Issue 34: David Brazil

Review: Chris Nealon, All About You (Wave Books, 20024)

Is Chris Nealon the best English-language poet in America?  The case seems stronger than ever with the publication of All About You, his fifth book of poetry.  All About You continues a long-term project of investigating historical affect through the ductile medium of the long poem – which, lest this formulation sound too serious, continues the great tradition of O’Hara’s “Ode to Mike Goldberg(’s Birth and Other Births)” and Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life”.  If contemporary poetry has any use-value whatsoever beyond meeting the thymotic needs of coteries, it is in the discovery of the shapes of feeling that are possible in our moment of history, and that form the grounds for possible action.  Happiness is historical, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, and by implication so are all our other feelings.  They’re also political, or at least they precurse the political.  All About You, which totally avoids any conspicuous virtue-signaling, is therefore the most plausibly political book of poems I have read in years.

Back in 2013, Chris read his long poems to a living room full of people including me at the Woolsey Heights series in south Berkeley.  When he performed “The Dial” (later collected in Heteronomy) and other long poems for that crowd of poets and anarchists still riding the post-Occupy high of utopian collective liberation (and looking, believe it or not, to poetry to offer cognizable shapes with which to comprehend their basically sublime experiences), I wasn’t the only one who felt the sound of something new and the challenge to step up in my own practice.  I’ve been thinking seriously about his work ever since.

What is the genre of “The Dial,” and the other poems of its kind?  I’ve understood them mostly by way of the New York School – works whose capacious character and informal tone seem to let almost anything in, and whose aesthetic effect is generally not the piercing acuity of lyric but rather a sort of distributed mood.  Achieved duratively, this mood tells us something about how it feels to be alive right now – a feeling that is, after all, historical.  For us radicals, stranded in mapless modernity where appeal to the past seems increasingly impossible, poetry in particular still retains the power to help us cognize and navigate the chaos of the world and the inchoateness of our own feelings.  Maybe we can call these works epyllia: mini-epics?

All About You consists of five pieces, four relatively short and feeling therefore as though they are in orbit around the title poem, which comes in at over forty pages.  “All About You” (the poem) is a splendid example of the genre I’m talking about, which develops like a late-night (or early-morning!) conversation and accrues its aesthetic effect like a piece of ambient music, very slowly and deliberately without any particular moment revealing itself as the decisive one (“phrases building up to what at first I thought was crystal pivoting”).  Excerpting’s hard, but look at the opening line:

“What is it – a stream –”

Right away there are let’s say three of what I take to be the poem’s basic strategies.  The first is that sneaky indeterminate pronoun “it,” which can refer to a variety of things, but definitely including the impersonal constative world (“it is raining”) as well as the poem we’re reading.  In the asking of a casual question we’re already amidst an ars poetica and speculating de rerum natura – all in medias res, naturally.  (We return, later in the poem, to “That stream, glacially cool –”, as though it is possible to step into the same river twice.)

The second’s the dash, which recurs as a visual and prosodic element (“what is this thing with dashes,” the poem even reports an editor asking).  We think of Dickinson, of course (although it’s a short dash!), but maybe also the famous opening sentence of the first chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic: “Seyn, reines Seyn,—ohne alle weitere Bestimmung”  (in George di Giovanni’s English translation: “Being, pure being – without further determination”).  The punctuation of Hegel’s verbless sentence, coordinated by the same mark Chris uses, is so famous that there’s an entire book (The Dash – The Other Side of Absolute Knowing) dedicated to it.  Since Chris is a serious student of Hegel, and since his criticism takes up questions of materialism and humanism I take to be at play in “All About You” and throughout his work, I’m confident in speculating about the serious burdens borne in the apparently casual (or is it causal?) diction of this work.

The third is the short statement itself, which, because of its rhetorical and tonal precision and despite its brevity, never reads like a tweet or a status update.  To evade the feeling of social media through summoning a different kind of intimacy is a profound achievement at this late date in our collective disaster.

Chris is well known as a literary critic with substantial contributions to the Marxist study of poetry, but prior to this work his first book took up the question of queer affect and history.  In Foundlings, Chris examined a panoply of cultural materials to make a case for the historical character of queer emotion before Stonewall.  He identifies as “foundling” that condition which encompasses both “an exile from sanctioned experience” as well as “a reunion with some ‘people’ or sodality who redeem this exile”. With due caution about universalizing the queer experience, it seems as though this dialectic of exile and community underlies Chris’s subsequent critical and creative writing.  Marxism is notoriously weak on the subjective life of the proletariat, but I believe Chris’s most recent poetic undertakings represent an archive of contemporary feeling as an index of the transpersonal – that is to say, what draws us out of the ideological constraints of compulsory American individualism and toward the prospect of future communitarian politics: our only fucking hope.  I’ve been skeptical as any communist about the often apolitical character of actually existing “affect theory,” but having endured the calamity of capital’s enclosure of feeling and subjecthood via social media and other technologies through the 2010s, culminating in our current fascist moment, it seems imperative to me to reckon with the crisis of our felt personhoods as the necessary prelude to any future politics whatsoever.  Since the ruling class’s program’s apparently to reduce all possible passions to the spectrum of available emojis, excavation of habitable new communal and radical feelings is in fact what a contemporary avant-garde that hopes to make a contribution to political struggle must undertake.

Ever see Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?  Almost the whole thing is Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet bickering in the editing room as they make painstaking decisions about how to cut Sicilia!  Costa’s film spurred me to think about what kinds of art we call political.  In my experience, hectoring and doctrinaire artmaking has far less impact than art that leaves me feeling fundamentally unsettled.  Not knowing why something has this effect, and beginning to think about why, and finding that, months or years later, a film or song or painting or book remains under your skin, feels like the beginning of political possibility to me.  It’s political possibility on the individual level in an acknowledgment that we do not live in a time of mass movement– and that whatever mobilizations have emerged in the recent American context are repeatedly and almost immediately vitiated by the weaknesses of what Lenin already critiqued a century ago as spontaneity.  (In other words they’re exciting, the state gives them one swift kick, and it’s all over.)  The damage done to our social body, and to the possibility of organizing, by the total computer colonization of the socius (which is a form of class rule), demands a new aesthetic and political thinking that we don’t have yet.

Amidst “All About You,” Chris’s narrator alters our collective continuum in a very literary way:

“You go back to re-direct the course of history, appearing at that café table just in time to muffle Auden saying “poetry makes noth—”

Well, there’s that dash again.  And, while we’re tarrying with Hegel, let me say that Auden’s famous line, here foiled, can be sounded otherwise, to make us hear a substantive: “poetry makes Nothing happen” – the Nothing which is the negativity of the Hegelian dialectic, and the essential precursor for any new emergence.  When that Nothing happens inside of us – when we encounter a new articulation of feeling which our inchoate experience has, perhaps, been awaiting – it’s the experience of transpersonal affective solidarity which is the precondition of any politics.  I won’t say, of course, that it is politics, but rather that it will not be possible for future liberatory politics to emerge without it.  We have a long, long work of remediation before us, and the old stuff won’t work.  If social media is the new smoking, consider All About You a nicotine patch, and maybe get yourself to a meeting. 

David Brazil is a writer and translator.  His renditions of Horace, Hölderlin, Sophocles and others are collected in profane hours (Free Poetry).  He lives in California. 

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