Carmen Giménez Smith’s new book of poems, Be Recorder (Graywolf Press), is a tour-de-force. It gets its title from the second section of the same title, as well as from a poem within that section. As a book and as a phrase, Be Recorder is an imperative, commanding the speaker and the reader to take action:
… have you made anything good with our outrage
or built an endless abstract war will an underclass hunger qualify for your attention
or will you have to track down their legitimacy yourself can I expect
a chronicle of the moment or is it fraught with the lyric therefore fraught
with the vulgar density of people is that the hitch aesthetically
thus ethically does it seem impossible the desire for such validation
or could you break free and record be recorder
It’s this very last question that the speaker grapples with throughout the book. In this way, Be Recorder is a mirror, or rather funhouse mirror of America — confusing, disorienting, multi-faceted, excessive, distorted. These poems are muscular tonally, but there’s also self-deconstruction everywhere, leading to a book that has multiplicities, is multiplicities, is the self, is America.
Giménez Smith, a professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Virginia, simultaneously wears many hats. The daughter of South American immigrants, she writes lyric essays and poetry, edits poetry for The Nation, alongside poet and critic Stephanie Burt, co-edited an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing titled Angles of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath Press, 2014), serves as the publisher of Noemi Press which she co-founded with Evan Lavender-Smith, and co-directs CantoMundo (an organization that cultivates a community of Latinx poets). This work as a community leader, organizer, and supporter of writers, along with being a child and a parent, all shows up in these poems that spill out onto the earth. In these poems, the reader senses that time is always running out for the speaker, but it is also running out for our country, for our earth, and for humanity.
In the first poem, “Origins,” the speaker is confused for someone else and the poem opens simply: “People sometimes confuse me for someone else they know/because they’ve projected an idea onto me.” But by the end of the poem, the speaker “got over it and here/I am with a name that’s at the front of this object, a name / I’ve made singular, that I spent my whole life making.” This poem could have ended much more expectedly into anger, instead it ends with complicity, self-awareness, and a sprinkle of pride for the book that readers are holding in their hands. In this poem and this book, there’s an implicit understanding that the self is complex, can be both creator and destroyer, victim and perpetrator. Giménez Smith seamlessly moves from the inward self to the outside world and back again, so that eventually the self becomes the world and the world becomes the self. It’s easy for the reader to gloss through the first section of the book without blinking, as this first section serves as a bit of setup, aptly titled, “Creation Myth.” The lineation and syntax are conventional, the diction exhibits a loose chattiness that those familiar with Giménez Smith’s work will recognize. However, arguably, this section and these poems are prepping the reader for the seminal second section of the book where things begin to unravel in interesting ways.
The long poem in section two is kaleidoscopic in its emotions, rangy in its concerns. All punctuation disappears across 37 smaller poems, separated on each page by a small bullet point at the top of each poem. The bullet point looks simultaneously like a period and a record button, and is a reminder that each poem below is a kind of “point,” as if to tell the reader to pay attention. In one poem, Giménez Smith writes:
I don’t actually know who the richest
person I’ve ever known is and that’s what
is so great about being an American and by
American I mean North American and by
North American I mean US and by US
I mean I’m a US citizen who may appear
to be rich to a lot of people so in a revolution
I will be sleeping off my new circumstance
hiding in a prison spoiler alert I believe in the state
in the end while the apocalypse roars outside
Here we see the speaker’s comfort in the capitalistic anonymity characteristic of being a modern American. As the poem continues, the speaker grapples with definition, as in who gets to be American. And like many of the poems in this book, the poem returns to the speaker and the speaker’s awareness of her own circumstance and privilege, in this case as viewed through the lens of the other. How quickly the poem has shifted culpability onto the speaker. Here, the speaker acknowledges that she can ignore the “apocalypse” while it “roars outside.” This poem, like many in the second section rely on the natural electricity of Giménez Smith’s brain — each line, each word, each phrase, effortlessly shifts into the next, but with each new thought, the puzzle gets deeper, more complicated, and the language more sinuous and alert. The language in these poems is alive. Here’s another example:
how shall we remind the mathematicians
the politicians and the statisticians
and the megachurch man
and the gentrifying house-flipper
and the executive garbage people
who hiked up the cost of Daraprim
and EpiPen and the Ponzi scheme
of senator-lobbyists and the propagandists
and the executive branch-corporate shills
and the patriarchal misogynist statesmen
and the Tiki torch-khakis boys
how shall we remind them that want is drug
the conduit that aversion is the trick card …
This poem is shifting within its own thinking and re-thinking, and ends like this:
shall we write our demands in blood
with our histories cures mythologies curses
or should we develop a master-approved
version of history how do we transform
their powers do we break them apart
and bury them set them on the shelf
do we push them out on the ice floe or take
away their scepters can we disrupt it
with our word parades or do we let them in
on the plot or do we burn them
All the poems in section two are breathless, mimicking the struggle and tension of a speaker that lives in a dystopian present, a place where the speaker also cannot deny her own capitalistic pursuits:
I have to prepare to live tight and court danger
prepare to live on air I have to stop buying
and watching have to learn to turn hate
into light and uncover I think
dance to disco from the ‘70s oil crisis
I have to pull my money
out of the faux middle-class race
I’m separated from my nation
have to teach the kids to turn
off the lights to compost shoot a gun …
Giménez Smith’s speaker lives in a world of too much. Too much noise, too much violence, too much hate, too much capitalism. Yet, the speaker understands and acknowledges that she is also the clicker, the shopper, and the viewer. The speaker knows this, loves this, and hates this. This speaker must simultaneously teach her children how to “turn / off the lights” and “to compost,” while teaching them how to “shoot a gun.”
The final section of Be Recorder, showcases Giménez Smith’s capacious range in subject matter and form. In the first poem in this section, “In Remembrance of their Labors,” punctuation re-appears, simulating a kind of waking up from the desolation and despair of the second section. There’s still plenty of despair though, but now there are small ruffled edges of love, as this section grapples with the illness of the speaker’s mother and the speaker’s rich and varied lineage, as well as her fraught relationship with her chosen career path of poetry:
What is the nature of the brown artist desire for disruption? My legacy: a long lineage of
fuck-up hustlers, mostly on my father’s side. On my mother’s side: civic servants: three gen-
erations of accountants for the state. On my father’s scamps, scam artists, pimps, criminals:
perfect models for destabilization…
I’m a node of various dark and light powers, first generation emitting energy from the first
world. In remembrance of their labors, honest and corrupt, I infiltrate the creative class by
racializing its traditions…
The frivolity of poetry, layers of frivolity disguised as labor or vice-versa. Poetry is useless
until we rot from inside when we don’t have words…
This is in remembrance of my mother whose hands were callused against heat, biceps bulging
from hauling vacuum cleaners and trays of grand slams …
Another prose poem in this section is called “American Mythos.” It grapples with many larger themes of consumerism, desire, the conundrums of parenting and when or when not to give in to buying violent video games for children. But again, it’s what this poem transforms into that makes it interesting. The poem shifts from simply: “My son leaves me a Post-it on the lamp asking me to email Amazon about the Star Wars video/game he had given me money for, but I lied about ordering it. I hadn’t even clicked” to the dystopian “end of the Americas” and the ultimate giving into consumerism:
but I order the Star Wars game and, accidentally, a book Pilates, a book on organizing, and eyeliner, the virtual items I had left in the virtual cart on one of my aspirational Amazon shopping sprees.
In my conscience I justify the game as an exchange for a little compliance, insurance against
being set loose upon a metaphorical ice floe into the stars alone….
Once there were swords, they would say, that made the sound of empty oil drums. Once
there was a ship powered by bones that flew in the air without moving a single feather, which
they had never seen. Feathers was like hair.
Giménez Smith has gone from a microcosm of the daily dilemmas of parenthood to the apocalypse, in just five pages. This is the brilliance of Giménez Smith — the scope and range of the poet’s mind and the writer’s ability to traverse such grand and sprawling territory with the reader in tow. These are borderless poems where anything can be collided with anything else.
In a book with so much desolation, however, there’s ultimately hope in language, in Giménez Smith’s language that not only bravely names the dilemmas of our time, but also boomerangs language into the mind and heart of the reader, as if to say, we must look into our collective memories and past in order to make a different kind of future, all the while acknowledging our own culpability within our vastly diminished society. Maybe acknowledging our culpability is the first step to a new future. In the first lines of a poem, the speaker asks: “do you remember/the different world / you wanted for your children” — yes we do. We just need to “break free and record be recorder.”
[Published August 6, 2019 by Graywolf Press, 96 pages, $16.00 paperback]