1.
On the back cover of Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings, a blurb by Srikanth Reddy proclaims that “If John Ashbery’s Some Trees marked a new beginning for modern American poetry, Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings renovates the poetics of indeterminacy for our transnational continuous present.” Ashbery is one of the dedicatees of Emily Skillings’ Fort Not, and he blurbed it, too, writing that “although her language sometimes suggests she is from another planet, Emily Skillings knows how history happens on ours.” Rather than just examine the debuts of these poets individually, I prefer to ask to what extent Skillings and Machado remix some of the aspects of an aesthetic category that is often associated with the late poet himself — that of the “interesting.”
In The Cute, the Zany, the Interesting: Our Aesthetic Categories, theorist Sianne Ngai describes the interesting as an aesthetic style and aesthetic judgment. To describe an aesthetic object as interesting can function as a deferral of passing critical judgment; you might choose to use this language because the object doesn’t inspire a stronger feeling in you or because you sense, but can’t exactly name, a quality in the object that diverges from what you expect.
Ngai points out how the interesting as an aesthetic category emerged in the mid-19th century; capitalistic excesses created “a background of boredom” and the general public’s demands for novelty that then gave birth not only to new kinds of aesthetic objects but also different ways of responding to them. If we buy into Ngai’s argument that the interesting style has a low-intensity affect (it’s not the lofty passionate case of the aesthetic category of the sublime, for instance), that it has a serial structure, (the better to extend the time you spend); that it has a recursiveness, (you desire to re-encounter it); that it orients toward the future, (you and I might continue to muse about it) – then what are we able to see in a new way about some of our recent aesthetic objects?
2.
Skillings’ response to the market conditions of aesthetic experience is to re-inhabit it wholesale, to do so in a way that creates interest. To be interesting is to be social; it is to create, and speak to, a public. The opening poem of Fort Not, “Backchannel,” begins in a gesture of purchase that is quintessential to the collection itself, throughout which gestures of consumption, performance, and information circulate. Purchase becomes linked to a question of pleasure:
I buy an orb-shaped glass orb
and a designer candle
and go home to touch myself.
The speaker puts her search for pleasure and her expression of discomfort in an eclectic range of references and transnational locales; the speaker is in Newfoundland, in Brooklyn; she experiences “hyperbolic / Encyclopedia of World Mythology-sized feelings” and introduces the figures of Isis, Osiris, Ereshkigal as well as the figure of herself:
I’ve been drinking too much possessed broth.
I pre-condition. I condition. I deep condition.
I leave-in condition. I deflect an image
of the body as a series
of hermetically sealed plastic cubes
filled with sluggish wasps.
Skillings recasts the human body as a serial object, a “series / of hermetically sealed plastic cubes” whose internal composition has shifted in response to excess consumption; note that the internal unit isn’t bees, the classic and endangered worker symbol, but wasps — insects of mere pest and sting. This orientation in the world of consumption becomes opportunity for what turns out to be Skillings’ trademark movement of collecting competing information to produce a kind of novelty:
I can skillfully point at something
by connecting it to a term
with a little line from my
character viewer of recently
used icons, but really there’s nothing
in these texts to end on.
These are classic maneuvers of the interesting, especially indexing via the toy image of a “character / viewer” the ongoingness of the enterprise, whereby “there’s nothing / in these texts to end on.” Skillings sees a metapoetical moment as an adequately social gesture; the poems suggest that the metapoetical creates a way to describe and potentially create an audience of others who might be interested in her awareness of herself as an observer as well, and share her interest in skill, in artifice, in pleasure, in range of reference.
While Skillings relies on a set of Ashberyian gestures to a strong extent — as many poets do — she transparently engages in her own saturated gestures of performance, commodity consumption, and information. “A New Sound” shows how she incorporates Ashbery as precedent but deviates in telling ways from his scripts; it begins with an older sound:
Oh it was morning and
the city broke,
and along the edges of its fissures
grew a soft, feltlike substance.
We notice the traditional “Oh” exclamation, but more strikingly, we might hear in this poem Ashbery’s opening lines in “How to Continue,” a poem that borrows from the precedent of a traditionally bouncy meter of a song. Ashbery’s poem pokes fun at and also elegiacally re-inhabits a lost world:
Oh there once was a woman
and she kept a shop
selling trinkets to tourists
not far from the dock.
Ashbery’s poem — notice that it also contains a scene of purchasing — ends with the lost and displaced people “looking back on love” and uses its prosody elegiacally. Skillings, while retaining a strong echo of Ashbery, breaks into indented elements, her lines retaining an air of abstraction but, like Ashbery’s in the above example, ends in concrete nouns which provide constant visual grounding (or as Longinus might say, in his treatise on the sublime from the fifth century BCE, providing necessary “curb” to the “spur” of momentum). The stanza continues:
Somehow too it was a sound.
Not one I could hear, but one I knew was there,
like the drone bookending a breath
and the full plushness of pause
combining into tone.
It waved
–much like grass waves, but not quite. This is as close
as I can come without harming an idea of it —
protecting the painful parts
of the city’s fresh wounds
from the harshness of the air.
Skillings describes how difficult it is to come close to the new sound “without harming an idea of it,” a tender attitude toward the unknown. The speaker says,
I may not even see “you,”
“you” whom I may come to love
and do not yet know.
We might hear an echo of lines from Ashbery’s poem “A Blessing in Disguise”: “knowing you may be drawn to me,” “I cannot ever think of me, I desire you,” “I prefer ‘you’ in the plural, I want you.” The romantic mists of Ashbery’s poem are complete with chairs that “ever / Have their backs turned to the light / Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees.” But the passive scene is reoriented in Skillings to meditate on the conditions of performance, commodity, and labor:
if how we spend our pay,
if how we make our wages,
is not predetermined to be connected,
and the points where we make our daily stops
fail to become intersections
that collect to form a field of relation —
The power of Skillings’ work, in terms of the interesting, is the degree to which it transparently makes use of Ashberyian maneuver but dramatizes a difference between her position in history and that of a poet of previous generations. This difference is only one way in which Skillings differentiates herself from a precursor.
A poem like “Girls Online” epitomizes another way. The positioning of the material of a porn or perhaps a sex chat site becomes occasion for elegy. And as in many poems by Skillings, the title serves as a conceit that clearly frames the whole. “The first line is a row of girls, / twenty-five of them, almost / a painting,” the poem begins, giving us a clear visual of the layout of female bodies in the market of aesthetic experience — compared to that classic instance of high art, the painting (which Skillings also explores in poems, like the “Matron of No,” where the speaker deadpans that her “personal favorites” of “paintings of Lucretia / stabbing herself” include one ones where “she’s just sticking / a casual reminder / between her tits that life is suffering”). In “Girls Online,” the performance of identity – “One says: I’m myself here” — centers on a social context where “the others shudder and laugh / through the ribbon core that strings / them.” The odd detail here is that the poem re-positions the public — the interested people, the consumers. The “one” who speaks is heard by her peers, and the peers react. This is a public, and the one who speaks gathers the interest of her peers. But however much the girls online have the agency of the laugh, they are objects: “the girls are a fence, / a fibrous network.” Towards its end, the speaker speaks to the reader (or perhaps herself):
One will choose you, press you
into the ground. You may never
recover. The second-to-last line
has a fold in it. The last line is
the steady pour of their names.
The closing lines re-situate the alienation of performers — they have names and so seem differentiated even as they are ambiguously posed for consuming, but the ominous quality that resonates in the closing lines is the self-deletion principle, or a kind of outpouring of some kind of essence, or what was once a sacred essence, a name.
3
Just as Skillings uses metapoetical gesture to create an interest in the reader toward the game she is interested in playing in her medium, so does Aditi Machado in her opening poem “Prospekt.” Like Skillings, Machado positions the self as caught between public and private domains that cast shadows into each other: “Every day I wake & my life / is private. I see a sun.” But the sun isn’t just the usual sun — rather, it bears resemblance, somehow, to the cultural object of “a coiling memoir.” The assertiveness of “there is privacy” is made more adamant:
O countries & natives, o
wordless obeisance, o privacy
coiling in the memoir —
a great book I will write
is not my private life.
Here, Machado asserts the fundamental formal glare in which an artistic experience in the form of a performance of a book happens. The matter of origin, of speech, of self-revelation in a circulated form (the book) that is itself coiling thus gets animated in Machado’s work.
While Machado’s work rarely uses object commodities as a point of reference the way Skillings does, Machado renders presence as a question of performance and consumption, of speech:
When one enters a room one becomes its audience. One audits its
dimensions, decides whether to reverse the dynamic or keep it. If
one keeps it one remains that most mysterious of facts: a furnishing.
One sits in a corner & one reads, deity. If one reverses it one turns
into that most gratifying of agents: a speaker. One expends energy,
loses one’s reserve. The most minimal sculpture is a rock. The work
of privacy is maximal. Look at this, draw some curtains, exit.
The position of power wherein “one audits the dimension, decides whether to reverse the dynamic or keep it” becomes part of Machado’s inquiry into a deficit of power, what another poem of hers later in the collection describes in a way, ending with a haunting and haunted claim: “a whole village was there, minus its people.” This deficit of power is at times a form of decimation, but at other times an erotic condition of emptiness where the sharp contrast between “minimal sculpture” of a rock bears up against the “maximal” privacy wherein one might “look at this, draw some curtains, exit.” The issue of power and privacy is enacted over and over via the seriality of the interesting, which becomes a way of creating a passivity that is, for Machado, not only part of the subject of her work but also the method to precisely experience the distant echoes of the sublime.
This interest in the sublime is stated near the start of the book. The first part of “Route: Thicket” is called “Grace, Excess” and it opens as follows:
Is there a sublime, that’s my birdsong today.
Is it immanent, that’s why I wrote a page I doubted
Slipping on questions
all questions are gloves against rancid weather
gloves being grace.
Grace, I think.
Grace, I think I can feel it as image.
(The white of sheep
invades a field.)
Grace not of but as
god, that unusable concept
used in excess.
The repetition and the spacing, the elegance of the monostichs, go against the vigor and strain and “‘fearful’ negativity of the sublime” (Ngai), but in effect the sublime as a named consideration gets reabsorbed into the poem to become a dampened, and beautiful, effect. It would be simple to say it is meditative, that this is a poet who is simply “interested in the sublime,” but the way this interest happens in the poem undercuts traditional stormy maneuvers — paratactic explosions, as in Jorie Graham’s middle-to-late work — or maneuvers often used in establishing the interesting — such as recessing of reference, willful novelizing and widening of diction register, two notable maneuvers of the quintessentially interesting work of Ashbery.
Some Beheadings is dominated by seriality via its sequences — “Prospekt,” for example, is a 24-page poem that is highly spacious in its layout. So spaced out is the poem that it even includes a surprise smaller poem embedded within it. “The Speech” brings to mind “the speech” described on the first page of the sequence, the speech that “is made” in “the proscenium” that “erects everyday / theatre”:
I spoke as in a wheel
spokes.
Supported the curvature, I
supported the ongoingness,
the goingson, some
beheadings, I
& the fascist in I
on the dusty road
reinventing.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see some of the interesting appear here in one of its key words (“ongoingness”), but already we can see that the poem transforms a kind of self-consciousness about implication of citizenry in larger power relation fields (“the fascist in I”) into a statement of poiesis (“reinventing”).
If the stormy quality we expect of a sublime poem doesn’t exactly exist as such in Machado, the afterglow does. It exists meta-textually, in her rendering of what sex depends on via interest and boredom: “The copula is / witting. It nests towards death, chooses to requisition / via tongue, unpierced, uncut / I’ll cut it when I want to know more.” This languorousness is at odds with the traditionally stormy sublime; the interesting effect of the speaker’s declarative — “I’ll cut it when I want to know more” — gains its almost sulky power by its reanimation of choice, less from viewpoint of buyer and more from viewpoint of maker. The tone here is palpable for me, but hard to describe. That I struggle to describe this struggle of mine creates interest, creates a gap, through which I interpret the wind of “Prospekt”:
So wind is a textual experience. So I revel in its ambiguities.
So may I stand whole minutes suffering its arrivals at the station.
So may I in this manner feel felt in the mind of whatever
is greater than I.
This ability to lose the everyday self would seem at odds with the interesting, which asks that the looker or reader or audience barely budge from their seat. Machado draws on this most classic of poetic functions — loss of one’s self – by coordinating the interesting and the sublime, as received categories, as received circumstances, so that exhilaration happens. It’s metacognive and it’s not. Skillings loses the “I” in a very different way, performing a deliberate kind of ironic humor (“I Like to Wipe My Hands on Dirty Things” is the title of one such poem) and metatextual re-alignment with precedent. While Skillings’ work is in some way predicated on the experience of consuming, it also laments — however cheekily — the rareness of all-consuming passionate experience (as in one poem’s title: “Nine Times out of Ten You’re Not Ablaze”). Almost perfectly bringing to life “the respect” that Kant associates with the last stage of experiencing or rendering the sublime, Machado’s speaker says, “I become ready to speak my name to the stations that ask.”
* * * * *
Some Beheadings by Aditi Machado, published by Nightboat Books on October 3, 2017, 112 pages, $15.95 paperback.
Fort Not by Emily Skillings, published by The Song Cave on October 1, 2017, 128 pages, $17.95 paperback.