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WORK TITLE: Lake Michigan
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1974
WEBSITE:
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1974, in Pittsburgh, PA.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, editor, educator, and translator. Wilbur Wright College, Chicago, IL, instructor.
AWARDS:National Endowment for the Arts grant, 2013; PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, 2013; National Book Award, 2016, for The Performance of Becoming Human; National Translation Award for Poetry, American Literary Translators Association, 2017.
WRITINGS
Also author of Arbitrary Tales (short stories), Triple Press, 2005, and Bedtime Stories for the End of the World, Bloof Books, 2014.
SIDELIGHTS
Daniel Borzutzky is a writer, poet, and translator living in Chicago, Illinois. The son of Chilean immigrants, he was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work includes two full-length collections of poetry as well as three chapbooks. His poetry often centers on major economic and social problems such as immigration, political corruption, economic unfairness, and the exploitation of workers. Borzutzky described his work in an interview with Michael Workman on the website Newcity Lit. “In terms of imagining a country or a nation, it’s doing a couple of things. I’m thinking about what is already happening, to some degree under the surface, or that is not entirely visible,” he told Workman. “I am also thinking about those things that are scarcely visible and drawing them out to their logical conclusions. It comes through the books in terms of state violence, treatment of immigrants and economic policy. I’m thinking about what we know is happening, but we don’t panic about. I’m trying to push that to where I think it’s heading, what people don’t see.”
Borzutzky has also translated the works of several Chilean poets, including Raul Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenun. His collection The Performance of Becoming Human won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2016.
The Book of Interfering Bodies and In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy
In The Book of Interfering Bodies, Borzutzky presents a rumination on the “fate of the human imagination in the postindustrial West,” in “what might be called bureaucratically occupied poetry,” commented Make contributor Kevin C. Moore. The collection is “not easy to enter, or, ultimately, to read. It consists of free verse and abstract prose chapters,” Moore continued. In one piece, Borzutzky engages with an epigraph from the 9/11 Commission Report. Other works give voice to some of the complaints that poets and writers commonly express, such as lack of funding, or the homogenizing of creative work, or the idea that poetry is a dangerous force in America. In “One Size Fits All,” Borzutzky makes a wry commentary on the commercialization of poetry by including a corporate-level survey at the end of the poem, asking readers to evaluate the work and seeking a comment on the emotional reactions it evoked. Moore concluded that Borzutzky’s collection is “very timely, and it constitutes his most ambitious and unified project to date.”
In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, Borzutzky presents readers with a collection that is “corporeal, terrifying, discerning, and utterly—rapturously—insane,” remarked a Publishers Weekly writer. The poet looks at subjects including violence and its opposite, migration, and the dullness of the everyday world, but in terms that often evoke death, decay, filth, and decomposition. He makes a connection to this unpleasant environment and the act of writing, deciding that without the experience of decay and rot, he would have had nothing to say as a writer. The book “offers a perspicacious and unsettling view of the current waking world,” the Publishers Weekly contributor stated.
The Performance of Becoming Human
The title of Borzutzky’s collection The Performance of Becoming Human refers to an the irony inherent in a situation in which an ape is captured by a group of European soldiers. They teach the creature to spit and belch, among the lower of actions people consistently commit, and in this way he became something resembling human. The collection contains poetry that uses “challenging phrases and jarring images reward the reader with a better understanding of the cynical and dehumanizing contours and limits of society,” observed Nicholas Hayes, writing on the website Your Impossible Voice. Other poems in the book of seventeen works elaborate on bodies, borders, political states, and the spaces between them and between various states of being, noted Dylan Kinnett in Atticus Review.
Borzutzky’s “body of work is a continuously unfolding organism in which translation and poetry, politics and aesthetics, Chile and Chicago, Latin America and the US, become uncertainly and convulsively layered and conjoined. In The Performance of Becoming Human . . . we can see the way all these dark and interlacing tides rise together,” commented Joelle McSweeney, writing in Bomb. A Publishers Weekly writer called the book “one of contemporary poetry’s most cogent documents of humanity and suffering in the twenty-first century.” Kinnett summed up the collection, stating, “This is a dark book, which makes it good reading during a time that many feel is a darkening one. The lines of these poems, and the demarcations they make, have an incantatory quality, the way a dark lullaby should.”
Lake Michigan
Borzutzky’s poetry collection Lake Michigan “is his latest in a series that explores the underbelly of government, capital, and the privatizing, punitive regime of neo-liberalism—all the acts of violence that uphold current systems of power but that we’ve largely agreed to ignore,” observed Pacific Standard reviewer Rebecca Stoner. Its “stark poetic depiction of a world in the grips of an Orwellian police state, no less surreal than William Burroughs, no less byzantine and corrupt than Franz Kafka,” commented Charles Rammelkamp on the JMWW blog. “Composed in long, proselike lines, this work explicitly places itself in the tradition of protest poetry,” noted a writer in Publishers Weekly.
“Lake Michigan is hard to read, and harder still to enjoy,” Stoner commented. “It makes readers confront the worst stuff of headlines, and the violence that’s too commonplace to make it into the headlines. Some readers may believe poetry should be a space of escapism or refuge instead. Others may wish that Borzutzky offered solace in the form of praise for resilience, hope, or beauty. He doesn’t.” Booklist writer Diego Baez called the book a “searing indictment and an immediate, dangerous, and urgent work.” Rammelkamp concluded that Lake Michigan is a “timely collection; it certainly responds to the nationalist zeitgeist in the age of Trump, the era of ‘Make America Great Again.’ It may not be a delightful read, but it is a necessary book.”
In the interview with McSweeney, Borzutzky addressed the criticism he sometimes receives for writing what some view as political poetry. “In the aftermath of the National Book Award, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I write political poetry or why a poem should be the vehicle for communicating political critique,” Borzutzky commented. “And this question is difficult to answer because it asks me to separate politics from poetry as if politics were merely a trope that one could tack on to their poetics. For me, it’s inseparable from my writing. It’s not like you flick a switch and start writing in a political mode, or with the intensity you are referring to. The intensity comes from a sense of desperation inseparable from the one I have felt while living through and observing the last ten years of life in the globalized U.S. But it’s also a desperation to articulate this mess so as to not fall into an even deeper despair.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Bomb, summer, 2017, Joyelle McSweeney, interview with Daniel Borzutsky.
Booklist, March 15, 2018, Diego Baez, review of Lake Michigan, p. 12.
Make, November 29, 2011, Kevin C. Moore, review of The Book of Interfering Bodies.
Publishers Weekly, June 15, 2015, review of In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy; May 18, 2015, review of The Country of Planks, p. 62; December 5, 2016, review of The Performance of Becoming Human; February 19, 2018, review of Lake Michigan, p. 52.
ONLINE
Atticus Review, https://www.atticusreview.org/ (June 5, 2017 ), Dylan Kinnett, review of The Performance of Becoming Human.
Brooklyn Poets, http://www.brooklynpoets.org/ (June 20, 2018), “Poet of the Week: Daniel Borzutsky.”
Colorado Review, http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/ (June 20, 2018), J.G. McClure, review of The Performance of Becoming Human.
JMWW blog, https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/ (February 28, 2018 ), Charles Rammelkamp, review of Lake Michigan.
Matter, http://www.mattermonthly.com/ (January 11, 2015), Matthew Reed Corey, “Big A, Little a: Interviewing Daniel Borzutsky, with Joel Craig.”
Newcity Lit, http://lit.newcity.com/ (March 12, 2018), Michael Workman, “The Conversation: The Sound and Rhythm of Poet Daniel Borzutsky.”
Pacific Standard, http://www.psmag.com/ (March 22, 2018), Rebecca Stoner, “Poetry for Those Brutalized by Capitalism,” profile of Daniel Borzutsky.
Poetry Foundation website, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (June 20, 2018), biography of Daniel Borzutsky.
Your Impossible Voice, http://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/ (June 20, 2018), Nicholas Hayes, review of The Performance of Becoming Human.
Daniel Borzutzky
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Daniel Borzutzky
Genre
poetry
Notable works
The Performance of Becoming Human
Notable awards
National Book Award
Daniel Borzutzky is a Chicago-based poet and translator. His collection The Performance of Becoming Human won the 2016 National Book Award.[1]
The son of Chilean immigrants, Borzutzky's work often addresses immigration, worker exploitation, political corruption, and economic disparity.[2] He teaches at Wright College.[3]
Contents [hide]
1
Works
1.1
Poetry
1.2
Translations
2
Honors
3
References
4
External links
Works[edit]
Poetry[edit]
Full Length Collections
Lake Michigan, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. ISBN 9780822965220, OCLC 1007923836
The Performance of Becoming Human Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016. ISBN 9781936767465, OCLC 994060924[4][5]
In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy New York: Nightboat Books, 2015. ISBN 9781937658335, OCLC 894937620
The Book of Interfering Bodies Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books Lebanon, NH, 2011. ISBN 9780984459827, OCLC 838471857
The Ecstasy of Capitulation Buffalo, N.Y.: Blaze Vox Books, 2007. ISBN 9781934289242, OCLC 105635040
Chapbooks
Bedtime Stories for the End of the World Bloof Books, 2014. OCLC 906944426
Data Bodies (Holon, 2013)
Failure in the imagination, Milwaukee, WI: Bronze Skull Press, 2007. OCLC 181911375
Poetry/Essay
Memories of my Overdevelopment Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2015. OCLC 944444558
Arbitrary tales,Triple Press: 2005. ISBN 9780976659310, OCLC 166144754
Translations[edit]
Galo Ghigliotto, Valdivia (co•im•press, 2016)
Raúl Zurita, The Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015)
Raúl Zurita, Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010)
Jaime Luis Huenún, Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008)
Honors[edit]
National Book Award, The Performance of Becoming Human (2016)
ALTA's National Translation Award for Poetry (2017)
PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Raúl Zurita’s El País de Tablas (The Country of Planks) (2013)
National Endowment for the Arts Grant (2013)
Daniel Borzutzky
Sean Patrick Cain
Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, recipient of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015), Memories of my Overdevelopment (Kenning Editions, 2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011). He has translated poetry collections from Spanish, including Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia (Coimpress, 2016); Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010); and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008). He lives in Chicago.
The Conversation: The Sound and Rhythm of Poet Daniel Borzutzky
March 12, 2018 at 9:00 am by Michael Workman
Daniel Borzutzky / Photo: Zakkiyyah Najeebah
By Michael Workman
Since winning the National Book Award for poetry for his “Performance of Becoming Human,” Daniel Borzutzky has finally gotten the wider praise he deserves. I published his work in the earliest volumes of Bridge, the journal I edited in the early aughts. Borzutzky remains less well-recognized than he deserves in Chicago, the city he today calls home. He is unflinching in his embrace of difficult emotions, even and especially at the social and political injustices that mark the territory of his Latin American contemporaries. The verse of this son of Chilean immigrants evokes the finest aspirations of Raúl Zurita (whose work he has translated), Philip Levine’s deliberations on the soul of Detroit, or Carolyn Forché’s dissections of a civil-war-torn El Salvador.
His newest collection, “Lake Michigan,” takes the accomplishment of “Performance” to more dystopian, challenging extremes.
Daniel Borzutzky / Photo: Zakkiyyah Najeebah
I’ve seen “Lake Michigan” described as the Homan Square section of your work. Is that a fair assessment?
At the end of my last book, the “Performance of Becoming Human,” there are some pieces that take place in a prison site on a Chicago beach. Lake Michigan becomes a continuation of that project. On one level, it’s thinking about Homan Square and police violence in Chicago, but the interest is certainly broader than that.
There’s a dividing line in the work that I think of as reality of thought versus imagination, or poetry and politics, which some say don’t go together.
The poetry is all political. It responds to the various political and economic realities of our time. However, I wouldn’t have the pretensions to confuse poetry with policy. Certainly, I’m using features of poetic language and narrative throughout the book. There are dialogues with other writers. There is repetition throughout the book and an interest in sound and rhythm. Those are features of poetic writing.
Doesn’t that suggest there’s something wrong with art for art’s sake?
I don’t want to tell anybody what they should do with their art, but I would also say that rejecting politics or doing art for art’s sake is also political, right? It’s an approach to how you think about politics in relationship to what’s going on in our society, or to what you think is going on in our society. That’s also a stance.
There’s anger or outrage about what’s happening that’s very visceral in your work.
In terms of imagining a country or a nation, it’s doing a couple of things. I’m thinking about what is already happening, to some degree under the surface, or that is not entirely visible—something like Homan Square which was invisible to most of us. I am also thinking about those things that are scarcely visible and drawing them out to their logical conclusions. It comes through the books in terms of state violence, treatment of immigrants and economic policy. I’m thinking about what we know is happening, but we don’t panic about. I’m trying to push that to where I think it’s heading, what people don’t see.
With these historical precedents, for instance, talking about Pinochet as one of the original neoliberals, do you see that as a parallel between what was happening in Chile and what’s happening now, what you refer to often in the text as a corpse, or a carcass economy?
Yes. Starting around 2014, I started to write a lot about the relationship between Chile and Chicago. I was thinking mostly in economic terms, about the experiments that the “Chicago Boys” and Milton Friedman wanted to enact—for example, privatization. Chile had privatization on a mass level of schools, healthcare and social security. In 2012, when the Chicago Public Schools were on strike for the first time in twenty-seven years, in Chile they were in the midst of a year-long student strike. Their issues were largely the same, about privatization and access. I was certainly thinking about parallels. Chile uses a voucher system to supplement people’s ability to pay for private education as a way of crushing public education. This was proposed here. When George Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, he talked about Chile as being the model and falsely claimed it was successful. There are various economic policies that begin in Chicago and then move to Chile.
I’m not saying that Chicago and Chile are the same thing, or that violence is the same—of course, in Chile, the numbers of people who died or were tortured are much greater. I would say that state violence in both places is used as a means of sustaining public policies that seek to rid those communities of social and public services.
Rahm’s closing down sixty public schools on Chicago’s South Side, for instance.
Right, but it is happening at the same time as cops are killing kids on the South Side. That’s the point I want to make. Those are not separate things. The killing of black youth on the South Side serves as a means of sustaining the policies of shutting down those schools.
Zurita was also a performance artist, staging actions in the streets. Is that something you were thinking of when you were writing the “Performance of Becoming Human,” this sort of action?
No, I was thinking about performance, but not as this kind of art action. The title refers to a story by Kafka, “A Report to an Academy.” It is about an African ape who is captured, put in chains, taken back and tortured on the ship. In order to find his way out, he begins to act like the humans on the ship. They’re really vile, they spit and belch all the time. He begins to imitate them, learns how to talk and goes around Europe giving speeches on his transformation. But while he’s plotting how to imitate, or ape, the humans, he begins to speak as an artistic performance. That was the seed. It got me thinking about the various ways that we perform humanity and particularly about the way that people with power choose to perform their humanity—or not.
Humanity is a choice.
Yeah. Kafka’s point and, as I reference in “Lake Michigan,” Aimé Césaire’s point is that the choice that humans, and often civilized humans make, is to act like barbarians. They do that through systemic violence and by killing people who have less power than they do.
You’ve described neoliberalism as a resurgent force, particularly in Chicago, can you elaborate?
We see all sorts of ways in which the public sector is affected. The city government disinvests in public services, closing schools and mental health facilities, privatizing prisons, street and utility services. There are many ways in which Chicago hands over its responsibilities to private companies.
Markets and commerce have been pushed to an extreme, where the thinking is that we can monetize everything, right down to people’s sense of individuality.
The ideology that is presented by neoliberals is that market economics will trickle down through competition and through job creation in order to benefit the public and people who do not have money.
Yes, and on a fundamental level markets are a negation of collective action.
We simply don’t have enough evidence that the market is interested sustaining low-income communities. Opening up a Whole Foods in poor neighborhoods is not going to end with real investment in what those neighborhoods need. One could argue that doing things like that becomes the first step in removing low-income people from the neighborhood, right? If we toggle back and forth between Chile and Chicago, we see in both places that the markets benefit people who can afford to invest and who can control profit and the means of production. Chile has been using a slogan lately—“Capitalism with a human face”—as if the idea could provide a counterbalance to the neoliberal ideas in place. But it’s not addressing the abandonment and social cruelties that mass capitalism and neoliberalism have created.
It’s this extremism that you’re trying to root out in this experience of the two worlds.
Yes, except the extremism is mainstream, right? It is extreme, except Rahm Emanuel runs as a liberal Democrat. Chile, since the end of the coup, has had three socialist presidents and they still have a mostly privatized school and healthcare and social security system. These very right-wing policies in the United States and in Chile have become simply the center, and to some degree, the center-left.
Do you then see these works as a critique of modernity?
I don’t know if I’m critiquing modernity in my writing, but I am critiquing the ways in which market forces and mass capitalism have existed side-by-side with extreme violence, with genocide, with racism and oppression throughout the United States, and that they are forces that simply run parallel. To the degree that they are facets of modernity, yes.
Daniel Borzutzky will read with Nate Marshall on March 14 at 6pm at Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 South Woodlawn, (773)752-4381 and April 27 at 7:30pm at Women and Children First, 5233 North Clark, (773)769-9299.
Poet Of The Week Daniel Borzutzky
July 24–30, 2017
Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection The Performance of Becoming Human, Daniel Borzutzky is a Chilean American writer and translator living in Chicago. His other poetry books are In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, The Book of Interfering Bodies, The Ecstasy of Capitulation and the chapbook Failure in the Imagination. He has published one collection of fiction, Arbitrary Tales. His books of translation include Song for His Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita and Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenun. On Sunday, July 30, Borzutzky will read for the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series at the NYC Poetry Festival with Elisabet Velasquez and t’ai freedom ford.
The Privatized Waters of Dawn
The appraisers from the Chicago Police Department prod my body in the bathtub
They can’t stop coughing in my face
They want to know what street I come from
What code I speak
Who I bought my hair and skin from
What disease I hide in my veins
There are holes in my arm and the appraisers put their cigarettes in them
They don’t smoke their cigarettes
They just jam them into my arm
I have a faint idea of what it means to be alive
But almost all of my feelings have been extinguished
I feel my hand at the end of my arm
It is weightless
There are eyes floating in the air and the river won’t stop exploding
Earlier, when I was sleeping in the bathtub, I looked up at the ceiling
The little hole of a window exposed a sky the color of blood
I cried into the water and I thought about a note I needed to send to my parents
I needed to tell them my key was with a neighbor
I needed to tell them the four-digit code to my bank account
I needed to tell them that if I died in the water, if I died in the warehouse, if I died in the mud, if I died at the hand of the appraisers, there were some things I needed them to do
The city has disappeared into the privatized cellar of humanity
My street was obliterated from a love that could not be contained by mathematics or emotion
I could not sleep the night before my appointment to be deposited into the private sector
I stared out my bedroom window at 3 AM on a night I could not sleep
I was startled by a police siren
And from my window I watched the police pull a young man out of a black sedan
The driver had long hair
He was gangly and underfed and they asked him to a walk a straight line
You could see hunger in his jawbones
He walked the line perfectly
They put a light to his eye
Follow the light with your eyes, the officer said
They made him stand on one leg
They made him walk on one leg
He walked perfectly on one leg
He stood perfectly on one leg
They made him do twenty pushups
Why do I have to do twenty pushups, he asked
Because you’re a decrepit, public body, the police officer said, and you do not own yourself anymore
And the starving driver did the twenty pushups as gracefully as he could
I hid behind the blinds and I wanted to send a signal to the man who was being made to exert himself, to let him know that from here on out every institution he enters is going to be harsh, austere, inflexible
I went back to bed knowing they would put him in the privatized jail cell where he would wake up shrouded in a horrible halo of light
I went back to my bed and a voice kept shouting:
Do you speak English? Do you eat meat? Do you rub meat on your body? Do you own your own body? Do you like to eat raw organ with me? Do you like your organ maggoty? Do you want to know how you can get to the other side of the river?
The voice did not have a body
But it had a mouth
It was the biggest mouth I had ever seen
It opened its mouth and there were small animals inside of it
A dog with two heads was on its tongue and so was a newborn baby and the baby screamed:
Do you have a job? Do you have transferable skills? Do you understand the implications of your inaction? Would you prefer to be grilled, roasted or boiled?
I said: Where are your eyes?
The mouth said: Your city has disappeared, what are you still doing here?
I said: I work for the city. I was responsible for supplying the youth with degrees of economic value
But this was another life
This was another story
Now I squirm with the other bodies and together we sleep and squirm in the giant bathtubs they cage us in and we do not belong to ourselves
When we are dry we swap bits of clothing, wrinkled up rags, and we warm ourselves in towels filled with our partners’ sweat and dirt
The bureaucrats laugh at us when we talk to them
They slurp down raw oysters when we talk to them
They sink their feet into our mouths when we talk to them
They say: Poet your favorite poet from now on is my boot
The poet-boot kicks one of my teeth and I feel it fall into my mouth
I swallow my tooth and wash it down with the bath water I’ve been sleeping in for the last few days
And when day inevitably breaks I watch the morning ritual:
They take away the horizon
They take away the sky and the streets
They take away the sewers and the beaches and the river and the trees and the birds and the cats and the raccoons and the garbage
And as usual I watch from the bathtub of dawn until someone comes to conduct the daily appraisal of my body
I cost much less than my historical value and the bank has no choice but to deny the loan I need in order to buy myself back
My deflationary wounds
My privatized blood
My rotten carcass sinking into the privatized waters of dawn
—From The Performance of Becoming Human, Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016.
Tell us about the making of this poem.
Among other things, I think this poem imagines the consequences of extreme privatization: the privatization not just of prisons, public services and water supplies. It also imagines the privatization of an entire city as well as the privatization of a city’s residents, their body parts, the streets they live on and the air they breathe. Chicago—only a little more privatized than it actually is, and with an analogous level of police violence.
What are you working on right now?
Finishing up a manuscript of poem-things called Lake Michigan, centered around a prison camp on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago. Should be out and about next year.
What’s a good day for you?
Lots of reading. A little bit of writing. A really good meal with people I love. A really good piece of fruit. A really good pastry. Reading, talking and playing with my son.
Spent any time in Brooklyn? If so, when and where? Share with us your experiences, impressions, etc.
I’ve spent lots of time in Brooklyn over many years. I have family and friends I visit when I go to NYC. But I don’t really know its complications. Still, it’s a place I associate with people I care about and who care about me.
What does a poetry community mean to you? Have you found that where you live? Why or why not?
Since I arrived in Chicago almost twenty years ago, I’ve seen many different poetry communities come in and out of circulation, and I’ve also seen a kind of core poetry community that has been sticking it out now for decades. Lately, for me, a very rich one has formed around MAKE magazine and Contratiempo (a Spanish-language publication), which has centered around Spanish-language writing, and has built lasting and deep connections between writers from Mexico and Latin America.
Tell us about some Brooklyn poets who have been important to you.
Joe Pan, of Brooklyn Arts Press. He’s a great friend, a great person, a great writer and I was lucky enough to have him publish my book, which he worked so hard to promote, as he does for all the Brooklyn Arts books. But Joe’s activism, his care for his community, his work with hungry and homeless people, is a sign of his selflessness and bravery and compassion.
Tell us about the last book(s) and/or poem(s) that stood out to you and why.
I just finished reading Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, a moving, beautiful, important book about her work as an interpreter for immigrant children from Mexico and Central America stuck in the bureaucratic entanglements of our legal and judicial system. It’s a book that observes, that analyzes, that tells the truth and offers hope.
Describe your reading process. Do you read one book at a time, cover to cover, or dip in and out of multiple books? Do you plan out your reading in advance or discover your next read at random? Do you prefer physical books or digital texts? Are you a note-taker?
I read multiple books of poetry and nonfiction at once, but hardly ever from cover to cover. Novels I read one at a time. I prefer physical books for reading in English. I like to read prose books in Spanish digitally because of how easy it is to look up the meanings of words I might not know. Just touch the word and there’s the definition. I take lots of notes.
What’s one thing you’d like to try in a poem or sequence of poems that you haven’t tried before?
To write a novel.
Where are some places you like to read and write (besides home, assuming you like to be there)?
I used to have time to write in places that were not my home. Now, with a child and a full-time job, I rarely write outside of my house and I rarely write before 9:30–10 PM. I am writing right now on an airplane. And I have always loved writing on airplanes. Something about the containment, both being trapped on the plane as well as knowing that your time being trapped will end, is liberating.
January 11, 2015
Big A, Little a: interviewing Daniel Borzutzky, with Joel Craig, by Matthew Reed Corey
Six o’clock p.m. on Sunday, August 10th, 2014 // Mixteco Grill, Chicago, IL
Daniel Borzutzky, who lives and teaches in Chicago, was born in Pittsburgh to Chilean parents. He has published two collections of poetry, The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVOX, 2006); as well as three poetry chapbooks, Data Bodies (Holon, an imprint of The Green Lantern, 2013), One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad Press, 2009), and Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull Press, 2007); and a book of fiction, Arbitrary Tales (Triple Press, 2005). Additionally, he has translated volumes by Chilean poets Raúl Zurita (Song for His Disappeared Love, Action Books, 2010) and Jaime Luis Huenún (Port Trakl, Action Books, 2007), and several other Chilean-born writers.
We met early on an August evening in Chicago’s Southeast Ravenswood neighborhood, set between Graceland Cemetery and a century-old industrial corridor, to discuss poetics and politics with my fellow interviewer, and poet, Joel Craig. I admire Daniel because his poems engage my imagination at the same time they give rise to my feelings of love toward people I don’t know. In the weeks leading up to the interview, I was sure my response to his poems had shown me something about poetry’s ethical responsibilities, and about what poems seek to provoke in politics. Yet, to be clear, I wasn’t at all sure what poetry’s intervention into politics would look like. Daniel sat diagonally from me, Joel sat across from me, and our conversation began with its most important question.
On Politics and the Imagination
Matthew Corey: What does politics have to do with the imagination: where do those things intersect?
Daniel Borzutzky: Are you thinking of the quote from the 9-11 Commission Report [that begins The Book of Interfering Bodies]: that we must ‘find a way to routinize and bureaucratize the exercise of imagination’?
MC: Yes, the failure of the imagination. As if, in our capacity to imagine something, we could’ve avoided, or superseded certain events, and it wouldn’t have happened. I think this says absolutely nothing about the imagination.
DB: I think that at that moment in The 9/11 Commission Report, where it specifies that the imagination needs to be bureaucratized––rhetorically, it was really interesting, I think, that the imagination was being given this important standing in culture. I mean, not just as something for kids, but for having the potential to craft policy. You know, nothing was ever done with that idea of bureaucratizing the imagination, it was a complete fiction….but there was this two-week moment when you would turn on NPR, and people would be talking about the importance of the imagination. It didn’t last. We should talk this out, the politics of the imagination, to see how it looks right now….
Joel Craig: Isn’t the imagination inherently dangerous for politics? That statement was interesting, in that regard.
DB: Yes, just the ungovernability of it is dangerous. You see all throughout countries that have had dictatorships, not just political artists being imprisoned (and potentially exiled or killed), but you see non-political ones, as well, in part just because art and the imagination are things that can’t be controlled. Even at the level of music, like in Brazil in the ‘60s: you get all these musicians who, on their faces, don’t seem political. But you get thousands of people going to their concerts, and there’s this realm of the ungovernable that is maintained––
MC: And they were punished, those Tropicália musicians.
JC: Well, they were certainly watched, they had their mail opened.
DB: I think from a policy standpoint, the destruction of art programs in public schools is this very, very clear shot, if not at the politics of the imagination, then at least at the imagination’s lack of value, and it’s all deeply connected to neoliberal educational reform policies and neoliberal policies in general that seek to destroy the public’s imagination and replace it with corporate nightmares.
JC: Usually, the people who make those decisions are academic boards made up by business people who are also the political donors, so they’re shaping policy in two directions––
DB: And the decision that gets made is that art has no use, which is happening throughout every sphere of education, through elementary school all the way up to graduate programs.
MC: Imagination seems to be the nightmare not of politics necessarily, but of dominant political systems, whether it’s left-wing or it’s right-wing. The things that people (from anywhere on the political spectrum) could imagine would potentially disable politics, in a way, and re-imagining politics makes people engaging their imaginations seem completely dangerous.
[I’m thinking of] a Brazilian musician like Tom Zé, who is interested in making psychedelic music that is much more closely related to North American music, than to traditional Brazilian aesthetics.
That’s terrifying. I’m not in power, but I would imagine if you are in power, that’s the worst thing that could happen.
DB: Right. But another side of it, I guess, is when you have drones, which are clearly a fascinating creative object of the imagination taken to the extreme. They’re going to become these completely mundane things. I think what politicians and bureaucrats do is figure out how to take scientific innovations, or artistic innovations, and make them completely mundane through repetition, normalization, assimilation.
JC: Is that one of the keys for the repetition in your work?
DB: I think so. I think there’s a fascination with certain words, as well. The word body is really interesting to me––
JC: Well, you constantly re-contextualize and re-define that word. Obviously, you implore through your titles that there is going to be a kind of project going on around that word. I get that. But the astounding amount of moves that you precede to make? Phenomenal. You strip meaning, re-assign meaning, you create music through repetition––and a lot of different kinds of feelings occur. You can feel horrific, pornographic, but always decidedly not romantic, not self-important. I’m curious: how much of it happens through the process that just feels right, in the making of it? Is there a strategy involved?
DB: I think part of it is just literary. I really love Thomas Bernhard’s novels, which continuously repeat the same name, or phrase, or rhythm, over and over again. I think it became––when I started writing––a way of getting the engine going.
JC: Barthelme came to mind, the first time I saw you read, many years ago. Instead of existing in an actual landscape. and instead of existing in a landscape of symbolism, it was a landscape filled [with] the words themselves, creating a logical progression for the piece.
DB: I think that the more I write the more I have become interested in abstractionlessness or maybe even some type of realism…and it doesn’t ever quite get there. But I found myself building from that place.
***
JC: When I read your work, [Daniel], I think a lot about composition because you have a huge toolbox. I don’t know if you’re aware of how big your toolbox is [laughter]. I’m not thinking about structure, I’m thinking about your ability to veer between potent things like satire (that may potentially be misread), and really generous, loving thoughts about people and culture. As much as you tear things apart, you’re always reifying the fact of life, especially in your latest book and your latest chapbook. I would imagine that your decision is, if I’m going to be this rad, I’m also going to be committed to life. Am I wrong?
DB: Yeah, [it was] being committed to life, but I think it was losing the fear of being emotional. There was such a 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s backlash against emotion, against sincerity, against making direct critiques, direct political statements, didactic statements—and this is still very much in play—with the assumption that to emote, to foreground feeling, to not write through modes thought to be more apt means of making political critiques: that to be direct, emotional, politically didactic in poems is not a valid way of using language and art to craft critique, that critique must be disguised through modes that mask subjectivity and that privilege language only if it is somehow commenting upon its own artificiality. Which comes out of this completely privileged position where writers get to distance themselves from the violence of the world and to focus more on form and diction rather than direct brutality. Somewhere in this I came to the idea that the lyrical work that I was interested in doing had to be about individuals, in some way. Political violence and bureaucracy seek to destroy individuals. I had to figure out how to give some value to that, and to think of very real contexts of how our relationships with one another, and our relationships with ourselves, get completely destroyed. I’m thinking of the US, but I’m also thinking about Chile, and about war, in a general sense. Politics becomes real when one figures out how individuals are affected by it. Neoliberal economic violence becomes real when you see its effects on the crumbling city of Chicago: the closed neighborhood public schools; the privatized public services; the closing of public mental health facilities; the insane realities of economic abandonment of so much of the city; the murders; etc…I find it hard to care too much about debates surrounding the politics of poetic forms in such a context. It’s not that I don’t have tastes and preferences and poems I like and poems and approaches to poetry I can’t stand. But I don’t have a lot of patience for poetry arguments about what approach to poem-making makes you a better Marxist. I’m not too concerned about abstraction, either, or whether one’s aesthetic choices have that much to do with their ability to craft political critique. I’m concerned about urgency, desperation, and the poetics of a violent neoliberal hell.
JC: Like being able to give a torture order, or giving a torture order, following through on a torture order.
DB: Sure, or teaching in public education and figuring out how state-political decisions affect actual people, how that boils down to the students who see policies that are enacted [against them] all the time.
MC: When you write lyric poems––you, in particular––do you think you’re trying to humanize the speaker? For instance, you have one poem [“Analytics for Everyone,” Data Bodies] that is a list of people in varying degrees of pain. Whereas they would otherwise go unseen, by mentioning them, do you try to humanize them?
DB: Yeah, I think I try to un-abstract––
MC: Yeah, yeah––
JC: If that’s a word.
DB: I’ve tried to figure out how you can write about war and torture, and neoliberal destruction, and maintain some sense of specificity about it. I’ve never been disciplined enough to do a straight documentary project, but I think there’s a similar spirit to think about people as individuals, and to be affected by those things. And in Data Bodies, I’m trying to explore ideas about data fascism, which none of us know how to shake. We’re all caught in this world where everything has to be somehow quantified, and we put so much faith in quantification that it serves as a way of making us not think about [things] qualitatively, right? One piece in here [Data Bodies], called “Analytics for Everyone,” is almost completely found language from this presentation that I heard about a new open-data system in a work place. It was very much being touted rhetorically as the formation of a new data democracy that was going to be––
Joel Craig: Data democracy?
DB: That phrase is used all the time, [as if] giving people access to data is somehow making us more equal, that there’s a connection between those things. Anyway, a lot of the verbs in the poem were verbs that the presenter used––refining, aggregating, extrapolating, tightening, overwhelming––they were all words that the person talked about as something you could do to the data. So I just sat there taking notes. It brought out the underlying violence to that.
MC: I don’t think anybody would say that you’re wrong.
JC: Have you ever met an underwriter? It’s like a massive obsession and business: who has the best data? Somebody with the right partnership, or [right] pocketbook, proposes to buy that data. In what condition are you presented to that body, itself?
DB: And all of us are willing submit to this shit all the time. We just submit to being other people’s data all of the time.
MC: Can you imagine seeing that data? It would be like somebody giving you a bag of your fingernail-clippings or dead skin-cells, and saying, here’s everything that you didn’t know belonged to you. We’re going to give it back to you. You think: is that [data] a part of me, or not?
On Sympathy and Empathy
Matthew Corey: I think sympathy is an important part of [your project], writing a speaker with whom the reader could sympathize, and you do it so quickly; there’s no development of emotional attachments, or saying you’re similar to this person. In a lot of your poems, it’s already assumed, so that by the time I get to them, I can sympathize with that pain.
Because it’s a poem, and because it’s a lyric poem (which has a long history of sympathizing with the speaker), you look at it, and you think, this isn’t my life, but I can understand it. That has to be one of the most difficult things to do in poetry, [and]even though there’s this long history of poems that make the reader want to sympathize, to do it is really difficult. I can’t teach people how to do that; I’ve tried. You can’t teach people how to do it; it has to be felt, I think.
Daniel Borzutzky: I don’t know…A confessional writer, like Silvia Plath, who I love, does everything to push us away from feeling sorry for her, and yet the result for me is always engagement and empathy. To take some sense of power back. And maybe this is where I’ll sound like I’m contradicting what I said before about form and diction, but not really, it’ll be hokier: I think there’s some mystical power in really good sentences. I think there’s some act of generosity, and of love, in writing beautiful, powerful, violent, life-affirming, life-destroying, soul-sucking, city-crumbling sentences. It’s answering the question of, why be engaged with really horrible acts, in writing? It wouldn’t [be engaging] if your sentences suck.
MC: But why sentences? Why not something like emotional textures, or something? Why the structure, or the shape, of the sentence? Why is that important to sympathy, or empathy, in your mind?
DB: The structure and shape of the emotion is all in there, but for me, I think it’s because of narrative. What I really want to be doing is writing novels.
MC: I can’t. Moving a character across a room, or plot arc, it escapes me. Do you feel the same way? I desire to; at the same time, I wish I could.
DB: Yes, I desire to, yes [laughter]. But I can’t sustain intensity, and sustain narrative, at the same time. I don’t know how to do both. I think I will eventually lose that fear of not having every sentence be a powerful container. Novelists have to write sentences that are boring. I can’t do it and, sort of, come back.
Joel Craig: Right!
On Poetry Affecting Change
Matthew Corey: You’re interested in [writing] the political grotesque, you’re interesting in [writing] bodies in pain: when you do that, are you working in one mode of many that you could choose, or is it the result of [following one single idea]?
Daniel Borzutzky: I think I’m writing the same thing over and over again. Working with Raúl Zurita [on translating], he will admit to having written the same book for the last forty years, in some way or another. Again, Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Duras, who keep returning to the same thing over and over again. I think, when you’re young, there’s this fear of being repetitive. At some point, one becomes OK with that notion––
Joel Craig: A distinction can be made between those who further themselves in whatever style they’re working in, and those who don’t.
DB: You can definitely think of writers who have stayed in the same voice and mode, and who you feel like they’re writing the same poem they’ve been writing for twenty years, right? But then there are others, like Raúl, who stick with that mode and voice, and who are mystically able to not write the same thing. Maybe it just has something to do with how urgent or compelling that thing is, or how incredibly unique, beautiful, insane, that thing is.
JC: Comfort is a word that comes to mind: where are your triggers coming from, and are you exposing yourself to different things that are uncomfortable? You’re compelled to assimilate those, somehow, and make them a part of your voice. Or maybe something really basic, like just thinking you’re good at it–– [laughter]
DB: Or other people telling you that you’re good at it, right?
JC: More so, yeah––
MC: But it’s hard not to, at the same time. It’s hard living in Chicago, and living with other poor people, and teaching poor students, & not to want to do something about it. You look at it, and you say, the best thing I can do about it is poetry. The thing I do best is poetry, so the question becomes, what can poetry do about poverty, pain, and injustice? On its face, it looks like it can’t do anything. Especially in the United States, I think, where [poetry is] looked at as something that’s frivolous.
JC: That’s going to be the case with anything that’s marginalized. At best, [poetry] may be confusing to someone who doesn’t know anything about it. Certainly, our culture has no merit and value in something that isn’t always changing toward the enrichment of the marketplace.
MC: Of course, poetry has the world’s smallest marketplace; it could fit on the tip of my pinkie. So the question is, how can poetry change anything: not why, or could it (because maybe it could), but how? It’s hard to overlook the people in pain. So what do I do about it, not as a writer, but as a poet? One strategy is sympathy, to make the speaker (it’s a dumb word, but I’ll use it, anyway) believable enough or real enough, to make that sympathy happen? Or to understand your reader enough to make that sympathy happen?
DB: Look, on a practical level, art is for the most part not going to be able to do anything for the threatened or the impoverished. I think it’s the wrong expectation that the poem should be able to do that.
MC: Yeah, yeah––
DB: But it also speaks to this absolute divide that we have between action and thought. It’s not that thinking is enough; one actually needs to do the work of fighting for big real changes on the streets and in our communities , and to do radical activism, in real concrete ways. But I think when statements like ‘poems have no political use’ are made it comes out of the ways that we separate thinking from acting, as if thinking is not action, [as if] there’s something inherently weak about thought. I don’t know. Maybe we write about horrible things in the hope that they won’t happen again. Maybe we write about horrible things in the hope that by living in them through words we can understand them better and that this somehow helps us to be more human..Maybe we write about horrible things in order to, as Fanny Howe says, ‘show that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.’ Raúl Zurita has spoken to me about the poem being a utopian space. That he writes from a position of having to believe that paradise is still possible even though we all know it’s not possible. That’s not the way I’d frame it, necessarily, but I’m sympathetic to the idea that it’s utopian to write about the horribleness of the world in beautiful ways. That to write through violence, to re-imagine and re-contextualize it and try to show just how awful the world actually is – that there’s something beautiful about doing this. It’s old fashioned, right?
JC: I think about cultural fabric. If we learned anything from German Dadaism, widely regarded to have failed as an art movement that tried to be activist, it did demonstrate the importance of cultural fabric. That people contribute at whatever level they’re able to, and that community is very, very important, whether your community is five people or five hundred, or if you have a soapbox in the middle of the piazza. I like to think that contributing by doing is a good thing, you know? If you’re able to exact any kind of change, then that’s amazing, and maybe we should all have that as a goal. We also live in a society that likes to wonder if something is worth doing if it’s not practical.
MC: And it is so dangerous, after all, the imagination and poetry [laughter]––
JC: Oh? Absolutely. It’s dangerous to poets.
On Pain and Memorization
In an interview with Daniel, the poet Raúl Zurita mentions that when he was arrested as a university student the day of Augusto Pinochet’s military takeover of Chile, Zurita had with him a folio of poems that he would carry with him each day. Upon discovering the poems, the soldiers who arrested Zurita didn’t think much of the folio, until a senior officer saw that drawings accompanied these poems. Thinking them dangerous, and thinking the drawings contained codes, the officer threw them into the sea like garbage. In that gesture, Zurita says, he understood exactly what was happening in Chile. Those discarded poems were eventually published as his first collection.
Matthew Corey: That’s totally fascinating, and I want one more sentence from Zurita, just to know exactly [how he knew] what was happening. What was communicated to him?
Daniel Borzutzky: What I think he means, or what I would say he means, is that there was now going to be arbitrary punishment, and arbitrary violent punishment. And what the military found incomprehensible was going to be destroyed. That the incomprehensible would get silenced, that art would be consider garbage. That art was so meaningless it could be tossed into the sea. Which of course is the same place where the dictatorship tossed bodies. Art was garbage. Humans with opinions were garbage to be discarded and buried in nature, the homeland, the landscape.
Joel Craig: That’s the fascist-coup playbook, right? Anything that could be of cultural value, but especially anything that could be a danger to them, whether it’s a person, or a painting.
MC: When a fascist government goes after a poet, does that serve to prove the danger of re-imagining, that something as disembodied as poetry could be dangerous to someone who wants to remake a nation?
DB: I think it was the fact of it being incomprehensible that made it suspect. When he says that soldiers thought the drawings were codes to destroy the military, it speaks to the fact that they didn’t know what his art was, and because the military didn’t know what it was it thus contained the possibility of being destructive. It’s also this re-defining of what is going to be permissible, or not permissible. Among other things, the dictatorship sought to eliminate eccentricity as much as possible.
MC: That’s how you make the hard edge of a fascist nation, I would guess.
DB: Yeah, but backing it up with––
MC: Pain, torture.
JC: Yeah.
MC: Thankfully, he memorized the poems.
MC: Poetry seems like a technology [readymade for memory], that says, I can remake [a poem] because it lives in that space between the voice and print.
DB: It was insane that he recreated [his first book], and he took a long time, but he wasn’t going to let it be destroyed. That’s the thing you hold on to, in the face of watching your friends get killed, and that’s pretty powerful.
MC: I was reading about a soldier [Pete Peterson] who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and they asked him about how he got through being a prisoner of war, and tortured. He said that he designed a house, bit by bit by bit by bit, every screw, every staircase. When he came back to the States, years after he’d been taken, he built the house––he remembered everything. He did that as an act of resistance, or maintaining his humanity, or whatever it is.
DB: There’s this documentary called Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán, and it’s about these women in the Atacama Desert who are searching for the bone fragments of people who were disappeared in the desert. There were these prisons, concentration camps really, there, in the desert. The filmmaker interviewed this one architect who was imprisoned, and who forty years later, he could completely re-create the architecture of the prison. That was what he did to stay active. When you’re isolated in a concentration camp, you’re not just removed from society, but everything you have is taken. [Memory] is just this way of, I don’t know, being alive.
MC: What remains? In all of these different accounts, what’s left there that would make [one] human? What does that say, once you’ve been dehumanized, about what’s left [of you]? The need to communicate?
JC: It a lot about our cognitive ability, and perhaps, our untapped cognitive ability. I’m sure it says something about our animal. Being in stasis, just being fed, is not surviving.
My aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, many years ago, sponsored a child from Cambodia who had escaped from a re-education camp at a young age. Most of his elder siblings, who were at university, were murdered. His parents starved to death trying to keep him alive. Then he went to a re-education camp. He escaped, spent weeks traveling through the treacherous, soldier-filled jungle to make it to Laos, or Thailand, or wherever else. If he was kept alive there, it was little different from a prison.
At the end of two years, they decided that they were going to close to camp, and [the detainees] were given the option of being shot in the head, or returning to Cambodia, or if they could make it safely through a minefield, and into the country, then they could stay, with papers. It was as inhuman as what they were coming from. It’s interesting knowing someone who has been through such difficult circumstances: it’s still abstraction, to me, but it’s a different kind of abstraction than reading it out of a book.
On Transnationalism: Chile and Chicago
Joel Craig: Your work does a good job of handling absurdity in different parts of the world.
Daniel Borzutzky: I think what I’m recently interested in writing about all the ways that Chile and Chicago are linked, and completely intertwined. I’m coming at it from this notion that Chicago is actually a very Chilean place. One of the things I’m trying to think about is reversing the notion that the United States is always the thing that affects the rest of the world. There are all these links between Chile and Chicago, starting with the notion that Pinochet’s economic plan was developed at the University of Chicago––
Matthew Corey: The Chicago Boys.
DB: Who then exported the economic plan, and then Chile became the testing ground for it, and it became exported all over the world, where there were repressive governments with the idea that you could implement severe acts of economic repression when there is a dictator. I think the endgame, ultimately, was to bring that back here. A couple of years ago, when the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike: there were at the same time enormous public-education strikes in Chile, with privatization essentially at the center of both school strikes. Pinochet’s privatization policies were copied both by the British, but by the US in many ways, as well. So when George Bush tried to privatize social security, he talked about imitating the {failed} Chilean model, where social security is completely privatized. Additionally, Chile has an almost completely private school system that’s based on a voucher program, where the majority of kids left in municipal public schools are very poor ones. Everybody gets a voucher from the state, but the voucher doesn’t really pay for a good private school, so people have to pay on top of it. In Chile, you had people go into debt not just to pay for college, but to pay for high school. Chile privatized its water. All of these moves are coming back to the US, and to Chicago in particular, where there are these extreme privatization ventures happening. Rahm Emanuel hasn’t privatized the water, but he has privatized the call-center workers for the water companies.
I’ve been reading Micah Uetricht’s book on the Chicago Teacher Union Strike in 2012 called Strike for America; Chicago Teachers Against Austerity. It’s funny, because when people talk about Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s often referred to as the laboratory for the neoliberal experiments with privatization of public resources. But Uetricht uses the exact same language about present day Chicago. He continuously talks about Chicago as being the laboratory for the neoliberal urban education agenda, the scraps that feed the flames of capital. But this is what Chile was under Pinochet -a laboratory, an incubator for neoliberal austerity public-sector destroying policies that were designed in Chicago. That is, they were designed in Chicago, exported to Chile and a few decades letter, now that the dust has settled, they’ve been brought back with vigor by the good old Democratic party who are unapologetic in their hatred for working people and labor unions.
On the one hand.
But on another hand I’m also thinking about the desert and disappearance as well: the Chilean desert being the site of mass disappearances, [and] the Arizona desert being this place where right now where there’s also mass disappearances. The coroners offices in the Southwest processing hundreds of anonymous bodies of Central American migrants….
So, this link between Chile and Chicago, between Chile and the US….It’s an identity-act on my part, but also the comparative neoliberal critique is relevant. And no matter what anyone tells you, Chicago is a Chilean city in a Chilean nation obsessed with re-enacting Chilean policies to completely restructure society, to destroy poor and working people, and to build a paradise for private corporations and the bureaucratic dispensers of capital.
MC: Have you tried writing that?
DB: Yes, I think I’m writing it, I’m trying to articulate it in a few essays, but more than that it’s at the core of my poems right now; and it’s important to me to start from the concrete communities that I live in and come from. I guess it’s just to make sure that when I/we talk about war, torture, destruction of society based on neoliberal [policies] and violent governmental policies, it’s not something that we can look abroad and say, that’s happening there. I’m thinking about the Chilean prisoners that have to enact whatever rituals in the minds to survive. But it’s also true that there are people living in Chicago in extreme poverty, [who] have to do something very similar.
Joel Craig: Right. One of my favorite statements of yours, when the [Chicago] teachers strike was started, was I just wonder who no one is rioting. Really? Why aren’t we?
DB: Given the amount of economic segregation in Chicago, the amount of economic abandonment, the utter callousness with which public resources are privatized at the expense of poor and working class people, it’s a pretty good question, right? It’s a good one to ask in our poetry.
On Poetry Culture
Joel Craig: What do you think about poetry-culture, right now, here?
Daniel Borzutzky: In Chicago?
JC: In the US, in the Internet Age, in the AWP Bookfair age? What do you think of poetry-lifestyle poetry? Academic [poetry]? World poetry? Small-press poetry? Poetry-personality poetry?
DB: I don’t think I’m pessimistic about small press poetry. Certainly there’s no shortage of interesting writing happening.
In terms of ‘Academic Poetry’: I think what is funny are the discussions about an aesthetic inside and outside. People talk about universities as being the center of poetry culture, or literary culture, and that this creates a certain kind of dominant, conservative aesthetic. But I actually think the importance of the mainstream, university poet as the determiner of what kind of writing is acceptable has been largely nullified. I don’t think you could say that there’s this mainstream type of poet that is getting all the university jobs anymore, because those jobs just don’t exist. The neoliberal education agenda and its reliance on adjunct faculty has more or less destroyed the possibility of university careerism for all but the, I don’t know, 1% of poets. But there’s still this notion that there’s an aesthetic inside centered around universities and mainstream publishers. I don’t buy it, so much. I mean- I think things like the VIDA count make clear that there are disparities in publishing, but I’m more inclined to think that those disparities have more to do with gender and ethnicity than aesthetics (though I recognize these spheres are not always so separate). I don’t know – I think aesthetic and political affiliations for university poets is a dead conversation, killed by the neoliberal attack on full-time faculty and the larger lack of commitment to education that it’s a symptom of. Who cares what kind of poetry is coming out of universities? Aesthetic debates about what kind of poetry your university is producing seem stupid considering the agenda that seeks to destroy not just the liberal arts but the entire profession of the professor and her relationship to students. I could care less about what kind of writing the professors and students at the Iowa Writers Workshop are producing. I care a lot, however, about the fact that the university as a place to have these discussions is withering away and is itself another illustration of austerity and hellacious neoliberal reform. But these discussions about the type of poetry that is being produced by MFA programs and how conservative or not-conservative or whatever it is…to me it’s like worrying about what color the walls are painted when the whole house is on fire. And if you look at Chicago specifically, and more broadly at urban colleges and community colleges, that lack of investment in faculty, instruction, liberal arts, etc… – disproportionally cheats African American, Latino and working class students in a similar way that they have been cheated in public elementary and high schools. But I’m getting off track. Do you guys think there’s an identifiable mainstream, anymore?
JC: I think school by school, a little bit: some of the more major MFA programs definitely have a trail that follows them in their night sky. It’s not like in the ‘90s when there were, like, five presses that put out poetry books, [the] National Poetry Series, and the Whitman [Award]. That was the only way to get a new book published. The attitude changing around all of that is really great. Certainly it leads to miles and miles of pulp at bookfairs, but you kind of need that to have something quality and to be reachable, right?
DB: I think small presses are the norm, now. There are small presses trying to maintain the fringes, but that center isn’t so clear anymore. We all have access to each other, and it’s just very hard to say that you are outside of that.
I think I get a little frustrated with Chicago as a place [to be a poet.] I mean, on the one hand, Chicago is great in terms of being able to cross the lines. There’s not a dominant aesthetic, or a dominant reading series, or any places that are exclusive in any kind of way. That part is nice. And everybody is, in some ways, very nice.
But I often feel that there’s a lack of intensity, where there’s not conversations like we’re having now, that take place in anything other than an individual setting.
JC: Are you thinking about a more pubic conversation, in a live setting, or at parties, or––?
DB: I’m thinking of this type of conversation about how poetry is interacting with the world at a political level––[this] is not a regular part of Chicago poetry-discourse. It does happen privately, certainly. It certainly happens among individuals. But I don’t get the sense of there being a large level of anger, with political intensity, in Chicago writing. I don’t know that it’s necessarily unique to Chicago, but it’s where I live, so I see it. I’m much more interested in participating in Chicago life than I am in any other kind of life. I think that notion of wanting to be involved very, very locally is really important to me.
Poetry for Those Brutalized by Capitalism
Daniel Borzutzky's new collection confronts the perverse logics of fascism and the free market.
Rebecca StonerMar 22, 2018
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Daniel Borzutzky.
(Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Borzutzky)
Poet Daniel Borzutzky’s newest collection, Lake Michigan, out from the University of Pittsburgh Press last month, is his latest in a series that explores the underbelly of government, capital, and the privatizing, punitive regime of neo-liberalism—all the acts of violence that uphold current systems of power but that we've largely agreed to ignore. Its predecessor, The Performance of Becoming Human, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2016. (Full disclosure: I am a former employee of The Wylie Agency, which represents Borzutzky.)
In an essay for The Poetry Foundation, Borzutzky explained the motivation behind his recent collections. "If I have any idea why I write poems, and I'm not sure I do," he wrote, "I might guess ... I write poems in order to expose what a neoliberal inferno is like ... who it eats, who it shits out, who it absorbs, who it refuses to absorb, what it kills, how it kills, why it kills, under what conditions it kills, how much money it uses to kill, what it smells like, what it makes its citizens smell like, what it does to the brain and the body of the people it hates and loves."
Born in Pittsburgh to Chilean parents, Borzutzky now lives in Chicago. In his words, he’s "a falso-Chileno living in a Chilean province called Chicago," a nod to the deep connections between the two places. From the 1950s to the '70s, University of Chicago economists trained a group of Chileans to privatize and deregulate; later, these policies would find their way back to their city of origin.
Lake Michigan is set in an imaginary prison camp on the shores of that great lake, a piece of fantasy embedded in an uncomfortably familiar socio-political landscape: police brutality, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and the "savage bourgeois" who are content to ignore any violence that doesn't happen in their own backyard. Even then, Borzutzky half-jokes, they'll explain it away: "They say one broken body in my backyard doesn't count for anything...."
The 19 poems in the collection are stark and simply constructed. Their building blocks are short, familiar verbs and pronouns: "beat," "die," "sing," "they," "us." With long lines that make complete sentences, the poems are deceptively prose-like. But instead of building on one another in a coherent way, as lines in prose traditionally do, these lines are connected by a twisted, perverse logic. It's the logic of the interrogator, the bureaucrat, and the fascist—a logic that has gained new life in the Trump era.
"They said I was illegal," Borzutzky writes. "They said I was an immigrant / They said I was an illegal immigrant who roamed the streets in a gang / They said I raped people /... They said I didn't speak the right language / They said my boss exploited me and I tried to kill him / They said my boss treated me well and I tried to kill him / They said my heart was dark."
One reason these poems feel so stark is that they strictly limit our access to the speaker's interior life. An "I" speaks, but glimpses of his mind are almost non-existent: There's no stream of consciousness offering a shortcut to empathy. Rather, the "I" tends to limit his speech to descriptions of violence and reaction: "He asked me why I couldn't keep my balance / He hit me when I tried to keep my balance / He spat on me when I fell to the floor / He kicked me when I fell to the floor."
Lake Michigan.
(Photo: University of Pittsburgh Press)
The "I" often melds into a "we," and punishment is received as a collective body. When the first-person speaker is asked to describe the constituents of this collective "we," he "points to the list of the names of missing people." He's binding himself to the many kinds of disappearing bodies that appear in the collection: predominantly black Chicagoans, taken to the secret Homan Square interrogation center and held without the knowledge of family members or a lawyer; migrants who vanish on desert journeys or into detention centers; public servants; and dissidents "disappeared" by authoritarian governments, as under the Pinochet regime in Chile. "I"'s body dies many times without dying, just as individual bodies die but the body politic survives.
"I think that survival must be vulgar," Borzutzky writes, offering a challenge to the prevailing neoliberal logic that we survive—or perish—on our own. "Vulgar" can mean common, or related to the common people; it can also refer to common or vernacular language, the kind Borzutzky uses in his poems. A "vulgar" idea is one in common circulation, though one that isn't necessarily held in high esteem by the upper classes. One such idea, held in common by Borzutzky’s collective, undying "we," is that we depend on one another for survival. In his telling, the powerful seek instead to transform life into brutal competition.
Borzutzky reminds us that "at one point in this life we were something other than what the bureaucrats knew us to be"; and even as they're beaten, tortured, and imprisoned, his collective "we" continues to "sing about the many ways there are to love and we refuse to collapse into nothing." They refuse to accept an existence as "privatized bodies," shorn from family, community, and social bonds.
"We live in the blankest of times," is a refrain that echoes through the collection. Blankest, as in featureless and empty: Picture "crate #17," where our speaker is kept before being shipped "across the border to the financiers who own me." But blankness also offers an opportunity: Picture the blank page, or the pointed typographical pauses within individual lines, ready to be inscribed with something new. "How much of me do they own," "I" wonders, inviting us to imagine the components of humanity—blood, soul, or private suffering—that could escape capture by the wealthy.
There is no easy optimism to be found in this collection, and even less trust in the power of poetry to make suffering meaningful or beautiful. In fact, through heavily ironic uses of simile, Borzutzky critiques the idea that poetry could ever do any such thing. "And a massacre at a Black church is like a massacre at a Black church," he writes. "And a massacre at an elementary school is like a massacre at an elementary school / And the nazis with torches are like nazis with torches / And the police who kill are like police who kill."
Lake Michigan is hard to read, and harder still to enjoy. It's the only collection of poetry to have ever given me nightmares—twice. It makes readers confront the worst stuff of headlines, and the violence that's too commonplace to make it into the headlines. Some readers may believe poetry should be a space of escapism or refuge instead.
Others may wish that Borzutzky offered solace in the form of praise for resilience, hope, or beauty. He doesn't. The only time the word "beauty" appears in the collection, it comes from the mouth of the "Chicago liberal [who] gives birth to the fascist": "At dusk they line us up and tell us about the beauty of the trees the beauty of the / leaves ... the beauty of our hate and fear."
But as climate change accelerates, inequality multiplies, and xenophobia hardens across the globe, Borzutzky's central concern—how to preserve a "we" capable of surviving this "neoliberal inferno"—is pressing and crucial. As he told the Chicago Tribune,"I think it's hopeful to write poetry about how awful the world is."
For our grotesque times, Borzutzky offers difficult, grotesque poetry with only the slimmest opening for optimism. In his final words, Borzutzky exclaims in seeming triumph, "We live in the blankest of times!"
Daniel Borzutzky by Joyelle McSweeney
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Daniel Borzutzky by Kristin Dykstra
Chilean American poet Daniel Borzutzky and I have known each other for more than ten years. As both of us have pursued our lives as poets and teachers, we’ve also collaborated on the international press Action Books, which has brought out three of Daniel’s translations, two of which are by Chilean poet and activist Raúl Zurita. Daniel’s body of work is a continuously unfolding organism in which translation and poetry, politics and aesthetics, Chile and Chicago, Latin America and the US, become uncertainly and convulsively layered and conjoined. In The Performance of Becoming Human, for which he won the 2016 National Book Award, we can see the way all these dark and interlacing tides rise together.
—Joyelle McSweeney
Joyelle McSweeney Well, first of all, congratulations on winning the National Book Award for The Performance of Becoming Human. It must be very strange and antithetical to win it for a book that seems so plainly anti-national—not just anti-nationalist, but one that literally sets itself against the idea of the nation.
Daniel Borzutzky It is a completely anti-national book. So it’s funny to think about how it is linked to the nation. There’s the question of how much the National Book Foundation sees itself as being linked to the nation-state.
JM Probably not much.
DB No, probably not. But their use of the term national award is still a choice, though I think that the fact that an anti-national book can somehow be recognized as representative or illustrative of what’s important for a country is more interesting—I won’t say for the nation—for the country.
JM How would you describe the territory or geography of this book? It seems to me that it’s twofold—Chile and Chicago, the desert and the lake.
DB That’s right—it’s at least twofold. There are separate locations we could point to: Chicago, certainly, and Chile, the desert in Chile, but also the desert in Arizona. And Cuba is in the book in certain ways, as is Mexico and the US-Mexico border. There is even an attempt at troubling the concept of borders as they exist between US states like Indiana and Illinois. Chicago is the most often named: the beaches of Lake Michigan and Montrose Avenue, a not particularly important street I drive down every day on my way to work, where there are often police pulling over and arresting young men. On Montrose Avenue, a giant mountain forms a kind of refuse dump for children discarded by the economies of the city. But I’m hoping the effect is one where the separate spaces don’t really remain separate, and where the experience of absorbing what we know about those spaces happens all at the same time. One of the poems is titled “Lake Michigan Merges into the Bay of Valparaiso, Chile.” In this piece, there’s an imaginary prison camp on Lake Michigan—with some relation to actual prisons—and it exists simultaneously with the prisons on the Bay of Valparaiso under Pinochet’s Chile. When the Arizona desert comes up, it exists in a kind of simultaneity with the Atacama Desert in Chile. Although there is no denying that the scale of their atrocities and histories are quite different, both deserts are the sites of disappearances that are directly linked to the brutal and lethal policing and militarization linked to extreme global neoliberalism.
JM I agree. This book does not promote the binaries of the domestic and the foreign, the US and Latin America, before and after—or even Chile and Chicago. We’re in this space where things blur into one another, a zone where we have absorption instead of separation.
DB Yeah, there’s a moment in one of the Lake Michigan pieces where the police in Chicago are wearing jackets that say “POLICIA” on them—”POLICE” in Spanish. That’s the idea that I’m trying to underscore: that Latin American policing practices live in Chicago and vice versa, that Chicago is itself a Latin American city. By this, I mean that policing in Mexico has a direct effect on Chicago and vice versa. At this moment, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the US may very well be knocking on doors with orders to detain as many undocumented people as possible using policing practices that are definitively not specific to countries or nations.
JM One obvious connection between Chile and Chicago comes via the Chicago school of economics. Under Pinochet, the junta enforced privatization and the free market ideology championed by Milton Friedman and the “Chicago Boys”—Chilean economists who had studied under Friedman and Arnold Harberger at the University of Chicago. You’ve voiced the idea that, ironically, the economic policies that were used punitively in Latin America in the ’70s and ’80s are now being used in Chicago. That idea has been part of your thinking for a while, so I’m wondering how the revelations about the black-site police facility at Homan Square in Chicago affected the writing of this book. According to the Guardian’s reporting, the Chicago police’s own documents reflect that they used a warehouse to detain as many as 7,000 people, most of them black, without access to lawyers and without anyone knowing where they were. This began in the early 2000s but only came to light in 2015. When did you become aware of those particular abuses? Did that punctuate the work that you were doing?
DB You can see it toward the end of The Performance of Being Human, but the book I’m finishing up now, called Lake Michigan, deals much more with the Homan Square revelations. The book is composed of scenes from the shore of Lake Michigan, and the premise is that each of the pieces is located at a prison camp on the beach in Chicago. I’ve been very much thinking about Homan Square as I have been writing this book.
Toward the end of 2013, I started writing about the links between Chile and Chicago. At the time, I was thinking about this in economic terms. In 2012, Chicago experienced a public-school teacher strike. Many public schools closed and private charter schools opened. There was a massive privatization movement under the Rahm Emanuel administration that still continues today. In 2012, there were also enormous student strikes in Chile that shut down schools and universities. And the issues were the same. During the Pinochet administration, Chile essentially destroyed its public school system and replaced it with an inequitable voucher system, where all students get vouchers depending on their family income to help them pay for private school. The vouchers don’t get families very far and so they go into debt to pay for elementary and high school. The voucher system is a love child of the conservative school reform movement in the US, and we now see it making a return under Betsy DeVos, our new secretary of education. So that’s one example of how neoliberal economic and social policy developed at the University of Chicago traveled to Chile and is now ramping up again in Chicago and the US.
JM It really has come full circle.
DB When the Homan Square revelations came out in the fall of 2015, my thinking started to change. The economic violence in Chile was tied to state violence. In order to enact brutal privatization measures they needed to first scare the shit out of the population so that nobody would be in a position to protest. I think we were starting to see something like this in Chicago. Extreme policing, especially of minority communities, has been working hand in hand with radical privatization policies. It’s a weapon used not just to kill and oppress communities of color, but also to enact economic policy. I’m certainly not the only person to have noticed this, but I don’t think it has been written about a lot. Pauline Lipman, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been writing about neoliberal urbanism and public education. She has been drawing the connections between police discrimination, the overpolicing of black and Latino communities, and the economic and educational desolation of those same communities.
JM It seems to me that another way of describing the territory of The Performance of Becoming Human is as a black site. That is, the book itself is somehow issuing from this black site. It seems like a really powerful image because of how fungible it is. A black site is such a dire and absolute location. And I know that you’ve spent a decade translating Raúl Zurita, and I know the power of Song for His Disappeared Love, in which the song rises out of a mass grave. In that poem, the mass grave is the site where bodies, voices, experiences, and historical eras all commingle. It’s a place of absolute grief and yet it’s presented lyrically and tenderly. What do you think of the idea of the book as a black site?
DB I prefer thinking of it as many black sites, and here the racialization of the language coincides with the reality that over eighty percent of the people detained at Homan Square were black. I think the book is often speaking to the experience of people who are affected by these sites from the outside. As I’m talking about Chicago and Chile, I always try to be careful not to say that they are the same thing. The numbers of the disappeared who were killed are in the thousands in Chile, so I’m definitely careful about how I’d characterize that. But the book is trying to come out of experiences that the larger society wants to make disappear, and I think that’s actually a better way to talk about it.
JM There’s a lot in The Performance of Becoming Human that one might call negative. The speaker’s tone has a degree of dark humor, as well as disgust, desperation, and anger, while the content itself is about often cartoonishly plausible acts of erasure, destruction, or violence. At the same time, there’s a certain amount of possibility. There isn’t a sense that all that awaits is extinction, that the lights will go out and that’s it for this speaker. Instead, many poems configure or point toward a next moment, or what will come next but will require the total destruction of the place that the book speaks from.
That ambiguous sense of possibility in which destruction is the route to reinvention comes via your use of the image of the mouth. This image is important because there’s an ambivalence about writing in this book. On the one hand, there are neat self-contained lines that report acts of writing, speaking, or seeing: “Revolutionary violence disgusts me, the voice said”; “The bankers sang: We are your brothers”; “Sorry, sing the bankers to the proletariat, you don’t really exist right now.” But we also have this runaway voracious leaky mouth motif. It’s present in so many of the poems and doing things that are unregulated and lawless. Sometimes, the mouth has other mouths inside of it; at other times, it’s eating itself. For example: “There is a machine in my mouth that spits and eats and spits and eats”; or, “It wants to exterminate its empire”; or, “it will lick every crack on your skin.”
So, there’s a lot of writing and speaking and singing in this book, but also this uncontrollable mouth that seems to exist apart from mundane human activities—a devouring mouth that’s going to be a site of consumption. To me that’s actually a hopeful thing!
DB The other day someone asked me about the way I use the word body. I think it’s probably connected, for me, to the mouth, which I see as the site of multiple traumas and infections. The mouth is eating, is force-fed, is being gagged, is spitting out bricks. There’s a machine inside of it. It made me think about how the book has changed. In the poem “The Private World,” it spits out bodies that are replicas of bodies of people who were killed in the coal mines in different countries. I think when I originally wrote it, the mouth was an anus. I substituted the mouth for the anus when I edited the book, but the function of the image remained the same. So, for me, the body is a unit of measurement, the most objective way to describe human atrocity and state-sponsored violence. But I refer to people as bodies, I think, in order to illustrate how personality and personhood are erased when we come to talking about deaths and disappearances. We report these as numbers, but those numbers are real human beings whose lives are turned into abstractions.
JM I thought the mouth was glamorous. I mean, it’s deadly, the site of coercion. The speaker is being coerced because he or she is not consenting to the things happening around the mouth. At the same time, the mouth is a total site that can regurgitate and consume everything. When you end a poem:
A glitch in the system
Nothing that can’t be fixed
By a full-scale overhaul
Of absolutely everything
I feel like you leave me looking into the maw of that gigantic mouth, and that this full-scale overhaul is somehow going to come via that vehicle, that portal.
It made me think of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and how he’s always trying to isolate a pivotal moment in which the people can rise up, “Au bout du petit matin…” as he says, at the edge of dawn, that moment where everything shifts. I don’t think your book presents that moment explicitly, but I see it in moments when the mouth is a machine eating and spitting everything:
Cadavers, chickens, olives, Easter eggs, bones, blood, words, sand, teeth, children, mountains, deserts, leaves, ghosts, sewers, rivers, mouths, humiliations, calloused hands, sperm, bubbles, wind, blood, rain
This total list describes the destruction and reinvention of the world that encapsulates an occasional vision of total revolutionary consumption. It also implies that the world will be regenerated by regurgitation. Your book offers no horizon line, yet it presents a vision of this omnimouth that knows how to devour and regurgitate, and might be an engine for the people, eventually, because it’s in the pit with them—it is them. It’s a little different from invoking terms like writing, text, or language.
DB One thing that was important to the idea of the mouth in my book was Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” where he pays a lot of attention to the gag put into the prisoner’s mouth as he is placed into the machine that will inscribe his punishment on his flesh. There’s a strange doubleness to the fact that the prisoner is being silenced with a dirty gag while his punishment is written onto his body. That sort of doubleness has been on my mind a lot. It has to do with being silenced while being punished by both machines and humans. The gag has multiple functions: It prevents speech; it prevents the prisoner from being able to scream; and it prevents the authorities from having to hear the screams of the prisoners. It makes it impossible for the mouth to eat, bite, or chew, and, given the filthiness of a recycled gag, it is a conduit for infection and disease.
JM I thought a lot about Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari after reading your book. In their reading of Kafka, the difference between sound and language is crucial to their idea of becoming-animal. Sound is powerful, it’s essential; it can act on all the other terms in an organism, pushing it toward escape. In the notion of becoming-animal, there is the powerful idea that we are capable of breaking away from oppressive or coercive regimes of signifiers, or from formal languages and expressions. There is the idea that we are breaking through to something composed of vibrations and thresholds, something that moves toward intensities rather than preserving fixed rules, boundaries, and binaries.
Your use of language is precise and there’s something very sculpted about the way you use sentences. There’s a type of intensity to them that breaks away from what American poetry is usually authorized to do. It made me think about other migrant or immigrant writers such as Feng Sun Chen and Johannes Göransson. The intensity in their work is due, I think, to the fact that they have to find new forms for themselves. What they make has intensity because it’s not an approved, official verse form. The reader isn’t protected from the language.
DB There are two parts to what you’re saying. The first is about who holds and grants literary authority; the second is about where intensity comes from. Authority and who gets to institutionalize a literary work—these questions are not as simple as they may seem. After winning the National Book Award, I may have a different understanding of how these awards legitimize writers for those who are less familiar with specific communities of them. But to your second point about where intensity comes from, I don’t think it comes from not being granted literary authority. I think that gives the so-called authorities too much power. The writers you mention have intensity because what’s in their language, what they’re writing about, and where they’re writing from has intensity. I could write in an unapproved, unofficial verse form, and do so without intensity, right? So intensity isn’t just a question of literary politics, or of writing verse that is or isn’t sanctioned by power brokers. On the contrary, for me at least, intensity is a question of being concerned about actual politics as something that is inseparable from literature.
In the aftermath of the National Book Award, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I write political poetry or why a poem should be the vehicle for communicating political critique. And this question is difficult to answer because it asks me to separate politics from poetry as if politics were merely a trope that one could tack on to their poetics. For me, it’s inseparable from my writing. It’s not like you flick a switch and start writing in a political mode, or with the intensity you are referring to. The intensity comes from a sense of desperation inseparable from the one I have felt while living through and observing the last ten years of life in the globalized US. But it’s also a desperation to articulate this mess so as to not fall into an even deeper despair.
JM The Performance of Becoming Human is a wordy title. I’m wondering what it says about the human. Is “the human” one more state-valorized concept that must be performed within sanctioned and official boundaries? What’s the status of the human in this book?
DB In my The Ecstasy of Capitulation, which came out in 2006, there’s a poem called “The Performance of Becoming Human,” and I wanted to keep with that idea. Again, it comes out of Kafka. In his story “A Report to the Academy,” an African ape named Red Peter is captured and imprisoned on a ship by European soldiers who sit around being vulgar. The ape decides that the way out of his torture and imprisonment is to become human, which he does by imitating these guys who are sitting around belching. The ape refers to the moment he breaks into human speech as a performance, as something that was done with artistry.
I’ve always thought that the story of that ape is emblematic of how one fits into a community, and somehow transcends one’s own imprisonment and moves toward something that is, if not liberating, at least more free. There’s this recognition and deep analysis in the story of one’s confinement and limitations. For me, that’s an essential part of being able to understand one’s humanity and the environment we live in. Perhaps becoming human is a constant state tied not just to how you behave but how you understand your own behavior and situation in relation to the community or communities confining you. Maybe what it means to be involved in a community already requires a sense of balance between sacrificing your individuality and having your individuality noticed.
JM So this isn’t an antihumanist book then. Would you call it a humanist book?
DB Does antihumanist mean I’m against people?
JM No, not against people. The title qualifies the word human in more than one way, and seems to devalorize it as a category. Of course, it has always been the ultimate category of Western thinking and humanism, but the way you describe it in the book, the human is not an undesired category. On the contrary, it’s a human—and even humane—book.
DB Yeah, performance isn’t a bad thing. Failure to perform in order to be a part of whatever community you enter can often be a disrespectful and ignorant thing to do. So no, I don’t think it’s antihumanist. On the one hand, I think of performance as being artificial, that is, as artistic artifice; and, on the other hand, as totally necessary. Maybe that connects to why we care about art to begin with.
JM You and I have a professional relationship as well as a friendship built around your translation of Chilean writers like Jaime Luis Huenún and Raúl Zurita, so I probably read this book as happening very intensely in the zone of Zurita. I don’t mean to suggest that it was a rewriting or a translation of his work, or even in conversation with it. But it shares some of the same landscapes and intensity. As a result, I read this book as also having to do with themes of spectrality and afterlife, the posterity of a voice. The voice lives on, but it speaks from the grave. In keeping with Zurita, to be posthumous does not mean to be at the end of anything. It actually means another kind of expanse, another futurity, really, and, perhaps, a black-site futurity. So I’m wondering what voices, authors, artworks, or soundtracks were with you as you wrote and revised this book?
DB Zurita is always an influence on me, and I don’t shy away from that. More than providing a linguistic model, his work is a model of how to write lyrically and politically about one’s moment, and do so without any sense of contradiction or feeling that you are sacrificing your art to politics.
There are others, too. Writing “Eat Nothing,” I was very influenced by a 1914 essay by Djuna Barnes called “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed,” about her experiences with hunger-striking British suffragettes. I read that around the same time that we were learning about Guantánamo Bay. Also, the 2010 film Memories of Overdevelopment, by Miguel Coyula and the 1968 novel Memories of Underdevelopment by Edmundo Desnoes. That film is very much present in that poem. The Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya’s book Senselessnesswas also important to my thinking. It’s about somebody transcribing a truth and reconciliation commission document in Central America, but it ends up being less about the testimonies in the book and more about the construction of those testimonies. It’s not just about the histories of those who were abused by the military, but rather about how history gets written, especially when those writing the histories of the victims are so culturally, economically, and socially distant from the victims themselves. I’d also been looking at early images of and ethnography about Mexicans in the United States, at figures such as Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito, who serve as some of the early representations of Latinos in American popular culture. But there are many influences and references in the book. Allen Ginsberg, Paul Celan, and César Vallejo. And there are writers who are always important to me: Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector, and Juan Rulfo.
JM It seems to me that this book also indexes your earlier books, and I think that’s exciting. It implies that you’re writing a kind of codex, and that all of your books are part of a longer, ongoing book that we’re moving forward and backward in. As a fellow resident of the Rust Belt, I’m excited to read your Lake Michigan book and see what comes next.
Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction, plays, and essays, most recently The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Press, 2014). With Johannes Göransson, she edits the international press Action Books, which publishes works from the US, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa. She teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
Lake Michigan
Diego Baez
Booklist. 114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p12.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Lake Michigan.
By Daniel Borzutzky.
Mar. 2018. 88p. Univ. of Pittsburgh, paper, $15.95 (9780822965220). 811.
In his previous poetry collection, the National Book Award-winning The Performance of Becoming Human (2016), Borzutzky explores the myriad contortions the self undergoes in "the privatized cellar of humanity," struggling against manipulative economic and political systems. Here he narrows his scope to a slightly mythologized Chicago, with its liberal mayor, privatized schools, and police murders. Arranged like a play in two acts, each with nine scenes, the book opens with the speaker protesting the murder of Laquan McDonald by staging a die-in on the mayor's front lawn. The protesters are beaten and kidnapped and taken to a police black site, reminiscent of the torture perpetrated by Chicago police at Homan Square, on the city's West Side. The implications are both brutally local and breathlessly global, as Borzutzky explains in an endnote: "Chicago is a Latin American city that has reimported its extreme neoliberalism from Chile," policies that were first derived by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. This violence completes its cycle, begets greater violence. A searing indictment and an immediate, dangerous, and urgent work.--Diego Baez
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baez, Diego. "Lake Michigan." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094388/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0efc937d. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094388
Lake Michigan
Publishers Weekly. 265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Lake Michigan
Daniel Borzutzky. Univ. of Pittsburgh, $15.95 trade paper (88p)
ISBN 978-0-8229-6522-0
Borzutzky's streamlined and unequivocally defiant follow-up to 2016's National Book Award-winning The Performance of Becoming Human unfolds across the streets of Chicago and along the shores of Lake Michigan, where he situates a fictionalized version of the Chicago PD's once-secret interrogation sites. Composed in long, proselike lines, this work explicitly places itself in the tradition of protest poetry, referencing such forebears as Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Aime Cesaire. Police brutality is a major theme, both as occasion for protest ("There are 7 of us in front of the mayor's house asking questions about the boy they shot 22 times") and enacted, as when "the police officers throw us to the ground hold their sticks to our necks put their knees to our backs pull our hair handcuff us take us to a holding cell where we are separated one from another and we cannot call our lawyers our friends our families and we scream from our cells until they tape our mouths shut." Authorities repeatedly attempt to normalize their brutality, claiming that this is "only war," that it is "only the beginning of war." Borzutzky engages with a history specific to Chicago, but the beach becomes a symbolic border zone where people suffer at the hands of capitalist power and, crucially, search for the means to fight back. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lake Michigan." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357506/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2b37d92e. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357506
The Country of Planks/ El Pais de Tablas
Publishers Weekly. 262.20 (May 18, 2015): p62+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Country of Planks/ El Pais de Tablas
Raul Zurita, trans, from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky. Action (SPD.dist.), $20 trade paper (250p) ISBN 978-0-9898048-5-1
Chilean poet Zurita (Dreams for Kurosawa) inhabits spaces--physical and psychic--ravaged by state violence in these severe, disorienting, and immensely powerful poems. He responds to the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which lasted from 1973 to 1990, and to the thousands who disappeared during the regime: "the beaches of an infinitely/ bombarded country infinitely defeated infinitely dead." A central concern is how the land--or rhetoric about the land--might absorb this history; Zurita creates an unsettling feedback loop linking geography, nation, and citizen. From the opening poem, in which "the sea stopped being the sea and the sky stopped being the sky// And the peaks were the points of the riveted stakes," the landscape is repeatedly distorted, weaponized, reconfigured in the human image, and made to express the horrors in which it has been implicated. The poems look to other 20th-century atrocities as the poet ponders change and changelessness, totalizing horror and nothingness, and the excess of images of the inexpressible. In navigating these distances, Zurita asks, "Did the bombing last millions of years? A fraction/ of a second? Or just a few days? Who can say?/ Who can say how long the infernal lapse of a life/ lasts?" Bilingual edition. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Country of Planks/ El Pais de Tablas." Publishers Weekly, 18 May 2015, p. 62+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A415324362/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78c9f14d. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A415324362
The Performance of Becoming Human
Daniel Borzutzky. Brooklyn Arts (SPD, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (94p) ISBN 978-1-936767-46-5
More By and About This Author
Over the course of several volumes, Borzutzky (In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy) has been writing “a bedtime story for the end of the world.” Simultaneously sparkling and abject, the apocalyptic tale does not reflect an imagined dystopia but very real crises of migration, state violence, and staggering inequity. This is one of contemporary poetry’s most cogent documents of humanity and suffering in the 21st century, one born out of an impossible but necessary struggle to reconcile existence with destruction, excess with deprivation, and alienation with proximity. The borders Borzutzky describes and problematizes include “the invisible line between one civilization and another” as well as the liminal terrain between surreal nightmare and stark reality, which these poems inhabit. Borzutzky refuses the constructed innocence by which “my ignorance keeps me from being implicated in the system in which I am involucrated.” And yet, “we do not understand why we are paid or beaten or loved” and “we do not understand our relationship one body to another.” For Borzutzky, there is a choice: “Our silent faces stuck together// Or:// The broken testimony of the broken beat in the broken rhythm of the crumbling excesses of my broken face in the crumbling cadaver of this night.” Borzutzky’s work is a remarkable testament to the latter. (Apr.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 12/05/2016
Release date: 04/01/2016
In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy
Daniel Borzutzky. Nightboat (UPNE, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-937658-33-5
More By and About This Author
Borzutzky (The Book of Interfering Bodies) turns an insomniac’s eye toward the forces and wastes of late capitalism, in a third collection that is corporeal, terrifying, discerning, and utterly—rapturously—insane. But unlike the familiar tropes of the sage fool or the tortured artist, the radical instability that charges Borzutzky’s poems is found in the maniacal outpouring of language sprung from a world of excess and decay. Pounding, rhythmic prose poems unleash images of violence, tenderness, migration, and mundanity in which everything leaks filth and data, bodies die and decompose, tongues are butchered and served, and attempts at sanitization fail. All of this is intimately and explicitly tied to the act of writing, as Borzutzky inverts Gertrude Stein’s essay “Composition as Explanation” to consider writing as entropy and rot: “This book owes its life to my mouth. Had it not been filled with mud, had the parasite not loved it, had the foam and the worms not caused my face to contort and my mouth to cave in, then I would not have had very much to say.” For all of its wild profusion, the book offers a carefully structured discourse. Borzutzky guides readers through a nightmarish terrain, one that offers a perspicacious and unsettling view of the current waking world. (June)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 06/15/2015
Release date: 05/01/2015
The Book of Interfering Bodies
by Daniel Borzutzky
Reviewed by Kevin C. Moore
Published: November 29, 2011
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Published by Nightboat Books, 2011 | 103 pages
If the protestors of the Occupy movement ever decide to nominate a poet laureate, writer and translator Daniel Borzutzky would certainly make a compelling candidate. A writer and translator of Chilean descent who lives and teaches in Chicago, Borzutzky’s latest volume The Book of Interfering Bodies—his third book after Arbitrary Tales (2005) and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2006), which are, respectively, collections of fiction and poetry—is very timely, and it constitutes his most ambitious and unified project to date. To be clear, the brand of ironic subversion Borzutzky invents in his latest volume probably doesn’t resemble the present populist resistance as it is usually formulated. Rather, in this new book on the fate of the human imagination in the postindustrial West, Borzutzky writes what might be called bureaucratically occupied poetry. The volume opens with an epigraph extracted from The 9/11 Commission Report, which Borzutzky suspends, chillingly, outside its original context: “It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.” But the reader who might expect a poet to resist this wintry recommendation along clean polemical lines and defend poetry as a final humanist stronghold will be entirely surprised. Instead of protest, The Book of Interfering Bodies deliberately embraces the 9/11 Commission’s prescription, working to demonstrate, and to deconstruct, what a bureaucratized “exercise of imagination” looks like through a set of incendiary poems and essays, with such titles as “State Poetry,” “Budget Cuts Prevent me from Writing Poetry,” “One Size Fits All,” “Poetry is Dangerous in America,” “The Relevance of Poetry in Our Current Climate,” and, “Bureaucratic Love Prevention Game.” Borzutzky’s wager is this: if the cultural function of literature really is to refract, capture, and meditate upon lived experience, then poetry written in a time of spooky government, dubious corporate ethics, and spectacle-obsessed media must be willing, however paradoxically, to bear the mark of decidedly unliterary phenomena in order to fulfill its purpose. To do so may in fact produce resistance, in a process perhaps analogous to Baudrillard’s famous example of clogging the escalators and austere industrial spaces of the Beaubourg in order to reveal the postmodern museum complex’s inhumanity.
The Book of Interfering Bodies is not easy to enter, or, ultimately, to read. It consists of free verse and abstract prose chapters, and at first glance it has the atmosphere—for its alternating chapter structure, as well as for its insistence on arriving at complex ideas by way of deceptively simple examples—of an apocalyptic update to William Carlos Williams’ modernist classic Spring and All. The essay chapters, which frame the poetry at regular intervals, are particularly difficult to figure out. Usually centered on a description of an imagined “book”—including, to name a few, “The Book of Flesh,” “The Book of Graves,” “The Book of Echoes,” “The Book of Collapsing Nations,” as well as a chapter reiterating the volume’s title “The Book of Interfering Bodies,” which is the final chapter—these abstract, hypothetical tomes accumulate to form a “tower,” a recurring image in Borzutzky’s text. Yet they are also referred to as “nations,” and they do not behave like any “books” we are used to. The “Book of Flesh,” for example, “contains pieces of flesh”; and “[t]he reader who opens the Book of Echoes finds a village where no one lives and nothing grows and where all the houses are empty.” On the basis of these book chapters, some critics have made comparisons between The Book of Interfering Bodies and the Jorge Luis Borges story “The Library of Babel,” where Borges refigures the universe as an infinite library, although I suspect that assuming too clean a legacy here may be to mistake Borzutzky’s distinctly metapoetic impulse for a metafictional or purely philosophical one. When books become nations in The Book of Interfering Bodies, or, for that matter, graves, they are always already metaphors for something else. We are always walking on a symbolic minefield in this text. Where bodies become placeholders for inhuman phenomena here, as they frequently do, books might as well be thought of as “interfering bodies” too. Or to put it another way, Borzutzky’s argument in The Book of Interfering Bodies seems to have more to do with the effects of bureaucratized imagination on language itself—on words and grammar—than on ideas and discourse.
The best evidence for this is probably the fact that the most powerful, innovative moments in the volume seem to occur in the verse chapters. Consider the opening gambit of “Resuscitation,” the first poem in the volume. Be forewarned, poetry that willfully submits to Patriot Act-era regulation in order to make its point is, predictably, very disturbing poetry (it will come as no surprise that some of the voices in The Book of Interfering Bodies descend from Borzutzky’s fellow Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s fictitious fringe literary movement the “barbaric writers,” who are decidedly unafraid to imagine the desecration of the sacred, and whom Borzutzky’s cites on several occasions). Here, Borzutzky’s words scrape at the skin of our ears:
I fell
I tripped over the horse corpse and its dead bones cracked
I was stuck between the horse legs and they came with a cleaver
Chop off the legs, they demanded
I chopped off the horse legs and the vermin that sucked on the dead beast
scrambled across the floorboards
I chopped the horse legs into thousands of pieces and they said what do you see
I said I see thousands of bone shards and blood and bits of hair and in each
fragment there are villages, towns, hamlets, inlets, streets, suburbs, cities,
states, and countries
Taken as straight-faced allegory, this forced mutilation of a horse corpse appears to capture the logic of an affair of Althusserian interpellation gone completely mad: the speaker does not so much as flinch when “they,” the apparent authorities, command him to “[c]hop off the legs” of the horse. No one is shocked in this poetic world, not even a few lines later when the speaker is told to “make … a work of art” from the mutilated horse legs. We have to continually remind ourselves that Borzutzky’s entire book is, in the first place, a thought experiment. This isn’t the poetry of the apocalypse; it’s the simulated poetry of the apocalypse, which is all about inhuman hollowness and simulation. The speaker’s provocative response to the question “what do you see,” that the bits of horse he has been ordered to chop up are themselves like the bureaucratic units who ostensibly have sanctioned the chopping, is thus ambiguous and disruptive: it at once constitutes a dark resignation to a bureaucratic tautology and serves as a most clever reminder to the insane powers that be of some of the classic bureaucratic units of civilization it ought to be protecting. The subtle pun of the book’s title may be instructive here. The meaning of the “interference” in The Book of Interfering Bodies is double, and it depends upon your perspective: it is either a problem to be dealt with (if you are the one responsible for keeping the Machine up and running) or a matter of resistance (if you are a mere cog).
For the reader who persists in the unsettling terrain of The Book of Interfering Bodies, there is plenty of fun, and even pleasure. In what may be the most clever, moving poem of the volume “One Size Fits All,” Borzutzky allows a quintessentially corporate form to become poetic form, to spectacular effect. After a panoramic series of visions plucked almost at random from the bleak, wide world, Borzutzky addresses the reader with an all-to-familiar request made to guarantee “customer satisfaction.” The moment is worth citing in its entirety:
Dear Reader, Because we value your input, please take a moment of your busy time to answer the following question, which will greatly assist us in our mission to produce cultural artifacts that will further meet your aesthetic and spiritual needs.
Which of these statements most accurately reflects your feelings about the writing you have just read:
a) This is a splendid poem, distinguished by the clarity of its thought, the force of its argument, and the eloquence of its expression.
b) This poem is conceptually vapid, artistically shallow, and contributes nothing to the world of letters. It is little more than a collection of bad sentences and poorly formed ideas.
c) I like this poem, but I wouldn’t spend money to read more poems like it.
d) When I read this poem, I feel frustrated and annoyed.
e) When I read this poem, I feel nothing.
This survey is a gimmick, and a profoundly interesting one. Note the spectrum of potential responses offered here: there are only two answer choices the reader can select that affirm the seriousness of the poem, one very positive (a) and one very negative (b). These choices constitute readings that still recognize the integrity and relevance of poetry as an institution. The other answers are all nails in the coffin of literature, which represent different kinds of anti-intellectual impatience and indifference. When we encounter them, they nevertheless provide the poem’s punch line: the possibility of option “e” – the final line of the poem – prompts an experience of genuine bottomlessness in the reader who has approached this strange text with an open mind. The structures and language of bureaucratic nonsense, which are antithetical to literature, are here part of literature, deployed to teach us about the role of literature in our world.
Borzutzky’s occupied poetry, in other words, bears within itself the institutions that will presumably be responsible for the demise of poetry if allowed to reign freely, and it does so in order to (1) protest that demise and (2) explore the explosive tensions in the gap between the poetic and bureaucratic languages as the domain of a new form of a poetry. In this sense, The Book of Interfering Bodies is a little reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s frequently shocking 1973 novel Crash, which tracks the experience of two characters who unemotionally roam the expressways looping “London Airport” chasing, and sometimes causing, automobile accidents in pursuit of macabre sexual pleasure ground in the mill—pun irresistible—of bodies trapped in colliding machinery. There, too, the reader is expected to accept a series of senseless mutilations, disablements, and deaths as meaningless signifiers serving a much more interesting sociopolitical argument regarding the embrace of alienating technologies in the postmodern West. Kafka is in the background here as well: the cascading, inescapable bureaucratic absurdities of Borzutzky’s text strongly recall the experiences of Josef K. in The Trial, only reconfigured here as the province of poetry. Yet the most proximate comparison may be the writer whose work The Book of Interfering Bodies literally references through its cast of “barbaric writers,” Roberto Bolaño. In Bolaño’s sensational, recently translated final novel 2666, which represents the experience of a broad array of characters who all wind up for one reason or another in a fictional Ciudad Juárez and entangled to varying degrees in the murders of women that have plagued the troubled border city for years, there is a nearly three-hundred page central section (“The Part About the Crimes”) cataloguing the deaths themselves. Like Ballard, there comes a point where Bolaño’s gore becomes excessive and the reader is tempted to turn away. But to do so is to turn a blind eye to a brutal cultural reality, and, in so doing, to allow it to propagate. This larger point of Bolaño’s is also Borzutzky’s: in order to rethink the cruel, indifferent world it is necessary to confront it, to openly render art from it. Think of the speech act of The Book of Interfering Bodies, which is a political speech act, as something like the sly, hollow grin of the Guy Fawkes mask that has come to signify the most radical edge of twenty-first-century resistance. It is painted on, mass-produced, a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy—inhuman—and yet, when donned in a determined fashion for radical purposes, it is all the more disruptive for exactly those reasons.
Kevin C. Moore is a PhD candidate in English at UCLA. He works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, and he is currently completing a dissertation titled The Rise of Writer’s Block: Myths and Realities of American Literary Production. His essay “Parting at the Windmills: Malamud’s The Fixer as Historical Metafiction” is forthcoming in Arizona Quarterly. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
Review: The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky
By Nicholas Hayes
Daniel Borzutzky uses the word unitedstatesian, and it irritates me. The word is one I would never use in reference to the US or its citizens. It is a word that challenges the assertion of American Exceptionalism. It is a word that shows that US citizens and culture are objects with no centrality or universality. It is a humbling word that trains my tongue not to say American when I mean US. That irritant becomes shellacked with consideration and contemplation. The irritant once accepted smooths out and lets me feel a little more human for leaving behind my latent nationalist leanings.
Such abrasive strategy is one that Borzutzky uses frequently in his poems in The Performance of Becoming Human. His reliance on challenging phrases and jarring images reward the reader with a better understanding of the cynical and dehumanizing contours and limits of society. He shows how the barriers of the world dissect and mutilate individuals. Borzutzky sees the truth in people like Rowdy Roddy Piper in They Live! He sees those aliens and occupiers, despite their most clever disguises. In so doing, he evokes pathos for the oppressed despite the absurdity of the oppressor.
In his titular poem, Borzutzky alludes to Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” The poem’s speaker says, “Everything reminds me of a story about an ape captured on a boat by a group of European soldiers who showed him how to become human by teaching him how to spit and belch.” In the story, an ape becomes an erudite and bourgeois member of European society after much work. He is not human, but he has crossed some barrier, some border which prevents him from even returning to his pre-captivity innocence. Borzutzky reminds us that after he was captured his first foray into the world of man was the sailors teaching him baser bodily functions. There is something so plaintive in this memory of the demands of assimilation. In the same poem, an imperious You declares, “There are countries in my bloody fingers. I am interested in the borders.” This interest manifests as definition and violence as separation by nation states, by the US’s terrifying obsession with immigrants and migration. Beyond this, the You’s interest serves as a reminder of the possible harm done by borders (whether geographical or psychological.)
Throughout his collection of poems, he directs the reader’s attention to national borders, bureaucratic shifts, police black sites as locations of trauma. As a US citizen (and Chicago resident), it is hard not to feel the throbbing urgency of having to examine these liminal spaces.
Borzutzky is not the first person to direct our attention to liminal spaces. Yet the spaces he draws attention to have an imminent exigency. This book is of our times and for our times. One hopes the exigency will diminish; one suspects it won’t. Perhaps such examination will allow our social wounds to form smooth, silvery scars before they become gangrenous.
The Performance of Becoming Human
By Daniel Borzutzky
Brooklyn Arts Press
ISBN 978-1-936767-46-5
Book Review
The Performance of Becoming Human
Poetry
By Daniel Borzutzky
Reviewed By J.G. McClure
Brooklyn Arts Press (2016)
94 pages
$18.00
Buy this book
Urayoán Noel has called Daniel Borzutzky’s new book, The Performance of Becoming Human, a “canticle for the age of listicles.” It’s an apt description; Borzutzky’s work—its long, disjointed lines, its impulse to absorb and re-present everything it sees—is a sort of listicle for the post-apocalypse, a cataloging of a nightmare world (our nightmare world) where everything is bureaucratized and privatized, “overdeveloped” to the point of nausea.
Take, for instance, “In the Blazing Cities of Your Rotten Carcass Mouth,” which opens with an epigraph from a YouTube comments section—“Too bad we live in a world so uptight that we can’t / have things like the Frito Bandito anymore”—then continues:
The children were eating the bushes outside of their former houses that had been crushed by The Bank of America.
There was a boy in a bush singing an improvised song about a bulldozer that obliterates the bureaucratic centers of the earth.
Do you remember cheese, he sang to his friend.
Te acuerdas de la piña?
Do you remember ferries, he sang.
Te acuerdas de los patos?
Do you remember school bells and cowards and the boys who would come to our yard to eat the scraps of food we threw to them before the city started to blaze?
Bienvenidos a CVS. Si cuenta con tu Extra Care Card please escanea it now.
Borzutzky’s poetic vision is vertiginous, a mash-up of images and phrases reflecting the absurdity of a world in which everything is on fire but the drugstores continue to dutifully remind you to swipe your Extra Care Card, a world where “an automated voicemail on my cell phone from the incinerating bodies … said they were serving the city and that soon all of the city would blaze.” It is, of course, a caricature of our world—but a worryingly recognizable one.
Crucially, Borzutzky’s speaker doesn’t imagine himself to be immune to his own critique. Instead, as Noel describes it, “the socially engaged bro-poet is mercifully broken, relieved of his epic monumentality.” The speaker soon admits that, “Once I made $60,057 a year working for the city. This was before it blazed.” In other words, the speaker has been a bureaucrat like the bureaucrats he so despises. More importantly, poetry itself is fully implicated in the critique as the poem comes to a close:
Imagination Challenge #2:
It’s nighttime. You’re decomposing in a cage or a cell. Your father is reading the testimonies of the tortured villagers to you. He is in the middle of a particularly poignant passage about how the military tied up the narrator and made him watch as his children were lit on fire. He has to listen to the screams of his blazing children but he cannot listen to their screams so he himself starts screaming and then the soldiers shove a gag in his mouth so that he will stop screaming, but he doesn’t stop screaming even with the gag in his mouth.
…………………………….
Write a free-verse poem about the experience. Write it in the second person.
Publish it some place good.
The vision of the poet here is one who shamelessly appropriates the horrific experiences of others in order to make art, art that can be published “some place good,” thereby keeping the Publishing Industrial Complex running smoothly. Poetry is no answer to this burning world—it’s just another problem. Everything in this world is infected and suspect.
We’re given a similar vision in the book’s closing poem, “The Mountain at the End of This Book,” which presents a world in which “We live in one of the deadliest cities in the world” is “a boring observation,” and where “the bodies of the neighborhood children are collected and tossed onto the base of the mountain that has emerged out of the sinking flatness.” Meanwhile “the free-market poems absorb themselves and regenerate into billions of the blankest verses there ever were.” As the book reaches its conclusion:
A pharmaceutical heiress dies and gives us six million dollars to spend on poetry.
The night sky is enjambed with rotten assets.
The poets on the mountain have barricaded my body and I will spend eternity trying to pry the wood from my flesh.
I look down into this mountain of gyrating bodies and sing a peaceful song about austerity and the privatization of our form and content.
At the base of the mountain there are frugal bureaucrat-poets making love in mud houses that float in sewers.
There are abandoned boys in the windows of these houses.
Come find us, they write on the sweaty glass, as they disappear into the bubbling mud.
The poets go on as always, singing their songs, making love, and so on. Our speaker, too, remains complacent in this world despite himself, and does nothing but sing “a peaceful song about austerity and the privatization of our form and content.” Meanwhile no one helps the boys as they are swallowed up by mud.
In confronting this bleak vision, I’m reminded of John Gardner’s famous description of the artist’s choice from his 1979 interview with The Paris Review:
If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skulls, you’ve got two main choices as an artist: You can either stare into the volcano and count the skulls for the thousandth time and tell everybody, “There are the skulls; that’s your baby, Mrs. Miller.” Or you can try to build walls so that fewer baby skulls go in. It seems to me that the artist ought to hunt for positive ways of surviving, of living.
The key question, to my mind, is whether The Performance of Becoming Human builds up those walls, or whether it counts the baby skulls again. Every reader will have to answer that question for herself; is Borzutzky’s message so scathing that it jars us from complacency, or is it so grim that it offers only despair at an inability to change the dying world it catalogs? The book, with its unflinching look at our corporatized lives and its condemning critique of the poet’s role in it, makes a serious charge. We can choose for ourselves how to answer—but we each must answer.
J.G. McClure holds an MFA from the University of California – Irvine. His work appears in Best New Poets 2015, Gettysburg Review, and Green Mountains Review, among others. He is the Craft Essay Editor and Assistant Poetry Editor of Cleaver, and is at work on his first collection. See more at jgmcclure.weebly.com.
Darkness Surrounds: A Review of The Performance of Becoming Human, by Daniel Borzutzky
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By Dylan Kinnett on June 5, 2017
Book Reviews
The Performance of Becoming Human
By Daniel Borzutzky
Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016
98 pages, $17
Reviewed by Dylan Kinnett
The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky is a “bedtime story for the end of the world.” It’s about bodies. It’s about borders, between political states, between states of being, between dreams. It is an “experiment in light poetry,” because it is about light surrounded by darkness.
Borzutzky’s book of 17 poems was awarded a National Book Award in 2016. It has already been read and reviewed, extensively. Why call attention to it now? When asked about his intent, the author spoke timely: “When I wrote this book […] I was thinking about immigrants, refugees and workers in the US and abroad who give up their lives to survive in economies that exploit them and make them invisible. And I was thinking about bureaucracies and the abuse of data and fake mathematical measures to justify the destruction of real people’s lives.”
When the book was published, the idea of a border wall was not such a prominent part of the American zeitgeist, but Borzutzky reminds us that borders have always been fluid. Bodies have always been crossing them. The poem “Let Light Shine Out of the Darkness” asks, “did you hear the one about the boy in Chicago whose ear was bitten off when he crossed a border he didn’t know existed?” We’re warned, early in the book, “you know you can die from so many stories.”
Daniel Borzutzky draws from his experiences as a Chilean-American, from Pittsburgh, to compose lines that draw together common elements of “the rotten carcass economy” in the Americas, North and South. The lines also draw distinctions though.
“It totally fucking sucks to have to travel the world, to leave my people and village, and to get stuck in some shit town in Indiana where the portions at the restaurant I can’t afford to eat in except when I am taken to lunch by a minister or a social worker or a rabbi could provide multiple meals for like eight of my nephews and nieces”
A year ago, if I were writing about this book on the occasion of its award, I might have focused solely on the formal qualities of the book (which I would still like to do). These poems have long and sprawling lines that recall the style of Ginsberg, to which one of the poems directly refers. The lines form litanies. The litanies form a sequence. These aren’t particularly sonic poems, but they have a hypertextual quality to them.The images recur, like those of a dream, in repetition throughout the book.
Now, aside from its formal qualities, which are delightful, I want to draw attention to why this book is important for another reason: its treatment of the ideas of bodies and borders. A border is not simply some abstract line, and it is not absolute. Borders are crossed, and they are crossed by bodies in a very real way. It’s been said “there’s something that doesn’t like a wall” and that something is a body.
This is a dark book, which makes it good reading during a time that many feel is a darkening one. Urayoán Noel famously called the book “a canticle for the age of listicles.” The lines of these poems, and the demarcations they make, have an incantatory quality, the way a dark lullaby should.
Review: Lake Michigan by Daniel Borzutzky (reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp)
February 28, 2018 · by jmwwblog · in Reviews. ·
Lake Michigan
By Daniel Borzutzky
88 Pages
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
$15.95
ISBN: 978-0-8229-6522-0
Lake Michigan continues Daniel Borzutzky’s stark poetic depiction of a world in the grips of an Orwellian police state, no less surreal than William Burroughs, no less byzantine and corrupt than Franz Kafka. His earlier work, The Performance of Becoming Human, which won the 2016 National Book Award, explored economic and political violence in Chicago and Chile, from which his parents emigrated to the United States. His other titles include Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy and The Book of Interfering Bodies, both of which explore similar themes of the dehumanizing effects of the neoliberal policies of privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade, etc. On top of this, or blended into the warp and woof, is the phenomenon of the suspicion of immigrants, their exploitation and disenfranchisement in the modern security state.
In Scene 0, which serves as a sort of Prologue to Lake Michigan, Borzutzky writes,
“This is an attempt to provide context for the insignificant reality of our lives
This is an attempt to provide context for the dreams we have in which we swallow the bodies of the police officers the prison guards the mayor the migra”
The migra: the immigration police. Think ICE, think Trump, think Jeff Sessions.
Lake Michigan is structured as a drama, with two “Acts,” a total of nineteen “scenes,” multi-page surreal lyrics of violence, torture, dehumanization. This form of a drama provides the context of what Roberto Tejada calls “the convulsions of ritual theater.” The police, the protesters, the mayor, the prison officials are all like stock characters in a plot larger than they are; call it neoliberalism or call it systemic racism, it’s the disparities of wealth, income, criminal justice, housing, employment and health care that drive the narrative, what the poet Eileen Myles has described in Borzutzky’s work as a “kaleidoscopic journey of American horror and global horror.”
Take this passage that starts Scene 11, Act 2:
“15 men around a van from the Department of Streets and Sanitation
The men push from the side and back
The van is rocking up and down
It is starting to tip
More men come to the side
9 pushes and it bounces but it doesn’t quite flip and a bunch of men walk away as a horn blares loudly as if telling the men to stop
The mechanics of flipping a van over
Push until it’s bouncing and once it bounces high enough lift from the bottom
11 more pushes and the van falls over onto the driver’s side and there is a celebratory whoop as the men walk away knowing that no one is ahead of his time
A riot is a thing that decides how it is to be done
And who among these men wants to consider the very long history of how he has ever acted or how he has ever felt”
This so makes me think of the Freddie Gray “riot” in my hometown of Baltimore where a group of people looted and burned a CVS. The boiling rage of futility that drives these acts is no less a part of the dramatis personae than the men themselves.
Unlike a conventional stage play, however, there does not seem to be a denouement to Lake Michigan. The tension that leads to crisis just keeps building; possibly it collapses in on itself in a sense of despair. The final four lines in the final scene of Act 2, after all the torture, the mistreatment, the injustice, the “carnage” (remember Trump?) read:
“I know the blankness of my burdens is a coda to the death of the city
I don’t know why I can’t see the moon anymore
I can’t see the stars or the sky anymore
I don’t even bother to look up”
Borzutzky’s verse in incantatory, repetitive, like a drumbeat, eschewing punctuation. This incantatory style, the repetition of phrases (“A was here // B was here // The dying lake was here // The weeping willow was here // The dead sand was here….” Scene 4) also builds tension but neither relieves nor resolves the tension. But Lake Michigan is not meant to provide solutions so much as shine a light on the grave problems.
A recurring image is the “tornado in the mouth” (scenes 1, 9, 13, 18; e.g., “They tell us we must give thanks our mouths are not filled with tornadoes” – Scene 9). It’s not clear to me what this signifies, but could it be the role of the poet, as a form of protest? Yet in Scene 5 we read:
“After Plato threw the poets out of The Republic some were sent to countries where they kill you and others were sent to countries where they couldn’t give a fuck about the stupid shit poets have to say”
Lake Michigan is a timely collection; it certainly responds to the nationalist zeitgeist in the age of Trump, the era of “Make America Great Again.” It may not be a delightful read, but it is a necessary book.
Charles Rammelkamp