The Brooklyn Rail

All works of art necessarily exceed their material dimensions. The poetry collection, perhaps more so than any other bound alphabetical text, is especially prone to makeover as multimedia, owing to poetry’s origins as a coupling of words and music, conditions in which audience and address are inherent and inherently linked. In this sense, the poem is indeed a text, and a text, in its etymological understanding, that is nothing if not always and already multiple: a script that precedes performance but also, in certain arrangements, exceeds it. Poetry, by virtue of its immanent modularity, continues to shape and inform what today we call “transmediation,” or the act of translating a single text across different (and sometimes multiple) platforms: one sign system to another. In this analysis, Matthew Walther’s recent New York Times editorial opining the death of poetry (“Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month”) could not be further from the truth. Poetry, as it continues to beg connections with disciplines and areas of culture well beyond literature and languages, feels increasingly more relevant today than in the one hundred years since T.S. Eliot published “The Waste Land,” troubling longstanding borders between high and low, aural and visual, original and copy, written word and gramophonic inscription, and opening up, moreover, a broader discussion about the nature and negotiations of textual reception; how we read a text across different formats.

Of course, moving from page, or screen, to performance requires—like all translation—a fundamental loss and revelatory change. Not all optical play can be articulated orally— think of Concrete poetry, or the polysemy of interwoven cleave forms—while performance is not and will never be a duplication but a rendition that involves repetition, variance, improvisation, elaboration, innuendo, error: the hectic tempos of being in a body under the constraints and pressures of the stage or the studio, what musicians, as the gramophone became normalized as a mass media and recorded sound gave way to recorded music, once called “phonograph fright.” How to bring both sound and sense together; how to transmit the phonetic and semantic in a different linguistic register while staying true to what one has already produced? Among the recurring questions confronting writers prior to any presentation of their work is whether a specific text insists upon a medium-specific message, and, if so, how to negotiate the expression of the word as something seen (that is read) with writing as something heard (that is read aloud). Perhaps the point is to displace the source, re-engineer the source code.

Every era has an operating system and today our understanding and application of a text might be likened to an interface, upon which myriad streams and technologies—chatbot, podcast, streaming video, digital photography, written word, meme—assemble and reconfigure. Even the idea of a “collection” of poetry as a stringing together or collation of poems problematizes ideas about the binary of or divisions between beginnings and endings, openings and (en)closure, repetition and variation, unity and multiplicity, which is to say: affinity, connectivity. Entering the chat is José Olivarez’s Promises of Gold/Promesas de oro (Henry Holt and Co., 2023), published dos-à-dos in English and Spanish, whose audio version begins with applause. Recorded, in part, during performances hosted by Brooklyn Poets, the audiobook as a text that is both recitation and citation, supplementary and processual, engages the question of aura and its fraught displacement parsed out nearly a century ago, in Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” What would it mean to entangle disparate times and spaces, to pick up the energy transferrable in a(nother) room, to be among the bodies assembled for an occasion?—live listeners that have in turn become spectral audiences to every reader of Promises of Gold/Promesas de oro’s sprawling audiobook, whose provisional trans-script includes the charge of crowd participation and José’s own notes on process, which includes explanations, addendums, and asides; the oft-invoked reminders that poetry can be found anywhere; that we should find more occasions to celebrate one another.

Likewise, Olivarez’s second poetry collection was conceived, as the author’s introduction explains, as a book of aspirations: “to wield these poems into a reflection of the world I want to live in.” By combining live performance deliveries and in-studio orations, the audiobook inverts the traditional experience of hearing a text: the private occasion made public has been recast as the public occasion made private. Written across eleven sections—what Olivarez refers to as “waves” or ondas—these are poems that were never meant to end in publication. With a narrative poetics laced with familial anecdotes, historical re-imaginings, frequent invocations to both god and the reader, and humor as a salve for grief, Olivarez considers what it might mean to extend tradition, family, and the broader concept of belonging. Building from his debut, Citizen Illegal, which examined the racialized and classist social structures of an Americas articulated in contradictions, Olivarez intertwines his ruminations about male friendship with the violence of nationalism, the reproduction of colonialism, the complicity of consumerism, the self-silencing of migration, the ruination of desire when it passes, as it often does, into greed, the toxicity of masculinity, and the burden of loving when heartbreak also signifies the absence of loving one’s self.

Olivarez has an affinity for returning poetry to the familial and familiar, elucidating, en route, the undercurrents of a continental Americas that so often go unspoken or neglected in both the institution and the intersections of media. “Escargot,” for instance, signals an opportunity for Olivarez’s speaker to introduce a story of cultural commodification and tokenization vis-à-vis college admissions interviews: the hunger that enfolds a luxury dinner in Paris with the privileges of academia and the institutional marketing of diversity. “Tradition,” Promises/Promesas’ first poem, announces the book’s desire to counter colonial practices by unearthing—and re-writing—foundational myth, and Olivarez accomplishes this early and often by deconstructing signifiers and their cultural associations. Pages later, Olivarez juxtaposes the two realities of a “Mexican writer,” the writer of Mexico or of Mexican descent as viewed through the Anglo Western imaginary—before the poem transforms into an instruction manual concerning the many different ways to enjoy tortillas, wherein “tortilla” might be read as the literary work itself, or perhaps as the virtual convergence between writer and reader, which creates the work, or still further: our consensual forms of sustenance, our manifold ways of sustaining ourselves and one another.

[…] we are still
discovering new ways to fold a tortilla. to cut a tortilla up.
to transform a tortilla into new worlds. to feed each other
with tortillas. […]
 (“Ode to Tortillas”)

The discourse of poetry today is relentlessly concerned with what a poem “says” and less and less interested in what a poem “sounds”: what it means vs. what it is doing. Literary celebrity, particularly in the realm of poetry, has manufactured not just an assumed essence of who—and what—a poet is or can be, but also reduced the heterogeneity of a poem’s meaning to a formulaic equation solved by reading poetry as if it were a piece of fiction, treating the swerves of body-mind relation as possible plot points, or perhaps more tedious, as nonfiction: the poem as autobiographical artifact. And yet Promises of Gold/Promesas de oro is unmistakably a testament to José Olivarez’s life and work, a ledger of loss, grief, joy, love, as Olivarez assumes the role of speaker with transparency and conviction, largely eschewing enjambment, formal arrangement, and syntactic deformation for a storytelling poetics carried by disarming candor, volubility, and vulnerability, a prosody which risks, at times, substituting the exploratory for the explanatory. Similarly, as narrator of the audiobook, Olivarez’s cluster of pitch and intonation—whether reciting his author’s note, David Ruano González’s note on translation, or the poems themselves—seldom strays from a carefully controlled monotone, an endeavoring for clarity that undermines Olivarez’s delight for words and his ability to surf their verbal channels with dexterity and the urge to discompose lexical borders. In contrast, Olivarez’s unrehearsed interactions with audience-collaborators in the sequences recorded live resonate with electricity. On the page, too, awe and wonder pulsate when Olivarez depicts life’s everyday complexities with aphoristic brevity, acknowledging—and insisting upon—the silences and the unspeakable, as he does in “Llorar”:

when my dad was laid off
he didn’t complain or cry.
i remember finding him
in the living room
moving his feet to all the words
he couldn’t say.

Or pages later, in the imagistic “Harlem Snapshot,” which telescopes, in the spare space of five lines, the precarity of physical labor amidst the break of day while accounting for the dignity and honor of the workers too often effaced by the infrastructural monuments they’ve themselves built. Promises/Promesas’s landscape is at its most uncanny and surprising when it ranges the mythic and the quotidian—the miraculous sprouting of a corpse flower, which blooms only when it has sufficient energy to do so, in an Alameda gas station, or, when its speaker connects the everyday and the emergency with critical self-reflexiveness, as exemplified in “More, Please,” a poem which recasts revelation(s) while troubling the ethical role of art and the artist in a time of death and suffering:

in the bible, it’s a flood. i told Erika i was a plant. sunlight
& water. water & sunlight. when my parents got sick
with covid i loved nothing. least of all myself. eight hundred miles away
doing what? being an artist? applause. sunlight filtered
through windows. the flood was a metaphor. i couldn’t sleep

David Ruano González’s insightful translator’s note speaks to the nuanced traffic of Spanish between the Americas of the plural, as well as the common geopolitical misnomer, an “America” that does not just erase but reproduces difference, and although Olivarez reproduces the lapse in conflating country with continent throughout the book, his poems speak to the repertoire of scripts and masks that persons of color have had to habitually wield in our everyday acts of survival in a country and within a Western culture rooted in white supremacism that is increasingly xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, and afraid, most of all, of what it might mean to find shared experiences within all of our differences. Olivarez holds up this mirror while calling out his own complicities under capitalism, as well as calling for alternative blueprints for resistance. Poems like “Mercedes Says She Prefers the Word ‘Discoteca’ to the Word ‘Club’” and “American Tragedy” speak to the shuttling of subject positions and registers of language, so common to persons who exist between cultures and countries. If we may read these poems as promises, they also serve as parables, in which everything that is untranslatable is sacred and everything that is sacred is out of sight, which is to say not wholly visible, not legible, to all, even those closest to us. “We don’t speak the same language,” Olivarez writes of his mom, “even in Spanish.” Perhaps Promises of Gold/Promesas de oro’s lasting lesson, in both English and Spanish, on the page and across sonic units compressed and converted, is that poetry’s currency is incommensurable; that poetry is not and can never be confined to a single mode, medium, methodology, or aesthetic school. Perhaps the most beautiful sound for artists working in the break of platform capitalism is the one that is heard each time and each time heard—that is seen, felt—differently. Change, real change, requires neither preservation nor assimilation, but modulation: the harvest brought by interaction and exchange and community; our sensitivity to take in.