by the language. If “disappeared” becomes a noun for all those who have been forcibly taken by the government (made to disappear), then “disappeared love” should be not a love that has gone away, but a beloved individual or object forcibly taken, destroyed, made to disappear. There is, naturally, support for this more literal interpretation of the title; the poems feature a boy and a girl who are dead. “They all disappeared,” he writes and repeats. The love could certainly be for these two specifically, but it’s not that simple, never. Zurita takes the beautiful girl and the beautiful boy and places them at the beginning of a great swirling mass of love; if they were real people who became “disappeared,” their factual existences are usurped, turned into retrospective story, bodies becoming part of the landscape, symbolic niches in the wild attempt to “sing pain to the countries.”
ReplyDeleteIn class we talked about the vagueness of the “it” in my poems, and here that sort of vagueness shows up readily; “it”, Zurita’s love, is stuck to the rocks and the sea and the mountains, but “it” is not just a person. The love is people and it is beyond individual people; it is the physical bodies stuck to the rocks and the sea and the mountains, but something else as well. Beyond human life, I felt like the next readily accessible aspect of the “disappeared love” was what Zurita calls his “country love,” out of which flows blood and the beginning of the song to the disappeared love (12). Certainly, a powerful sense of fidelity to Chile—to the people of Chile, the ideals of the Chilean nation, the memories, culture, traditions, and beautiful aspects of life in his war-torn country—seems to move him (and move through him).
Here Chile itself transforms from a natural landscape into a living being, stuffed into a niche, exploding, bleeding, dying, disappearing. Everywhere the “you” or the “love” becomes ambiguous, there is the lurking thought that the “you” is not the reader, not a living person, but the country itself. Most of the poem can be read this way. “They dumped limestone and rocks on us./ For a second I was afraid they had hurt you./ Oh love, when I heard the first bang I stuck to you even more./ Something happened. I am sure something happened” (10), for example. Although this seems to depict another human being, there is no clear definition provided here; the “you” may as well be a half-personified Chile, the limestone and rocks of overthrow and chaos being heaped up on her, the “first bang” causing a great need for reassurance in faith and loyalty to one’s country… Perhaps the most clear example of this personification of the countries comes in the line “the scream the country said no it didn’t hurt” (12). Various readers will read the line in various ways, but I don’t think that anyone could deny the purposeful collapse of syntax here which produces “the country said,” implying the country itself has a crying voice Zurita can hear, must hear.
ReplyDeleteSo the country can become just as much a body as a human can, and if that is the case, it becomes just as vulnerable, just as easy to “disappear” as a person. Although its rocks and sea and mountains remain, nevertheless what fostered love, peace, life that was not a nightmare, can be taken and dropped from an airplane, left splintered and irreparable somewhere far from those who loved it.
Equally interesting is the fact that human beings, throughout the course of the poem, transform readily into countries themselves: “From the disappeared love the countries are also/ called. Buried in the walls they rest like us. They mas-/ sacred the boys and the countries remained. We are/ them, she said” (13). Here the individual stand in for their countries—not the physical realm of their countries but the aspects disappeared by violence, by the loss of freedom, peace, art, human decency. The human-countries linger like ghosts in the sheds, even after the people who believed in them have fallen prey to violence and cruelty. The sheds fill up with niches, with these human-countries, starving and being eaten (13). To some extent, I read the large body of poems discussing the barracks and sheds in this manner, the breakdown of the countries listed in the dialogue both literal in the sense of referring to actual places, but also figurative, people transformed into dying ideals and memories and traditions.
ReplyDeleteIn that manner, I came to my ultimate conclusion about the “disappeared love” (at least for the moment. Let me think for another minute or so and I’ll change my mind again). After closely reading the text and listening to Zurita read, I believe the disappeared love was never a person—its not even just Chile, the lives lost there or the freedom and peace of its people. Zurita’s song for his disappeared love felt, at its heart, like a genuine and general mourning for freedom itself, for the loss of the world where art was not garbage; Zurita’s disappeared love seems to be, for me at least, all kindness, all sense of self and soul and rightness, the world where the poems were never thrown overboard—where the sheds did not exist, where the countries and people were never reduced to niches, where the poem did not need to be carved into the desert to be seen and valued.
And if that’s what has been forcibly “disappeared,” then how can he not sing so passionately?
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ReplyDeleteWhat is so remarkable about this internal structure/world is that everything recurs and everything is in transformation, indistinguishable. There are figures without names. There are boys, girls, my mother, my parents, my friends, she, you, they, and love, and sometime there are more specific “my boy” and “my girl”, but there is no name that pin down any of these figures. Some appear dead, some appear howling, sobbing, dreaming and then dead again. Nobody has distinguishable face, or body, for every bodies are fallen, mangled, have limestone and rocks dumped on them. We cannot even be sure whether there is a physical narrator, his shoulder is “disembodied” and the entire universe is “you and I minus you and I”. Everybody—or rather, everyone and all the bodies-- are eaten up by the violence, concrete, and grass. All of them are appearing on the scene briefly or being addressed. This facelessness and different moments are collaged together, nightmares undistinguishable from memories and torture that piles up in this poem.
ReplyDeleteEven the direction where the violence is coming from is hard to determine. Mother/parents appear to be at first “skinning me with blows” and then get beaten by “them”, and then appears insulting the narrator “soon your time will also come”. The parents become part of the violence, and there is their puppies being neglected, “dying from love and blows in the old shed” by the parents. The parents are beaten by the “they”, ones clipping off “my shoulder” with a bayonet-blow, but they also appear as they in “they are like God”. Is this a nightmare of his dead parents mangled with the “they” the narrator is having? Are the soldiers who give bayonet-blow consuming these parents? It is impossible to say. There are niches, niches that are filling up the concrete sheds, filled up with bodies , numbered like a military camps. This world is the world of apparitions, body-less, name-less nightmare where constant death, disappearing, and mangling occur.
The horrific and powerful part about this poem is that it is named as a song, especially a song for love. The poetic “oh love” and “love” comes across almost mislocated, jarring, as they are brought into the poem where atrocities are constantly in motion. “my love is here and it has stayed” or “our dying love does not go away” do not come across as consolation; it rather becomes something monstrous, almost, especially when the “they” giving bayonet-blow become beautiful and the speaker “fall[s] in love with them”. This love is mangled corpse, “my beautiful girl”, “my beautiful boy”, and the fallen, the burst-open, “Oh love we burst”; but it is still beautiful, as there are this “she” holding hands, desperately whispering “I love you”, “I love you”. Perhaps the violence had contaminated, mangled “love” with corpse, like the nature, the grass, the only living image – everything else concrete, niche, putrid, snot, spit-- became the place where people fall into.
There is no didactic, no melodramatic about this poem. It is the poem that you live in, that penetrates you, Artaudian theater-like world, where reality and nightmare indistinguishable, the trance. I cannot really articulate it any more.
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ReplyDeleteI didn't read any post until I finished my post so that I would be able to generate my own thought first and then move on to the discussion.I really like Kim's idea of fertilizing, copulating bodies/love. It is hard to tell whether the image of fertility is a hope, for the image of impregnation with spit and bursting sounds like contamination and spread of the contagions. However, the last stanza urges that one should "appear" "rise anew" in the dead little countries seem to suggest the landfill of bodies becoming the impregnated corpse giving birth to the hope... I should keep thinking about this issues.
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