FLICKERS APR Books
If cycles of taste in American poetry didn’t have their own propulsion and life span, neither to be appraised in eras, one would now express a prayer of thanks. But we may not be out of the period of poetry virtue signaling for years, because few of the social conditions that bred this era’s political traits have changed or seem ready to. Since the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, the feeding on political language in the United States has become extreme, and the political arguments, coarse. As if to underscore these conditions, there’s been an amazing explosion of partisan poetry—never have there been so many political poets, so many poems vying for attention, so many books, so many inflated disputations, and so little sympathy for proportion. The boom in the poetry market, the triumph of promotion, the manufacture of glam, the aesthetics of social indictment—these won’t be going away, as with a whisper of abracadabra, now that a natural demarcation, like 2020, is around the corner.
But America is not the only place where poems get made, which motivates me to look elsewhere for other registers of feeling and thought not so tethered to social debates here at home. There’s much to suggest that American poetry might be losing its primacy, if it ever had any, as a poetry center. The point is not that the poetry of one nation might get replaced by another, or that one is on the verge of disappearing. But, for the last few months, I’ve been asking myself, what’s been going on out there, beyond our borders?
Alejandra Pizarnik
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972
Translated by Yvette Siegert
New Directions Press
384 pages, 2016
Extracting the Stone of Madness, the latest publication from New Directions of Alejandra Pizarnik’s hectic and heartbreaking poems, showcases seven of her books, some posthumously published, and takes its name from her 1968 volume in which she condemns the ways she loses all sense of time through the “pendulum of solitude” (73). That phrase is something of Pizarnik’s shorthand for chaos, I take it—but it’s less a literary trope captured, and more a perception of a suffering mind, a sense that the inner life is without calm, mercy, or order. Pizarnik took her life at the age of 36, in 1972, by overdosing on Seconal, and when you learn that biographical detail, you realize that for Pizarnik, who was born in 1936 in Allevaneda, Argentina, to Jewish immigrant parents, poetry is the art of one’s most shatterable obsessions.
Perhaps that’s why her poems ricochet with crowded, makeshift gestures of desperation, as if succumbing to despair
