Response to “Act(ion),” “The Ancestors Laugh at the Lesser of Two Evils,” and “Alien America”

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        One of the things I like to do when I approach a text that operates outside the parameters I typically work within is to consider where the poet’s coming from and where the poet might be taking me. I glance at these three poems and instantly I think of predecessors such as Ezra Pound, Jerome Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, poets who are visual, concrete, and spatially experimental. I think of John Cage.

        Another thing I like to do in such situations is to simply look at the poem as, let’s say, a landscape I’m about to enter. I scan the environment, trying to leave my mental baggage home, my preconceptions, but there’s still the matter of orientation. I can’t help thinking that that sagebrush or that mountain looks familiar. So, in my perusal of the poems in this packet, I believe I catch a glimpse of Martha Collins here, a glimpse of Muriel Rukeyser there, poets who address the documentary, and I believe I catch a glimpse of Jessica Johnson who says, “The documentary poem opposes Szirtes’ idea of a closed system, inviting ‘the real life outside the poem’ into it while also offering readers a journey into the poem. Because of this double movement, documentary poems constantly court their own collapse, testing a poem’s tensile boundaries in the face of what Wallace Stevens called ‘the pressure of reality.’”

         “Act(ion)” opens with the familiar and the un. I know what “act” means, but after that I experience a bit of parenthetical dislocation. In my head, I say the word shun. Act shun. What’s going on here? I’m returned to solid ground with the excerpt from the Hate Crimes Act, the document intended to address the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. I drift down to the fading stanza that appears at first like lines of code I read on a phonemic level. Then, against my will, I start to hear the voice of Donald Trump: “chinaviruschinaviruschinavirus.” An unpleasant chorus. I have to get out, and so I move to the cascade of letters: “i as cairn i as urn such is ruin.” I pull up short when I get to “incurs in vain” and hear incursion and, once again, shun. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to act? Am I supposed to vanish? Run? And then that voice again, the pressure of reality.

        In “The Ancestors Laugh at the Lesser of Two Evils,” the landscape changes a bit but retains an echoic familiarity. The chinavirus chorus returns but with letters sometimes omitted and a long diagonal row of c’s. I read the lines of code, and I experience semantic satiation, that phenomenon where when you repeat a word or phrase enough times its meaning disappears. This meaninglessness gives way to the meaninglessness of legalese, the document returning, promising action but the promising action statements themselves fade away into the chorus that’s returned. And on the left side of the page, the official angel on the shoulder tells us not to worry. What’s in the document is just required. What needs hushing will be hushed. We’ll cheer our efforts. We will chuckle.

        The joke of the “(B) Semiannual Law Enforcement Agency Report” is revealed in the opening document of “Alien America.” The excerpt from The Page Act of 1875, otherwise known as The Oriental Exclusion Act of 1875, reminds us that what’s happened recently is nothing new. The circus is still in town. The scars, the sins, the plea to be unchained are bold above the chorus. And it hits me as I write this: the inauguration is tomorrow.