"Not nearly as cheap as they seem": On Éireann Lorsung's "The Century"

Éireann Lorsung | The Century | Milkweed Editions | 2020 | 144 Pages

“Inclusivity in American systems comes with the price of domestication.”
- Fady Joudah

Recently, I heard Hanif Abdurraqib correct himself—“I shouldn’t say we.” Instead of speaking generally, which often makes it sound like you’ve been around the block if not the hemisphere enough times to verify some observation, Abdurraqib wanted to speak specifically about being a person and writer in society. (If you have time, I recommend the conversation.) It’s a valuable impulse, and one that, in addition to cropping up in Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World (as a means of pointing out that the reader writers write to has always been assumed to be, without being outright named as, white) and Aditi Machado’s The End (as a means of pointing out that the reader writers write to is an avatar of the market), opens Éireann Lorsung’s new collection of poems, The Century. In “Form A,” a title as inspired by bureaucracy as it is by poetry handbooks, Lorsung provides a kind of invocation. Instead of to the muses, though, it’s to what we might call a certain temerity, the bravery necessary to rebuke, then revise, not just the impulse Abdurraqib resists above, but the whole system that gives that impulse its value. Lorsung puts it this way:

I need to try a syntax of each in place
of accounting: each-syntax as language
within reach of one’s own body,

not “the body” indefinite
and general but my own, your own.

There’s a certain Frank Bidart (Bidartian? Bidartic?) quality to the abstraction, here and elsewhere in the book. The punctuation and typography, the cadence and hesitation, each phrase carved like a soft cheek into marble. Bidart’s carvings tend to be more voluptuous, since his subject is desire. Lorsung’s is connection: between historical events, competing epistemologies, the body of the speaker and the bodies of others. 

One way to get a sense of a poetry collection is through a catalogue of its recurrent images. A brief one: fields, fogs, lines or threads, redactions, various facts of international migration/displacement. The fogs—also appearing as scrims or clouds—instantiate whiteness, one of two central epistemologies of the book. Whiteness subsumes everything into a “world-collapsing, insufficient we” in which “almost everything disintegrates” (and which, through its existence and painstaking, bloodthirsty maintenance, posits “an almost // unlimited / they”). It is a thing clearly at odds with witness, the other epistemology, which operates not just as “poetic witness to the dark times” (Bertolt Brecht via Carolyn Forché), but as an example of what should be done in response to the vicious machinations of whiteness, as traced by Lorsung across not just the globe through the action of nuclear development and war and the displacement of native peoples it has led to, but the erasure of difference and individuality as a means of leasing a shaky peace or legitimacy: tracing one’s connection to, and even culpability in, these events. 

This is not a radically new approach—Carolyn Forché’s poetic and editorial work (which Lorsung nods to) strives to show “how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of individuality.” What is new here is Lorsung’s connecting the lineage of outspoken politically-minded poets like Forché and Robert Hass (whose “Ezra Pound’s Proposition” sees the tendrils of international finance in the light on a young woman’s cheek) with explicit interrogations of whiteness (drawing on work by C.D. Wright, Jake Adam York, and Martha Collins). It is not strident, or even the foreground of every poem. Instead, it lurks, like a haze or an odor, above the whole book, and is periodically refreshed in poems like “The book of splendor” (a lesson plan which makes visible what whitewashed education in the US has tried to redact) and “Nuclear geography” (a Sebaldian mapping of how colonialism—French and US in particular—created the territorial possibility for nuclear testing, and the effects thereafter on the areas and people tested on). Whiteness is as prevalent, and as hard to perceive with the naked individual eye, as electricity or radiation, but this does not mean it is not everywhere, nor that it is imperceptible. We just need to look differently. 

“Report from Nasiriyah” demonstrates this looking, drawing a connection between the US power grid and atrocities committed in Iraq during the Gulf Wars. (Depleted uranium “is linked to DNA damage, cancer, birth defects, and multiple other health problems” and is classified by the UN as an “illegal Weapon of Mass Destruction”; the US military has used it in bombs and armor-piercing ammunition since the 90’s.) 

Power seems
to come from nowhere

but it comes from
reactors where enriched uranium

use produces depleted uranium,
a very dense metal.

Good for armored vehicles.
Good for penetrating projectiles.

Along copper filaments electricity
travels to my light.

It looks like I’m 
alone in my quiet

room, but the threads
are all around me.

Destabilizing as it may be to have this realization—that the simple turning on of a lamp can be traced to the health problems of Iraqi newborns whose “kidneys migrate inside / chest cavities”—it is an essential one, for the speaker and for us: our comforts, in a nation some still insist on calling civilized, are not nearly as cheap as they seem. 

Of course, having this realization alone isn’t enough. A poetry of witness gives testimony and raises awareness, but it also endorses a bystander mentality. Lorsung says as much in the poem right after this one (also titled “Report from Nasiriyah”):

The danger is beauty alone,
a feeling poetry suffices

as a response, an
end to my responsibility.

There is only so much a poem can do. Auden said so: “poetry makes nothing happen.” He also said it endures “in the valley of its making”—it might not create anything (or it may only make space for an indolence that our hyperspeed neoliberal pacing doesn’t prefer) but it does persist. In that persistence lies some of its responsibility. Adorno famously said that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and W.G. Sebald agreed: “the construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.” But to let it go ignored, and be swallowed by the human desire to just get on with it, is equally horrible. Lorsung’s poems do not reach for beauty—they reach for accuracy. They preserve and map while knowing that maps have been used to dispossess. The poems’ power comes not from experience being transformed by lyrical presentation, but by assemblage of keenly perceived reality.

Is this a research-heavy project book that says Important things about Important issues? Not exclusively. The imprint of the individual recurs persistently, sometimes even tenderly. This is on display most vividly in the remarkable central poem, “An archeology,” where Lorsung exhibits her powers as an imagist and sequencer. The poem, an abecedarian, stitches together images and overheard speech, mostly concerning displacement/forced migration. It reminds me of the work of Kader Attia (specifically “Open your eyes”), and is a tour de force of curation and compression—each vignette is as rich in possibility and texture as a cubic foot of loam. The book itself—though clearly an interrogation of power, complicity, ecological destruction, and more—subtly balances the international with the personal, and then balances these between intimacy and horror. (“I’m stroking the indent [in a bed] with one most gentle finger. / Rationing this too.”)

What about hope? It’s never spelled out as such, but throughout the book Lorsung scatters plants and herbs. Often they are medicinal, “in use / in kitchen / gardens / for centuries,” despite not being official medical knowledge, and found among “[t]elephone poles, high-tension electric / towers, columns supporting overpasses” and “several miles [of] hills / of ore or gravel.” This, and the “tendency for ancient feed plants to emerge in disturbed ground; to be called weeds,” reminds me of Eavan Boland’s poems adducing to official History the lives lived among, within, and between it and which often escape its official notice. It also reminds me of the work of Cecilia Vicuña, who shares a reverence for what might be called folk practices (though I bristle at the anthropological condescension in the connotations there), as well as for performance (Lorsung’s reading of “Redaction / monument” is more than just a reading). In one performance (transcribed in Spit Temple), Vicuña connects herself to the audience via a thread of wool woven among them. In another, she says (intones?) “a thread is not a thread / but a thousand / tiny / fibers / entwined,” which is a more symbolic, less historically-minded way of saying, as Lorsung does, that “every grave is five graves” or that every field is filled with (made of?) bodies that become the field. The lesson, in both, is clear: we overlook multiplicity at our peril. Whether in the past, the future, or the present, we must remember our numerousness, our connectedness. Together we are strong, but to think that we are one is a dangerous illusion.