photographs were hanging in the gallery and I said, although I hadn’t really seen them, that they were excellent. Perhaps because I paid him this compliment as if my knowledge of photography were considerable, he seemed eager to demonstrate some understanding of poetry, and he began to compare my writing with a Spanish writer I didn’t know. As he grew increasingly animated another smoker joined us, and after listening for a while he began to disagree with Abel, lightly at first, then with increasing intensity. The more heated the exchange, the more rapid the speech, and the less I understood; in the afterglow of what increasingly felt like my triumphant reading, however, I had the confidence to conduct or project a translation of pure will, and I came to believe I could follow the back and forth, which had the arc and feel of debates I’d heard before.
The poet to whom Abel likened me was a reactionary, the second smoker seemed to say, and his formal conservatism was the issue of his right-wing sympathies; my writing recalled him only in its sonority, but my formal openness signaled a supple capacity to take the measure of contemporary experience quite distinct from so-and-so’s fascistic longing for some lost social unity. My work, said the second smoker, was much more reminiscent of another poet, whose name I’d never heard, who fled Franco and died in exile, a poet whose capacity to dwell among contradictions without any violent will to resolution formally modeled utopian possibility. This Abel dismissed with a wave of his cigarette as a simplistic, knee-jerk association of formal experimentation with left-wing politics, when in fact the leading Modernist innovators were themselves fascists or fascist sympathizers, and in the context of U.S. imperialism, I thought he argued, reestablishing forms of sufficient complexity and permanence to function as alternatives to the slick, disposable surfaces of commodity culture was the pressing task of poetry.
One cannot overcome the commodification of language by fleeing into an imagined past, the second smoker might have countered, which is the signature cultural fantasy of fascism, but rather one must seek out new forms that can figure future possibilities of language, which was what my work was somehow doing, unbeknownst to me, placing recycled archival materials in provocative juxtaposition with contemporary speech. We were all in one group now, the smokers, many of whom were lighting second or third cigarettes, and it was clear that I was expected to weigh in. I said or tried to say that the tension between the two positions, their division, was perhaps itself the truth, a claim I could make no matter what the positions were, and I had the sense the smokers found this comment penetrating.
I lit another cigarette to help my aperçu sink in, and in the ensuing silence I tried hard to imagine my poems’ relation to Franco’s mass graves, how my poems could be said meaningfully to bear on the deliberate and systematic destruction of a people or a planet, the abolition of classes, or in any sense constitute a significant political intervention. I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I’d participated in that evening, then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.
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We tended to wake at the same time, Isabel and I, which