Partisans
Rodrigo Toscano
publisher: O Books, 1999
isbn: 1-882022-37-8
price: $10
Toscano's Partisans injects a startling new breath of urgency in contemporary poetics, one that skates awfully close to such politically activated texts as Bruce Andrews' I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up or Myung Mi Kim's Dura, but which doesn't lose its very specific questioning of political agency beneath its cross-cut surface.
The twelve parts of this book-length work each consider a specific moment in thinking about progressive politics -- "unveil[ing] the conjoined agency of human labor and grammatical component" in Barrett Watten's phrase from the book jacket -- with such titles as "Present Perfect Progressive" and "Simple Past" identifying the perspective taken amidst the historical flux, pointing to concepts of closed historical determinacies and never ironic ideas of utopias to-be.
Its short, tight lines, which move through several modes of rhetoric from the direct address, the declamatory, the lyric and the quasi-hermetic, never lose steam as Toscano plows through his manic considerations of aesthetics and society. The following is near-Poundian razzling of activist poetics, condemning as it is precise:
Flouting history, rambling spleen'd
<sign of Timidity>
Fumbling segues, trancing sex'd
<a sign of Banality>
Spouting ethics, shunning touch
<a sign of Celebrity>
Sorting concepts, draping needs
<a sign of Obscurity>
[9]
Toscano's "wordwork" -- the poem is obsessed with the nature of poetry as "labor" in an poetic economy that is, even at its margins, compromised by the exigencies of the "market" -- is always tempered by his quest for the "collective" revolutionary consciousness, such that even the short time it takes to bring the poem to the print drops it from its immediate social moment:
By the time this all gets sketched, typed
circulated, confiscated, allocated
celebrated, denigrated, reiterated
obfuscated, recuperated, activated
it will have lost its gain
so to speak
will have had to begin
again
between
[12]
he writes, staring into the space between the immediacy of his spoken address and the near-archival quality of the white page and the bookshelf.
Partisans takes issue with "beauty" -- it is as pared and honed as Brecht's later poetry -- and certainly against the idea of a beautiful soul, but consequently avoids the pessimism and turn toward the ironic that much latter-day lyricism possesses in the face of disappointment with the revolutionary moment.
So back to irony-ville
petty bourgeois-ville
round and round
eclectic hectic and peptic
[20]
His metaphysics of social "Agent(cy)" seems to center around the idea of a "social surplus" which can be engaged for social transformation for "Doing" -- a surplus created in the margins of the bourgeois self and which, to this time, has been the static, inactive area from which most avant-garde American poetries have surfaced.
And why not
partisans
So so democratic
postmodern muzzling
Having been fitted
having been summoned by it
In the present (but of the past)
the subject
We 'ye, as a has been
or stand in -- for
Now? A muffled yet pressing now --
[41]
he asks, bringing to light the necessity of a singular, staunch view amongst the calls for plurality and untranslatability that have become catchwords of late-progressive literary and political theory.
However, even Toscano realizes that, in this case at least, his verbal assay may not be more than a tone mourning the loss of collective action and will in the later 20th century, an urge toward "the dazzling brightness / of realism," the "tattered / fettered / committed."
Poetry may very well be the unsatisfactory vehicle, as he writes toward the end, imagining himself before a crowd:
So I'm facing faces
as I recite this
as I'm looked at
quizzically?
[47]
But this line is followed by "toward yourselves too", throwing the ball back in the court where he has, fairly and unpretentiously, returned it, into the minds and hearts of the readers who are being challenged by this extraordinary, difficult, but noble and ennobling text. "Readers / as agents" [49].
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