Poetic mulching

 V. Joshua Adams: Let’s start at the beginning. The title of the upcoming 2025 book: WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. It comes from the opening of “Caras y Mascaras,” which juxtaposes the names of poets and literary practices with those of military hardware and politico-historical places and events a total of 14 times, by way of tercets, like this:

Caras y Mascaras

Whitman.
Cannonball.
Puebla.

Frigates.
Dickinson.
Shanghai.

Pound.
Ramparts.
Manila Bay. 
. . .

Can you talk about your choice of this title and perhaps the significance of Whitman in particular for the book and your writing?

Rodrigo Toscano: For sure, yeah. Well, first off, “Whitman,” the historical phenomenon, legacy, constitutes a multi-varied, overloaded, cultural marker, and not just in the U.S., but in the Americas at large. As regards North American poetry, it calls up sovereign individualism, “transcendentalism,” and a sort of idealist populism, a national Geist that can be tapped into, and rendered “accessible.” It’s nearly impossible to arrive at Sandberg, L. Hughes, Ginsberg, J. Jordan, A. Rich, Harjo, and thousands of others without Whitman. It’s also hard to think of Neruda, Marti, and even Borges without his poetic vision glowing in the background. But also, this talisman, “Whitman,” is in no small way implicated in the logic and lingering vibes of Manifest Destiny, a never-ending expansionism, both on land and sea, and in the innermost recesses of the “soul,” as he might say. So, “Whitman,” yeah, it’s a sprawling semiotic terrain. Suffice it to say that when we encounter a night of “open mic poetry,” it’s likely a Whitmanian allowance that’s powering it. 

But the problem is this: as the saying goes, that fish don’t know that they’re in water, we ourselves hardly sense that we live in an elusively hard to describe tank of ideological currents tossing us to & fro. The human that undergirds Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” the sovereign self so eloquently proposed by him, and that many of us still take cues from, leaves us wholly unprepared for the “vistas” of a tail spinning Empire, its institutional wobbling, and the copes that tug on poetry to deal with it all.    

So, in “Caras Y Mascaras,” after “Whitman,” comes “Cannonball.” Well, sometimes a cannonball is just a cannonball. But perhaps in this case, it also signals, you know, a diplomat, of that age. An individual too. And “Puebla” is a baroque city in central Mexico, which the American military besieged in 1847, the same city in which Mexican military dealt the Hapsburgian army a final defeat on Cinco de Mayo of 1862. And that’s that tercet. And you can see (in the tercets above) where the poem is generally heading (the complete poem can be read here). It’s called, “Caras y Mascaras” (Faces & Masks), because, in a dialectical sense, both the appearances and underlying characteristics of different geopolitical-cultural moments are equally consequential, both vie to impel us forward, or often, sideways, on to places (times) as yet unknown to us. But we sense that it’s no longer chasing a Zion, and that we can proclaim, openly.

Adams: Let me pick up on two things in your response here. The first is something that’s implied by the “logic and lingering vibes of Manifest Destiny,” and of course by cannonballs and diplomacy, and that is the project of the nation state. Allen Grossman suggests that “mythological nationalism” is the non-poetic institution that sanctioned Whitman’s work, and that seems right to me, even as Whitman is also very obviously a world poet, in the sense that his work crosses borders and languages (and not just in our hemisphere). The second thing is this shift you make at the end of your remark in the sense of spatial-temporal movement — from forward, to “sideways on to places (times) as yet unknown to us" — a shift that you are maybe cultivating or exemplifying in your work.

Now let me put these things together. The second poem in the book, “Iberofonía,” engages in its own kind of mythological nationalism, or transnationalism. It revisits, playfully, the Bolivarian dream, and imagines the formations of several distinct unions of South, Central American, and Caribbean countries, as well as some further flung Hispanophone and Lusophone places like Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. The poem ends magnanimously towards the former colonizers but critically toward the contemporary U.S. politics of identity: “Spain and Portugal / also cordially invited — / Latinx not spoken here.” “Latinx” actually comes up three times. The poem seems to me, in part, a geopolitical critique of the horizon of neoliberal identity politics — an identity politics that is rooted in the sovereign self you mention above re: Whitman. But it’s also appealing to the nation state as a meaningful unit of organization, even if it is only as a means of forming larger units: Greater Colombia, Greater Brazil, Greater Mexico, and so on. How do you conceive the nation-state working in this poem in relation to a term like “Latinx”? And is this a lateral move, spatially and temporally, or a forward move?

Toscano:  Nice. I love how you detected and named the cluster of contradictions in the poem “Iberofonía” as “mythological transnationalism.” It complements Grossman’s take on Whitman, and (eeks) kinda outs me as a trafficker in a similar poetics(?) Perhaps, yeah, but I would characterize “Iberofonía” as more of a metapolitics, annunciated at the level of a poetics. You see, sometime back, I came up with a zippy formula meant to clarify how we might arrive at “political poetry.” It goes like this: if metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics. Take Gary Snyder’s 1974 Turtle Island, for example, a book that won the 1975 Pulitzer prize for poetry. That slim volume wielded a poetics that informed and even catalyzed metapolitical affiliations (environmental fugitivity, “east-west” fusionist deep ecology, alter-indigeneity, “minimalism” lifestyle), and that flotsam and jetsam of commitments, in turn, eventually gelled into new realpolitik. Something like that. But I don’t want to be formulaic or catechistic about it, though I would insist that poets these days are in dire need of structural framing to arrive at notions of “political poetry,” otherwise, political poetries get easily siloed into just another flavor of topic, and “non-political” poetries are gifted a pass on getting historically decoded. 

I’m also thinking of your fantastic new book, Past Lives (Jack Leg Press, 2024),as a poetics reaching into metapolitics in a very unusual way.I read the book, in part, as a testimonio of an industry insider, a whistleblower poetics. I see the collection as thriving within a structure of nested sets, each housing the other. The sequence goes something like this: North American liberal arts academia / Literary Studies / MFA poetry landscape / functionary (loyalist) poetries / interventionist critical poetics milieu (the basis of our friendship, no less). But look what’s at top there, academia, a national industry. And so the book walks us through piles of literary industry tricks that aren’t quite clicking anymore. And poem after poem, through paradox, hilarity, and biting contradiction, the boards are cleared for something else to be imagined. I’d say it’s a negative image of a whole new deal of industry conditions, and so it suggests the need for total transformation of that industry. It’s an insurgent poetics acting on the metapolitics of academia. And who can say these days that the metapolitics of campuses aren’t everywhere, from cubicles in Silicon Valley to the streets of Minneapolis. So, the proposition, if metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics, if it has real legs, must be able to decode literary “accomplishments” at many levels.

As to your inquiring about my manner of casting the word “Latinx” in “Iberofonía.” Well, straight up, it’s obvious that in the poem the term is being disparaged. But I should be clear here that I largely take an ecumenical stance on terms like “latinx,” “latine,” “chicanx,” etc. All these designations have their place at the right time. That said, I do deem “latinx” to be mainly a cultural-managerial term of the Anglosphere, specifically a U.S. product. So in that way it has a state function. And what the poem is aiming to do is foreground Hispano-Americano civilizational elements as a whole in the interest of foregrounding a new geopolitical project wherein both political and cultural confederation across nation-state lines are at a premium. This would be in contrast to politics (and poetics) that promote autonomous zoning of peoples and places. This is a long and winding conversation to be had at the level of realpolitik and culture, but suffice it to say that in U.S. literary spaces, intersectionality is taken as a forever-tool for interpreting practically everything. And so I’m questioning that. Like, I’d say that what links me to people like Steven Alvarez, or Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, or Stalina Villareal, etc., is something deeper and more sweeping than a specific (period) set of U.S. literary tools.  

Adams: “Whistleblower poetics.” I’ll take it. It makes me feel better about my complicity. I mean, it would be hard to be more of an insider than a poet-professor who is also a white guy with an expensive education. Perhaps that is the social role for my work, clearing the boards. I put it slightly differently once on Twitter:

“Some poetry expresses utopian longing. Mine expiates realist cynicism.”

I’m intrigued by this business about poetics being the “mulch” of metapolitics. It puts me in mind of something you said during our conversation in New Orleans last year about the casual relationship between poetics, politics, and praxis. In both of these formulations, poetics seems to be at the root of the social order, what gives that order its shape, out of which it grows or is made and remade. Here we have another Whitmanian echo, via Emerson and also maybe Vico, too. This echo is instrumentally important of course, particularly for some of us, since it keeps us from throwing the poetic baby out with the demystificatory bathwater. But it’s obviously more than instrumentally important, it’s sort of like the whole point.

I see a connection here to the third section of your book, “Humanitas.” It seems that in this section we have an attempt to precisely establish a grounding of intelligibility of the human world. But this ground is, perhaps unsurprisingly, shifting and slippery. The first poem begins with an ironic echo of Frost’s “Mending Wall”: “Something here won’t allow / a simple phrase about Humanity.” Here’s the first four couplets of twelve: 

Humanity (a meandering raft)

Something here, won’t allow
a simple phrase about Humanity.

Since Humanity is a dream
dreaming us, it floats, fragments.

So maybe this is a fragment
adrift in perilous waters

let’s say, a swamp
at midday, in summer
. . .

Each of the poems in this section is titled “Humanity” but has a different qualifying parenthetical appended to it: “(a meandering raft),” “(a quirky nomad),” “(a loose brick),” “(a glint in the fog),” and so forth. What kind of concept of the human, or of politics, or metapolitics, grows out of this poetic mulch? Is this basically a “humanity to come” — or, as you put it, “(a kind of churn)” — or are there more specific, tangible things we can and should say about it? And, in a slightly different key, what is getting mulched to make this mulch?

Toscano: Okay, yeah, even though I am in the main a relentless historical materialist poetic thinker, I also do a fair amount of, let’s just say, side work, where materialist interpretive framing is momentarily suspended, like in the “Humanitas” series. Like you, I often post tweets on poetics (@Toscano200), and so the other day I said something about “the gall of becoming a contemporary.” What I meant is that while we’re alive (“especially in these times”), we’re overwhelmed by historical uncertainty. We don’t know where things are going, and it makes us anxious, and stimulates poets into adopting all sorts of explanative ideologies to deal with it all. Like these days, many go for universal “open society” practices and sentiments, others double down on ethnicity, while others are Anthropocene doomsayers. Well, when I said, “suspension” (of historical self-interpretation), I mean, yeah, to write in a raw, naked way, with no obvious political framing as if you’re speaking to people in the future of what it felt like to bear-it-all in our time. You see, I’m a lifelong student of antiquity. I know that most archeology, both physical and literary, involves dealing with civilizational refuse. And perhaps somebody rooting around in a deposit decades from now, some poems might be found that might speak across time. Now, I don’t know if that’s my pessimistic or optimistic side of being a poet. But the “gall” is all about taking one’s poetics seriously enough to think that the main social contradictions of our time are flowing through one’s poems. But notice, when I do “suspend” those flows, it’s an overt act, not just an avoidance of confronting pressing social conditions. Okay, obviously the two modalities (historical flow surfer vs. historical suspension sunbather) are in dialectical tension with each other.

Now, as to the “mulch,” I should first restate the jingle: if metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics. Yeah, so, one question easily arising from that is what, indeed, has been mulched? And the answer, I’d say is, words. Words have been cut, stripped, chopped, and mushed together by the zoon politikon (political animal) that we all are. The difference is the poet is (hopefully) sensitive to these processes that render words opaque, words that were once vibrant lifeforms. So that it’s through poetic tinkering that these clumps of “mulch” are arrayed in such a way (aka “the poem”) so as to provide a nourishing terrain for metapolitics. Phew! Thank you John Donne for teaching me metaphoric endurance.

Okay, so this “realist cynicism” that you mention, how your poetics makes amends for it, is it realism in the sense of “socialist realism” à la Lukacs, where superstructural elements (including literature) are “reflecting” particular social relations (a schema I’m critical of, by the way), or is it more in the sense of identifying fetters on social agency, you know, like when the pathways towards social change are so blocked up that everything seems, just, blah, hackneyed, and demoralizing?

Adams: Perhaps oddly, in retrospect, I was thinking of realism less in that sense and more in political terms — in the kind of Thatcherite sense of  “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) to Capital’s complete rule, and, behind this propagandistic usage, the way the term is used in a deeper sense in politics or international relations, where it identifies a permanent condition of states or other political actors struggling for power. And the implied claim that this is the really real state of affairs — on the one hand, of course, it has an obvious plausibility in some contexts, but, on the other, it seems like a profound distortion not only of what is plausible but what is actual and possible on the level of the social and the political.

That’s where the cynicism comes in. This has been the ideological climate in which I have lived, and it is one that has had enormously destructive consequences. I am not sure that the poems make amends for those consequences, or that any poems could. But perhaps in reveling in the failure of that cynicism to produce anything good — except for maybe poems about it, ha! — the work is engaging in a critique. Not a radical one, to be sure. That’s not my style. With apologies to Marx, I’m not convinced anyone can ever grab anything “by the root.” But a critique, nonetheless.

At the same time I know this is a position that has been adopted before, and that it can be self-serving. So the critique is also an auto-critique. That’s why one of the poems I have about this is called “Tropes.” It concludes like this:

The party dissolved in a game of hide and seek
among the palms. Beside the cemetery gate,
two young women in crocheted overalls
tossed glowing hoops over the Southern Cross.
No sign of the dead man’s grave, so I walked to the bodega
and bought a beer and an egg and cheese sandwich.
I never eat much at functions. They bore me.
And eating when you’re bored is a dangerous thing,
like imagining a future as good as the past. 

Is it too late to talk about empire? Because this seems like it has been in the background a bit in our conversation, and, in the “Imperium” section of your book, the relation of the poet to empire is primary. The first poem in this section, “Mystery Reader,” describes a poet who appears to be thriving in the context of empire. But they are thriving because they are “Downplaying entanglements / with national interests / and global affairs.” 

I guess my question is — and this gets back a little bit to your remarks about being a historical materialist poetic thinker and also your “side work” — what’s the best way to play up these entanglements without reinforcing them? How should we, to borrow some more language from “Mystery Reader,” be “agents,” rather than “double agents,” for change — and not just in the context of the nation but of empire? Is it a matter of heightening the poetic contradictions?

Toscano: Yes, heightening, but also navigating those contradictions. To quote another tweet of mine (which got a grand total of one like):  

“The dialectics of/and between empires; the dialectics between states; the dialectic between classes within states; the cultures oozing out from dialectical clamor; literature as subset of culture; poetry not just a subset of literature, but an unruly child of the whole shebang.”

As for “Mystery Reader,” I’d say that poem is exploring that charged zone between reader and “poet” (a specialized kind of reader). Among the other crazy tercets, there’s these:

This poet, maybe
            is para-national
            or infra-national

This poet, actually
            speaks from metropoles
            to metropoles 

Signaling new virtues
            counter-signaling others
            unlocking impulses
            . . .

It’s a complicated piece (and I’d say a fun one), that, as you’ve said, is “heightening the poetic contradictions.” And as journals’ editors have been telling me, “we read it with interest, but in the end, thought it was not quite right for our summer issue.” To which, I should answer, “nor for your winter, fall, or spring editions, given that y’alls is a ‘national’ journal whose primary historic mission is to continuously mystify this nation’s cultural-imperial dimensions.” Though I’ve articulated that perspective more clearly in yet another two tweets:

“In direct or circuitous ways, are not all contemporary American poetries springing from the vortex of an Empire’s crack up? Are not most poems titillating copes straining at redeeming a previous geo-political moment’s liberational possibilities? Who’s got one toe in the future?” 

“Geopolitics is outfoxing geo-poetics. There might be traces of viable paths forward to many of our poetics, but not much more. Makes me question national cultural categories of estrangement and oppression (and their aesthetics), how they’re unintegrated into larger realities.” 

So you see, my writing, in part, seeks to integrate national, cultural-political elements into sweeping world historical currents. And that’s tough because we’re all so trained to make autonomous-acting poems. Legions of literature teachers ask daily, “What going on in this poem?” And look, that’s a fair place to begin, but also that’s the one prompt most likely going to squelch conversations about material-social understanding of art objects. I mean, imagine opening up a creative writing class like this: “Welcome everybody…alright, so, given that the Liberal Capitalist cultural landscape’s soil is nearly depleted, precisely because of the U.S.’s global imperial deceleration, we’ll be exploring ways in which you’ve been roped into professing your creativity.” How many might drop the class that day? I hope some might stay, because there’s fountains of cheeriness that comes from knowing that one is already involved in plots of all sorts, and you can pivot off all that. When we had you read for The Splice reading series in New Orleans, that’s how I was reading and cracking up at your anti-enthusiasm, anti-victorious, “realist” pivots.  

And eating when you’re bored is a dangerous thing,
like imagining a future as good as the past.

One could even say that this species of poetics is largely worthless — for the strained efforts of Empire to prop up the Mighty Sovereign Subject for another round of “democratic vistas.” To my way of thinking, these kinds of approaches to poetry are covering one “front” in the grand pushback on Empire. It’s laying minefields of agentic nullity to clear the way for other poetics to breakthrough. In that sense, I don’t look at it as pessimistic presentism, but rather, as a new variant of realism.

But there are, indeed, too many presentist poetics that gather at camp Avant Garde, and strut about as if there’s nothing from the past to carry over, or nothing in the future beckoning us to come its way. That’s what I meant by it being important to have “one toe” in the future as Imperium starts its wind down. Although, it feels like casting a dinky fishing line on to a rushing river, it’s important for — somebody’s (why not ours) — poetics to remain responsive to stirrings of possible futures, one’s beyond our lifetimes, here, in this hemisphere. And that’s why I find poetry readings (if not, always, the poets) so enticing. Because the poetics manifesting there, have the gall of presupposing we’re relevant contemporaries.    

But the boil down of all this, is we are living in a historic period that’s exceedingly hard to grasp, because we’re fully immersed in it. This dialogue between me and you also speaks from the fish tank. And you’re asking if “we are enforcing” contradictions that could be harmful? I’m assuming that by “harmful” you mean, not only adding to the cache of inert idealisms around literature, but also bolstering actual political structures. Well, maybe, maybe not. You know, when Zhou Enlai (first Premier of China, 1960s) was asked about the French Revolution and what he thought of it, he said, “it’s too early to say.” And Yankees 1950s catcher, Yogi Berra, let us know that “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Adams: I take those last points, for sure. There’s a bit of residual liberal hand-wringing in that query of mine. But I think, actually, that your account of getting beyond the tendency, so institutionally sanctioned, to make “autonomous-acting poems,” and your investment in readings (and not necessarily poets), points to a way of taking that hand-wringing quite generously. It is almost as if, in order to do what we need to do — by which I mean create an art that won’t be fully subsumed, exhausted, or determined by its Imperial/capitalist context — we need to abandon, really abandon, a fetishizing of both the author and the work. This is something that I am not necessarily so adept at doing. I’m interested in impersonality, in impersonation, in an anti-essentialism with regard to identity and selfhood, but I also love a good fetish. And yet it seems to me that you are taking this kind of transcending of the author/object quite seriously in your work, and that you have been for years. (I’m thinking in particular of Collapsible Poetics Theater but also a book like Explosion Rocks Springfield.)

At the risk of activating an inert idealism: the question that arises for me in the context of this kind of radical poetics is the place of aesthetics and aesthetic judgment. The further we get from the “autonomous-acting poem,” the further we get from our sense of the work of art, traditionally conceived. And this perhaps puts a slightly different spin on the editors of those magazines who rejected “Mystery Reader.” Is it possible for someone to read that poem in full sympathy with its politics but to have an aesthetic reservation about it, in a legitimate way? Or does keeping one toe in the future mean that we have to re-learn a vocabulary of poetic evaluation? When we “integrate national, cultural-political elements into sweeping world historical currents,” is there room for debating and deciding how to do this well? Or is that just an academic sideshow? Maybe because I am also a critic, I’m curious about the fate of aesthetic criteria in the expanded poetic field that you are sketching.

Toscano: Of course, yes, there’s room — tons of if, to evaluate how well a poem is working (unto whatever it set out to work on). Actually, some of the poetry I’ve hated the most over the years has been self-branded “political poetry,” especially when the ideological contradictions that went into writing it are pasted over, defanged, so as to force the poetry into mere ethical stances deemed profitable for the moment. At the same time, I can think of many a decadent, even backwards looking Bourgeois poetry that I’ve learned a lot from. The problem is exactly as you put it, that we have to “re-learn a vocabulary of poetic evaluation,” especially for rapidly shifting times. That’s the key. My view is that poems themselves should be a demonstration of new forms of readability, and those forms should be given the benefit of the doubt as issuing from the dispersal of legit historical forces. If my life’s work ends up as 80% error in aesthetic execution of social stress points, and 20% nailing of matches between intentionality and aesthetic forms that retain vitality, that’s an outcome I’d gladly welcome. Though, yeah, for sure, I shoot for a much higher ratio of poetic “success” than 80/20. The fact is that the material-social perspectives I’m trying to infuse into American poetics have been “traditionally underrepresented.” And I’d like it if editors (and frontline readers) could be more open minded. All that said, there’s so much quirkiness in my poetry that I’ve also gotten plenty of raised eyebrows by (non-poet) political activists. But those are the tough rows I hoe. And of course, I can’t complain about the overall reception I have gotten in American poetry. Strange. It’s been quite hard and super easy at the same time.

Joshua, what poetic trends are you currently seeing that raise your spirits? And are you sensing in any way what your next moves in poetry or criticism might be?   

Adams: I am a poor trend spotter. In terms of movements, Flarf was the last one that meant something to me. Or the British poets gathered in Chicago Review years ago while I was still a graduate student (Andrea Brady, Chris Goode, Peter Manson, Keston Sutherland). I still find that work engaging. It is not really so similar to my own. But it goads me to write when I come into contact with it.

I’m part of a group of poets in Louisville that are, in my view, doing interesting things. Here I want to give a shout-out to Kristi Maxwell’s recent book Goners (Green Linden, 2023), which weds Oulipian-style constraint with attention to our ongoing environmental catastrophe. It’s a truly provocative, accomplished work, full of a strange music. I think we see in it a possible path for vanguardism. 

I do have a new poetry manuscript in the works. I’m calling it Central Time. I guess it is about the middle of things, spatially, temporally. Critically, I’m obsessed with the question of poetic vocation. Of what it is that we are called upon to do as poets, and how/whether that vocation persists in a modernity that has made traditional conceptions of vocation untenable. And you? Where are you headed?

Toscano: Oh man, where are we all headed, as a society, is the question that haunts me. But in no way do I want to invite apocalyptic thinking to negotiate either social stress points, or pathways beyond them. Okay, so, that’s what I don’t want. But what is it that I do want? Well, here might be a clue. In my latest manuscript, WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA, in that “Humanitas” section, it appears there’s a desire there to do a big zoom out from from the current barrage of national crises. And though I realize that midflight gazing on all below might be a wholly artificial, even idealist endeavor, I think it’s warranted. My poetics can’t be simply dragged and flung about at the whims of — literally, daily news cycles. One can’t build a poetic-politic like that. And so, doing deep cultural excavations of the past, coupled to getting up the nerve to think of futurity, seems to be where I’m at. But also, though I rail against “presentism” (the state of being numb to the past and future), I, um, (shoot) I think, I sorely need some form of luminous present too. All this is a mission impossible! But my hope is that if done and felt to be slogging alongside others, in contact with others’ cosmovisionary — uh, let’s call them, inklings, then it seems possible. Matter of fact, I’d say that’s the only way I think it can be optimally done. So what really frustrates me is folks wanting to be understood wholly on their terms — everyone, doing that. I look at that as frankly quite mad. Can you imagine a roaming clan back in the paleolithic where every member wants to be massaged for their singular, unique visions? So, yeah, inklings. Instead of saying, “I’m going to a poetry reading tonight,” I could just as well say, “Hon, I’m off to the Saturn Bar to sample some inklings.” But, look, full circle here, isn’t that a sort of Whitmanian thing to do? Be hyper-interested in everyone’s maneuvers all at once? Alas! But, hey, let’s get this dialogue up on the web soon for people to mull, deliberate, or even hate, as it means nothing if it ain’t adding to the mulch of poetics.