Commune Editions’ First Three Titles reviewed by David W. Pritchard

Review by David W. Pritchard

The three books published this summer by Commune Editions—one by each of the press’s founding editors—ask us to think seriously about what it means to make a political commitment. The books do not pose this question in terms of poetics or literature; they are not concerned with an aesthetics of properly political or politicized taste; they do not think that poetry can ever be political struggle in the same way that a riot, or a protest, or a brick thrown through the windshield of a police car is a political struggle. All the same, poets must concern themselves with struggle, and with the ways in which struggle determines the devices they have at their disposal. It is not, nor can it ever be, the other way around. And it is from this point that Joshua Clover, Jasper Bernes, and Juliana Spahr begin, in their very different ways, their poetic explorations of the problem of commitment.

Thus, when Joshua Clover writes that “culture happens everywhere eat once or not at all/And we belong to it” in Omnibus Omnia, he draws attention to the ways in which commitment cannot simply involve the making of lists of politically “proper” culture for the properly “political” individual to consume. It’s more complicated than such a parochial and condescending line of thinking would allow. Red Epic rejects this sort of taste-based politicking, going so far as to suggest that there’s no such thing as revolutionary culture, only a revolutionary relation to culture. The distinction may seem small, but it makes all the difference, locating as it does the agents of revolution within the system they oppose. There’s no outside to that system, Clover’s poems tell us, and there’s no right life in it.

Lest it sound, however, like Clover’s is a poetry only of didactic statement, I should point out that Omnibus Omnia, from which the above lines are quoted, begins

It’s always a good day for Apollinaire and September too

And the public market’s thatched awning barely remembers

It was once an arcade and I am in love with Green Gartside

Who is the most enigmatic pop star until the next one!

Clover traverses great distances—both temporal and spatial—to get from here to his maxim about culture. And on the way he makes two key points that characterize the formal project of the book as a whole. First, he emphasizes the ways in which Apollinaire, who is a poet and not a unit of time, can become equivalent to September: the distinction between a month and a person seems to matter not at all. Similarly, the cyclical nature of September—which comes but once a year—makes Apollinaire feel like something that recurs, something whose problems and questions and ways of seeing the world are still with us, and continue to return to us in various ways. Extreme contingency and extreme repetition in the form of cycles thus traverse the boundaries between time and space. This is certainly a reading of modernism, but in a book so preoccupied with capitalism—a book in which the phrase “the general formula MCM'” appears—it’s clear that modernism cannot be divorced from capitalism, and, indeed, that it affords us the forms of thought best suited for thinking of the latter as a totalizing process. The world that Clover inhabits and moves through, the pleasures he charts in his poems, are inseparable from capitalism, so their contingency takes on another valence: these things, too, will be destroyed by revolution.

This brings us to Jasper Bernes’s long poem We Are Nothing and So Can You. It feels very much like Bernes picks up where Clover left off, writing a much slower and more descriptive poem, and one much more explicit in its deployment of collage than those in Red Epic. The major theme of this work is the search for a weapon with which to fight back against exploitation, and the major antagonist is the junkyard of commodity culture. Nowhere does culture offer any tools for a neat solution to the problems of the present. It can only lead us back to ourselves and our connections with others—to collectivity. Bernes seizes upon this and repeatedly dramatizes the antagonism between state-sanctioned weapons and the collective of people those weapons are used against, switching between verse and prose as if searching for a form adequate to tell the story of this struggle without reducing it in the process. But this does not mean Bernes has a thing for easy representations of violence. In fact, the most moving parts of We Are Nothing are those in which a collective of human bodies in the street overwhelm even the most alarming amassments of arms, as in an episode where an old man comes out into a bombed-out urban space and simply lays down on the debris. “Eventually,” writes Bernes,

the whole neighborhood was there, in the street, parents and grandparents, friends and cousins, lying together in a big pile as if they had expired happily. Nothing happened that night in the zone, nothing was lit on fire, nothing smashed into little pieces; there were no angry declamations, no projectiles. The zone was the calm eye of a storm whose scale was orders of magnitude larger: for thousands of miles in all directions, city after city swept up in the outcry.

These sentences epitomize Bernes’s sensitivity to the problem of representing struggle: it simply can’t be done, even as the various components of that struggle—urban space, weaponized counterrevolution, simply being together in some minimally unified collective way—indicate that something larger than the individual parts is at work here. Bernes gives us the parts, but doesn’t have a moral to go along with them; his poem is compelling precisely because of the comments and interpretations it withholds. The bodies in the street refuse the authority of drones and cops simply by being there; they refuse the ideology that grounds that authority, they reveal its contingency simply by contesting the preconditions for that space’s reproduction as social space. Bernes gives us, in We Are Nothing and So Can You, a makeshift map of state power, and asks what it means to start contesting that power in its most fundamental spatial and temporal manifestations. If you wanted a critique of voting for the upcoming US election season, this is it: reading Bernes reminds one of what the bourgeois charade of “democracy” can never address, and what it seeks desperately to hide from view.

Where We Are Nothing and So Can You admixes high modernist collage and social realist description, Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came tackles political commitment by way of a sustained intertextual encounter with British Romanticism. Percy Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy provides the epigraph that gives away this intention; it also frames Spahr’s book as though it were the monologue spoken by the character of Hope, which conjures, in Shelley, the star of the show: Anarchy. The choice to invoke Hope instead of Anarchy could alone form the basis of a reading of the whole book. Spahr adopts a minor position, places her poetry outside of Shelley’s Utopian eruption; she does not allow poetry to legislate, we might say. In doing this she doesn’t jettison Shelley, but undertakes to work through his Romantic commitment to total freedom and liberty. Thus her poems are acutely aware of the myriad prohibitions and privations that exist both structurally and interpersonally about what poetry and people can do.

In Brent Crude, we hear about what people said to Spahr when they heard she was writing a poem in iambic pentameter about the BP oil spill—

someone said the last thing we need is another BP poem; someone said just another nature poem; someone said stupid white girls writing about Africa; someone said I refuse to publish stuff like that. Not to me necessarily. At other moments to me but that doesn’t matter.

How satisfying, then, to get to read that poem in this collection (Dynamic Positioning), a poem that takes seriously all the legitimate criticisms in this list while wondering about the limits of trying to figure out what the “right” kind of political poetry to write would be. And that poem ends up being Spahr’s most Marxian moment: she describes, as Marx does, the mechanisms of capital, the equipment and processes of oil-drilling in minute detail, in iambic pentameter. She has no judgments to hand down to us, only the imperative that we think about how poetry and the pleasure we take from it is impossible to extricate from the fact of ongoing ecological catastrophe, which itself is not separable from capital accumulation. If there’s any specific shared theme among these three collections, it’s a matter of locating those politics, refusing to see them as exempt from the system they want to destroy. The poems in these books, like the culture they work through and the world they inhabit, make promises of happiness and fulfillment they necessarily can’t keep, because they are of this world. There is no love in things, or in thingified—reified—life.

The observation isn’t new, but it’s important. And if these three poets have done anything, they’ve taken up the task of modernism, as T. J. Clark is fond of describing it in a phrase from early Marx: to “teach the old forms to dance by singing them their own song.” It’s not enough to name the various aspects of the world that are bad and in need of destruction; we have to grasp them as a unified and total process, where to destroy one thing means destroying all of them. Poetry cannot be bodies in the street or bodies setting fires or bodies smashing windows or bodies standing in between cops and other bodies. Poetry can help us with the grasping of these things, but the rest is up to us. I don’t think that’s cynical or defeatist, I think it’s true. And it’s that truth that the poets of Commune Editions are at pains to express in all its urgency, because at this point we have to destroy everything or let it destroy us.

 

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David W. Pritchard received his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is currently working on a PhD in poetry and poetics. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in TINGE, Tammy, Incessant Pipe, and elsewhere; and he occasionally writes about music for The RS500. He is the author, with Greg Purcell, of the chapbook More Fresh Air. David is one of the coeditors of INDUSTRIAL LUNCH: a magazine of poetry and visual art.