A Protocol Called Friction: On Catherine Wagner’s "Of Course"

Catherine Wagner | Of Course | Fence Books | March 2020 | 120 Pages

Catherine Wagner has long been a poet of rambunctious provocation and gritty dazzle. Her first full-length collection, 2001’s Miss America, is brazen and deft. “Laughed at my own joke and got a bloody nose,” she writes; the book moves with that visceral quickness. Its lines respond to—and rupture through—one another with impatience and play, at once anthemic and fractured. Wagner has characterized the book as a “rowdy and punchy” sort of “party-crashing” into the “frat party” of literary tradition. Twenty years on, its “licky happy” style is still incisive and thrilling.

Her subsequent collections crashed into the parties of parenthood, performance art, and economic precarity (“the carrot on the stick that keeps receding,” as she said in an interview). Compared to poets who eschew friction—who prefer tidy signaling, fulfilling what Cathy Park Hong has called, in another context, the Internet’s demand for “clear, succinct poems that stop us mid-scroll”—Wagner’s work suggests that, to get somewhere in language, we need to pursue it beyond what we can comfortably say. This process, Wagner has said, can provide “information about the present” that may surprise us. In Wagner’s new collection, Of Course, she uses this “protocol called friction” to careen through the ecology of small-town Ohio, the reality of fantasy, what labor makes of us, and the ecstatic mundanity of contemporary experience.

Or should that phrase be “the ecstatic anxieties of contemporary experience”? That can include the (white, liberal) anxiety that can cause a poet who is “embarrassed about privilege” to “market guilt.” Wagner’s consideration of such privilege is characteristically candid, unruly, and critically rich:

Been able     Been popular

     Been white     Been castled     Been way in debt

Been poor     Been to college     Been

no one died for     link child

          baseball gram     hi cat what you want

Been alive for     figure it out in wire crumple graph

The passage follows a “we” that’s problematized by quotation marks. It offers a summary of structural facts, rather than autobiographical elaboration. Its mode, which performs analysis via itemized admission, is familiar in contemporary culture. But its final phrase suggests, perhaps, that when you try to figure out what these facts add up to, in terms of what one has “been alive for,” the graph crumples. It’s hard to sum up, because life keeps intervening; the listing structure, on the edge of a stammering song, keeps pulling in new data, which is variously opaque (“baseball gram”), ambiguous (does “link” child mark a place to embed a link, perhaps to a child who died?), and documentary (“hi cat”). The passage doesn’t deny privilege, and it certainly doesn’t suggest that more resolute articulations of identity are less complex or conflicted; but it puts the language of “owning one’s privilege” into contact with a poetics of earnest grappling and interruption.

That is, it doesn’t just employ the language of admission, but its language admits divergence that’s hard to assimilate into a single point. It doesn’t solve for privilege through simple acknowledgment, since the terms of acknowledgment are themselves conflicted. Take the phrase “been castled.” I hear it several ways: as having a home, as having “been” thrown into a system in which that’s significant, as having been “castled,” as in chess, into a defensive position in which movement is restricted. That multiplicity doesn’t ignore difference or suggest a false equivalency between, say, the suffering of having “been castled” and the suffering of homelessness. But it foregrounds the ways in which language, however crisp, can also glitch productively.

Meaningful words, in other words, can point several ways at once. Wagner’s poem “The moon has no body,” explores a related idea. She shows an erotic fantasy swiveling to thoughts about language:

I am a passenger

My left leg lolls and

My friend reaches a hand

Across the emergency brake

Which points now at the base of

The gearstick shaft

And can point its head

But nowhere else

Thus does not

“Speak”

For signaling to be meaningful speech, in this formulation, it needs to do more than indicate. It needs to accept, or invite, the possibility that one might “misunderstand / Or willfully misinterpret the / Point.” This uncertainty is charged, like the hand in the fantasy. And it depends on others for the creation of meaning. In contrast with the smoothness of writing that aims for what Wagner calls, in another poem, “lossless performance,” she casts herself as a “lossy old girl.” But the loss of exact fidelity, in communication, or the acceptance that perfect communication is impossible, opens up space for agitation, transformation, disagreement, and a politics of collective meaning-making.

But Of Course is not a book that’s just “about” a philosophy of language. Rather, it shows the tension between trying to get away from expected ways of speaking (“You never know what I am / Going to say to / Yaaaaaaaa”) and finding that, for a poet as responsive as Wagner, rupture becomes structure, however improvisatory or unsatisfying or provisional. Wagner’s efforts to keep speech moving, even as patter settles into patterns, operates by what she calls a “glitter principle: / Create a bumpy / Moving surface     cast light on it.” This principle is especially resplendent in poems that recall the capaciously crafted chatter of writers such as Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Dana Ward. Some of these pieces simulate real-time transcription, as though through an imperfect speech-to-text program, complete with nagging thoughts and groaning half-puns. Wagner’s corrections become the poem, as in “My Hair Is Getting a Free Blow Dry in the Win” (the typo is in the text, winningly):

and my hair is dry for

my hair is frozen    I said for

not for    the thing you row a boat with

but not spelled like that kind of for    shit I said OR

In the end, Wagner’s poetry suggests that anarchic and revelatory responsiveness—which responds to the frictions of fantasy and of imperfect language, which rushes among pleasure and difficulty—can be a method for making one’s way among topics, even when we aren’t sure what to make of them. It suggests that being responsive to shifting particulars can create a record that is varied, adaptive, durable, and relevant to conditions that exceed easy summary. The stance that emerges is pointed, even if it doesn’t hew to a set point. Poetry, thus, becomes a performance of continual repositioning—not to evade specificity, but to show the collision among intricate particulars. In the title poem, a sprawling pastoral set on and around a golf course, these particulars range from the history of segregation in small-town Ohio to onomatopoetic representation (“fweep or chkkkk”) to bucolic comedy (“red-winged blackbird other side of pond, / twerpy buzzsaw”), and more. What’s there to say about commercialized nature and small towns? How can we even think about climate crisis—its conceptual and material vastness, its bearing on the microscopic? Wagner’s poetry doesn’t settle on a message but demonstrates a method for staying alert. Its vital “information about the present” may be that, despite all we know, the present remains wilder, harder, and in need of more various tools of engagement.