Desired Outcomes: On Laura Henriksen’s Laura’s Desires and Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle
Laura Henriksen | Laura’s Desires | Nightboat | March 2024 | 151 Pages
Michael Chang | Synthetic Jungle | Northwestern Press | March 2023 | 104 Pages
For a while now, I’ve been writing about desire. I’ve been talking about desire. I can’t stop. It’s become a compulsion. I have been theorizing about desire, creating charts and categories. I put together a PowerPoint presentation diagramming “types of alt straight men.” I wrote a poem about having a crush on the Baker’s Man of the nursery rhyme “Patty Cake” fame. I presented my PowerPoint presentation at a party. I wrote a poem in which I claimed to be “triangulating desires.” I showed people at a warehouse rave the PowerPoint presentation on my phone. I wrote instructions in my poems: “don’t text back a bad texter. / don’t fall in love with a bad texter. / don’t text in love. / don’t love and drive. / you can always fake an orgasm. / you can never fake a dream.” I shared the poems with anyone who’d listen.
Toward the end of Laura Henriksen’s debut book of poetry, Laura’s Desires, the speaker expresses her compulsion to share the work she is writing, to read it to people, any chance she gets, “emphatically.” Simultaneously, she is stricken at this divulsion in the face of her original intent to keep the work to herself. It seems there is some sort of permission baked into the context of a poem that allows, or indeed encourages, a person to share intimacies they might not otherwise feel comfortable divulging. Meaningful discussions of romantic and sexual desire often strike me as lacking in our cultural conversations, perhaps because this desire is ultimately difficult to render—much of the time being frustratingly simple and frustratingly vague. But this line between the specificity of one’s feelings and the overwhelming, nearly universal nature of a crush seems precisely the sort of challenge poetry is equipped to undertake.
Laura’s Desires and Michael Chang’s latest collection, Synthetic Jungle, tackle the urge to write sexual desire in ways that offer new modes for thinking about how to represent what it means to want for pleasure as a woman or as a queer person. These books question the relationship between desire and power, authority and submission, pop culture and renderings of sex, and how language can enact desire. And both projects treat these desires with the seriousness they demand, seeking to communicate the gravity of these questions for their speakers. If we cannot treat desire as a serious linguistic pursuit, then how will we ever be able to articulate a better world, with better options, romantically, sexually, politically? How can we ever imagine possibilities for what these worlds might look like?
i. Authority & Submission
Henriksen attempts throughout Laura’s Desires to build a new, contemporary feminism. Her speaker thinks through what this would look like: a messy desire for powerlessness, for an emptying out, to view the self as mere vessel, to escape the paralyzing self-consciousness of being. “When I think about what it means to me / to be contained in the category of woman, / I think first about penetration,” Henriksen writes. She clarifies that penetration is her favorite part of this category of womanhood she is constructing—in this case, womanhood as vessel. She suggests she’s been taught to make herself a vessel not just sexually, but socially: to doubt herself, to remain accepting and easygoing and attendant to those around her. In this book she attempts to reclaim those “negative” qualities, to view them instead as a source of power.
Indeed, a key component of desire, both books suggest, lies in a tension between one’s sense of their power and fantasy of their power. The speaker of Chang’s poems seems to get off on wielding authority, which often manifests as being a Poet. “when u asked if i could handle it / i thought u meant the stress of being a rockstar poet / but of coz u meant ur dick,” Chang writes in “Singles’ Night at the Museum.” In these poems, sex, power, and poetry become a sort of triangulation, in which each is inextricable from the actualization of the others. “like stephen hawking’s oxford examiners / u know i am better than u,” their speaker brags in “Teacher’s Pet.” This desire for power and recognition is enacted through alignment with celebrities, authority figures, even dictators: “i want the name recognition of princess di the shamelessness of tonya harding the tenacity of genghis khan…like jesus said i am thirsty,” Chang writes. This is a speaker who lusts for a sort of domination, though we are rarely given details of the actual sex being performed. It’s the idea of authority that is so hot to this speaker, even if the dynamics of these constructions seem fraught.
What does it mean to ache to give up power, or to view oneself as powerless, or to romanticize powerlessness, when structurally one wields more power than others? And what does it mean to ache for a sort of fascistic authority in a time when we see this authority playing out on real bodies? These books suggest that to claim powerlessness or to claim authority in sex can be a naughty act, one not aligned with one’s mode of being in any other space. And what better place to live out fantasies one knows would be wrong in real life, or unfair, or unethical, or slightly fucked up, than through the privacy of sex?
ii. Romance & Potential
The depiction of sex in these two books is not always tied to romance. In a poem titled “Caducity,” Chang writes a sort of “out” list, in the sense of an “In/Out” year-end roundup. One item on the list: “dreaming of love (meaning erotic potential),” which leads into “processing cum like a college drain.” If love as erotic potential is “out,” then what takes its place? Chang suggests in “Your Place, or Another Trip to Dean & Deluca” that the wanting becomes pleasurable: “circling the rim of desire, a feeling so total & insistent it must’ve been what the cool kids call ‘edging.’” Chang expands on this delineation between desire and sex acts by teasing the line between the literal and the mental toll of sex: “guys always want u to take their load but have they ever stopped to consider (!!!) what a heavy burden it is to carry,” they write. The unromantic image of cum circling a college drain, the load shot, made manifest and brought to conclusion, underscores the relative lightness of an erotic desire—something that doesn’t have a preconceived ending, and the romantic nature of that imagined anythingness.
In this poem, Chang writes in the second person, providing space for an intimacy that is inclusive of the reader. “this is my polemic reaching out hoping to encounter another, an effort to arrive at more love,” Chang writes. I’m interested in this “you” and its possibility. Henriksen writes about cathexis, which was the chosen style of Francis Petrarch, the Italian Renaissance poet often known for his sonnets: love poems written about the object of his desire (also named Laura). Henriksen defines cathexis as “the concentration of intense mental energy on a single person, a fixation on the regenerative force of desire, here endlessly renewable because endlessly deferred, perfect and undying on the page.” But this style is distinct from a seduction poem (“speech acts attempting to precipitate an event”). Cathexis seems more closely aligned with what both writers offer as a way of figuring out one’s own desires: writing about it—maybe even compulsively.
In both books, trying to figure out what one wants is essential to the form of the project—these authors throw things on the page and listen to determine what sounds right. “Look at this hymn to possibility,” Chang writes, which seems an apt descriptor of what both books perform. The ultimate possibility of romantic expression becomes a direct address to the “you” of the poem (or, in Chang’s case, more often the “u”). The casual intimacy of writing to a particular person, even if it is just the idea of a person, is romantic, a constructed idea of desire and love.
“I like to imagine what the essential quality must be in this ‘you’ that makes them recognizable across nights, across dreams, [across poems], somehow both reliable and mysterious, inescapable and unattainable, always returning, never fettered,” Henriksen writes of Real McCoy’s 1994 Eurodance hit “Another Night.” And I think this “you,” perhaps, does feel radical in this current moment, an intimate speech act we rarely allow ourselves after the internet, where we are always speaking to an implied audience. Romance is being in a quiet room, with a desired one or few, and attempting to work out what one wants. The epistolary form replicates a sense of real conversation—and it reminds us that cutting through rounds of flirtation, of talking around something, gesturing toward meaning through layers of meme and quotation and allusion, and instead entering into direct address, might cultivate a new, electric domain, one satiated with thrill.
iii. Narrative & Fragmentation
Laura’s Desires is composed of two essayistic long poems, centered on the page: long blocks of text with white space on either side, like a creed, or a scroll. Synthetic Jungle’s poems are primarily monostichs—short, curt lines, double spaced—that are witty, pithy, irreverent, and fairly concise. Or else they’re short blocks of text, either prose poems or verging on the lyric essay. Formally, both books make tangible the act of wanting while attempting to avoid narrative whenever possible. If the contemporary novel most often approaches the territory of romantic or sexual relationships via a traditional urge for conclusion and resolve, these poems withhold that, while often seeming to dangle tidbits in front of the reader, guns that’ll never go off.
Both books, however, use pop culture as texts through which to understand their speaker’s own desires, and then to build new work that is simultaneously composed of those existing worlds and reactive to them. Laura’s Desires draws heavily on the making of the film Variety (1983), in addition to the lives and work of female artists involved in the downtown New York scene: Kathy Acker, Bette Gordon, Nan Goldin. Michael Chang turns to Keith Haring titles and invokes contemporary celebrities and politicians—Jacob Elordi, Kamala Harris, Bill de Blasio. Indeed, Chang’s book plays off memes and viral videos, building a contemporary pop art that is ever serious about the political implications of the often absurd contemporary life it chronicles. “‘poetry of the everyday’ means boring poetry,” Chang opens the poem “White Tennis Shoes,” and then goes on to write a poem that blends quotidian musings with cultural critique:
i eat busily between ur legs
all-encompassing, so vantablack
[...]
i’m the best thing smoking thru ur life
a siren passing, there, then not there
i’m trying to fill my love empty
wink & a prayer
remember when kamala did an event with aka & her sorors went skee-wee
& a white reporter, not recognizing the calls, said they were hissing at her?
remind me what white reporters are qualified to write abt besides their too-big-to-fail?
The everydayness of sex and desire is cut with the threat of sirens, which transitions into this cringe cultural misreading on the part of a white reporter, the moment’s subsequent virality, and Chang’s amplification of this real-life instance as illustrative of a broader cultural issue. The movement here is sonic—we are lulled by gentle rhymes into an intimate, lovely moment, then shaken out of it by the speaker’s invasive, frustrated memory. This remembrance remains in the realm of the sonic: a mishearing and subsequent misrepresentation of a celebratory sound as something vicious. But in this way, Chang demonstrates how, though the everydayness of the poem is in some way boring (exasperatingly redundant, recognizable), the mundane can become compelling (“all-encompassing, so vantablack”). This poem is driven by conflicting feelings (the urge to “fill…love empty”; a siren “there, then not there”) and it seems by the end that the speaker is advancing a “boring poetry” theory they don’t quite believe in: “wink & a prayer.”
There’s no narrative here, because to have a narrative runs counter to the way our cultural lexicon works, a rewriting of moments that bump up against one another in the eternally returning space that the internet calls into being as we sit in our homes, engaging in various acts of pleasure or discomfort. The fragmentation in Chang’s poems brings to the forefront the limits of narrative in a romantic or sexual situation, instead offering a sense of play with sound and humor, which better gets at the experience of a flirtation, a situationship, a hookup, a casual intimacy.
Henriksen also scrutinizes the project of narrative, which has undergone almost ceaseless shifts in its societal meaning alongside new forms of feminist critique. Is narrative feminist or antifeminist? Is experimentality a means out of patriarchal structure, or is it an essential representation of jerking oneself off? I think about Henriksen’s reticence to provide us with narrative structure in these poems as an attempt to clarify the inaccuracy of presenting desire as a narrative. Because ultimately, and I think Henriksen would agree, I don’t believe that narrative today is so firmly within the grip of the patriarchy—narrative is so universal, and it belongs to everyone, and it’s not necessarily a violent form. And of course, many books do present desire narratively—namely, romance novels—which rely on a set of tropes through which a reader expects to be rewarded. But presenting desire non-narratively is less satisfying, and this lack of satisfaction seems more accurate to the sensation of wanting something. Narrative removes the surprise of desire, the thrill of it, lending it instead predictability, coherence, consummation.
Both of these books—which, as books of poetry, are less interested in traditional narrative—encourage me as a reader to build a narrative through my own desire to learn more, to know these speakers of these poems, who both seem, through the details provided, familiar enough for me to not unfairly imagine them as the poets themselves. And in this way, I feel myself becoming a voyeur, or perhaps a scopophilic, one who loves looking, a term which bears the association of the male gaze. Henriksen reclaims this term in her long poem “Laura’s Desires,” which is all about watching films about female desire, and which includes a sex scene where the speaker watches a friend bring her girlfriend to orgasm. “I don’t need a narrative to begin identifying,” Henriksen writes, and this I feel too, reading both books. Henriksen mentions her partner Morgan by name, and now I know, or imagine I know, something about their relationship, these two real people I have met in real life. I can’t decide whether this knowing makes me uncomfortable or excited, or both, and if that is, in turn, a rendering of desire.
iv. Vague Wants
One of the most compelling ideas that these books return to, and that I can’t stop thinking about, as I write and think so much about desire and what it means to write about this subject, is its inherent vagueness. Desire is rarely for something so much as desire is the act, the embodiment of wanting. The pleasure of desire is not about actually obtaining its object—that would only result in self-abnegation. And so, to write about desire seems to require some vagueness of language, some hinting at, some approaching things through dreams, through films, through side doors, to imagine other possibilities, which is what is most hot. Eroticism seems most solidly located in the suggestion of something—the potential, the fantasy—without the consummation, which manifests in these poems as a gesturing towards, some measure of withholding. “I continue to want nameless things, things with names that seem wrong, things I don’t want to want, things I’m afraid of that nevertheless when I manage to fulfill make me feel like an electrified current for days on end, until that feeling fades too,” Henriksen writes at the end of a poem about her desires. As I read these lines I feel frustrated—I want more specifics, I want to see more deeply into the speaker’s world, particularly at the end of this long poem-essay about desire. But I think that frustration is in fact the point; this vagueness forces me to reflect on what I myself want, and attempt to call it into focus—or at least note the ways I desire for narrative, for specificity, perhaps for voyeurism. I desire to know another’s desire, perhaps in order to better know the nature of my own.
In Chang’s poem “Best Buddies, 1990,” titled after the Keith Haring image depicting two characters with their arms around one another, rays spiking from their heads and arms, they write “Some poems are abt the symphony, how the sounds come together, the specific words aren’t terribly important… / … Let’s strive for fewer words & more feeling.” This is a poem all about sound, how moving it can be, how phrasing something a particular way can elicit a feeling that is unrelated to the exact meaning of the words employed. But it’s also about the limits of language to describe intimacy, or at least the limits of descriptive language.
“writing abt sex is hard to do. it comes off as too vanilla on the page: weirdness & a sense of wonder are important. there’s always longing. make it linger,” Chang writes in “Six Bits.” This poem consists of six short prosaic list sections, which range among observations of news items, memories, sex, dreams, and imaginings. If love renders life like a dream, as Henriksen has suggested, then desire renders life like a poem: it collapses space and time, it calls into focus images, sensations, new voices and forms of seeing and saying something.
And while thinking about wanting across time and space, both books delve into matters of state violence and destructive power, making demands or elucidating hopes and dreams for the future. They often do so by diverging from the familiar lexicon of the book or the speaker’s own voice. Though questions of nationhood and state power recur throughout Synthetic Jungle, these issues are most directly addressed in “U.F.O. & Dolphin, 1982,” a poem that once again takes a Keith Haring image for a title, using it to explore the case of the killing of a fifteen-year-old Mexican boy, Sergio Hernandez, by an American border agent across national lines. The reuse of Keith Haring titles throughout this book is a subtle way to invoke the fraught history surrounding gay sex that palls this speaker’s described acts. We’re reminded that the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s, like contemporary state violence, was a mass death for which the US government is at fault. This is a poem about futility, the difficulty of suing the state, but also one about how things might be different in the future. Like Chang’s poems about romantic desire, this is a poem about possibility.
“Power accelerates / Death,” Henriksen quotes Etel Adnan in “Dream Dream Dream,” the first of two essay-poems that compose the book. Henriksen continues, “I try to think of all the ways state power abbreviated the lives and accelerated the deaths of sleeping refugees, but there are so many, stretching across lifetimes, creating a string of waking nightmares, many holes in the world.” In this construction, power is presented as the opposite of desire: if desire is a means to stretch time, if it exists adjacent to it, then state power accelerates time, plummeting toward an end. Desire is endless; power is teleological. But Henriksen also alludes to a failure of imagination here. She is unable to think of all these “holes in the world” because there are too many. State power rushes us into the realm of the fixed, and in this overwhelm there is no room for dreams, for possibility.
And yet, the dream space, or the poem space, seems to represent a site of potential for new ways of being and existing in the world. Henrikson writes:
I consider the possibility that the kind of freedom afforded in dreaming might offer an example of a kind of freedom we could pursue for each other in waking life. In dreams I can recognize a place or a friend, for example, even if their appearance is transformed, such that it is both a kind of reunion and a first meeting. This defamiliarizing simultaneity allows for an unstable complexity of identity, a fundamentally uncategorizable uncertainty, that if I offered to everyone I know, if I incorporated into my language, would make me a much better friend, lover, neighbor.
She suggests this form of interpersonal freedom: a sort of spiritual approach to manifesting liberation on an everyday basis, which is perhaps the logical place to begin enacting one’s own emancipatory politics.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that word “free” as I’ve attended rallies, chanted “Free Palestine” over and over until the words transform into a liturgy of sound and fervent feeling—how vague and all-encompassing the word is, endlessly interpretable, and necessarily dynamic. And here I think this is the answer I’m being provided, no matter how frustrating that is to my narrative-seeking mind, in search of denouement. It is this “defamiliarizing simultaneity” that these books offer over and over again—a tension between desire for power and desire in spite of one’s power—a generative state for both the speaker and the reader. Perhaps it is impossible to delve into desires without returning to the general, the vague. But perhaps part of the pleasure of reading these books is the wanting for something more, something that will never quite be given to me, something I can continue to desire, though I don’t know quite what it might be.
Ultimately, I think the reason I’ve been sharing my poems, my powerpoints, my theories with people, in an effort to discuss what I want or what I think I want, is because they provide a layer of non-narrative form that allows me to talk about what I’m feeling in a more comfortable, perhaps more socially acceptable fashion. It’s hard to tell someone about a crush without slipping into cliché, without feeling childish, and without eroding some of the mystery and excitement of erotic potential. But within the space of a poem, the desire never has to end.