I start with the basic proposition that avant-garde poetry foregrounds language (rather than external signifiers of ‘reality’) as the basic raw material.

From this a number of other presumptions follow: 1) Avant-garde poetry unequivocally declares its opposition to styles of writing, and thinking, that do not foreground language. 2) Language manifests as a provocation, a political statement, though it might often appear that the language is not explicitly political. 3) Avant-garde poetry redefines the personal, because it redefines the political, in a way that mainstream poetry can’t or won’t. 4) Questions of originality, i.e. whether poetry stems from genius or collaboration, become redefined to the advantage of the pure materiality of language. 5) Avant-garde poetry creates its own readership; it seeks readers that do not yet exist for each instance, its essential subject being the act of reading.

Language is reality. Reality is language. Avant-garde poetry operates along this endless tension.

Let me back off a little, and explain why I was forced to think about these matters. My first poetry book, My Tranquil War and Other Poems, engaged deeply with political and public matters, and the history of art and writing, but without foregrounding language. Although I have to say, looking back at it now, it was quite adventurous in manipulating forms — there are ghazals, sonnets, villanelles, and even a sestina, a zestful reinterpretation of poetic conventions, an obsession with exploiting metrical forms for new means — so it was experimental in that sense. But there was still a direct relationship between an original, self-mediating external reality, i.e., the political turbulence of the 2000s. The reader had a large, but limited, role to play in interpreting the book, since the facticity of the external events wasn’t in question.

On exploring the love affair between language and experimental poetry

What is different about Soraya, my new book? I’ll pick a sonnet, at random, to illustrate, so here it is, sonnet no. 32.

Dateline Karachi: checksum, chequered flag
of chemical abuse, casting bread upon the
waters of laughter, the bravura of bilboes,
binary operation upon the beach buggy of
my favourite bawd, while you, Soraya, bead
of hijra, high holiday leaping over Hilbert
space, monofilament for monition, fjord
between my legs, discover the fissionable
rush basket, my earphone to earth. Soraya,
the monkey on my back is a mongoloid
nitwit, Nkrumah’s noetic no-fault prize,
drinking palm wine, Pandarus panicking
me to monoglot cycling. I am left mucking
about the misprision of my mulatto rule.

How interesting that the book randomly fell open at the only sonnet that has the word Karachi in it! This book lends itself endlessly to such serendipities. At the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I read from it three summers ago in manuscript form, members of the audience only had to mention certain words — like Shiraz — for me to find a sonnet with it. After the book launch at Houston’s Brazos Bookstore this May, some of us gathered at a nearby watering hole, and randomly picked poems to define different friends, and it was always serendipitous. We did the same for politicians like Clinton and Trump, again with accurate results.

So what makes this book so protean at turning out expected (but unexpected) meanings? More importantly, is it typical of avant-garde writing to bend to the reader’s will for meaning in this manner?

I wrote Soraya in a burst of inspiration over the course of three weeks in the spring of 2013, 100 sonnets in the same baroque style, relating the narrative of my relationship with my muse, Soraya (a name whose meaning I didn’t know until recently). At least, that is how I explained it at the time to myself, because it was important to hold on to the idea that the book was narrating a history, even if personal.

Soraya is repetition (100 sonnets in exactly the same style) and collage (fragments of verbal fusillades from dictionaries), as is the wont of postmodernism, and it also sets itself constraints (each sonnet has some consistent peculiarities, such as the recurrence of Soraya in the octave and the sestet, the close juxtaposition of certain discourses such as medieval medicine and 20th-century science, etc.) as a way of liberation, which is true of Oulipo and other ‘mechanically-generated’ poetry of the latter half of the 20th century. But more than that I see Soraya as a specifically postcolonial book; the kind of constraint it operates under is almost a reflection of the constraints imposed upon the narrated self or the colonised subjectivity, and it appropriates the constraints not in a merely parodistic way but as a way of declaring freedom.

I had written three poetry books before Soraya, in a public-spirited style of lament or elegy, and I have written five poetry books since Soraya, all in a playful experimental vein — so there is a before Soraya and an after Soraya. The last three books are called Confessions I, II, and III (I will finish III this month), and again, as with Soraya, it has been important for me to tell myself that each book is telling a story of some kind. Confessions is obvious, The Art of Love was my attempt to grapple with grief upon the death of my beloved cat Fu, Death is a Festival was a look at different systems of belief grappling with our most intractable reality.

To go back to what I said at the beginning, my ex post facto justifications aside, these books are really about creating a new self through reinventing language, stepping away from the reality compelled by conventional language. Avant-garde poetry, as I said at the start, can only be conceived as existing in opposition to something, so what is Soraya confronting?

I think that realist writing of all types, whether prose or poetry, is a way of validating the capitalist way of life that the West has experienced for about 500 years and the rest of the world more recently, since the age of imperialism got going. Realism is the ideological arm of capitalism, whereas language that is not realistic is capitalism’s enemy. Official literary culture, everywhere and at all times, repeats the reality that those who have power would like the powerless to believe in. It takes external conditions as given, it does not pursue revolutionary ethics, it believes that there is a stable self that is in emotional control; confession, in this mode of writing, is simply to purge, to clear out the system, making it ready again for capitalism. If official literary culture, which traffics in the banalities of the domestic self, is the enemy, then so is official political narrative an enemy for avant-garde writing.

But if we redeploy the languages of advertising and movies and mainstream romance and markets and globalisation and identity politics, are we only reinforcing the strength of the existing paradigm, giving in to it and playing by its rules? For example, when a conceptual poet like Kenneth Goldsmith writes books like The Weather, Traffic, Sports, or The Day, reproducing huge un-processable chunks of weather or traffic reports or sports commentary or the contents of a daily newspaper, and then calls it poetry, is it avant-garde poetry, or has it leaned over too far in the direction of capitalist kowtowing, even if it does foreground language?

For me, there has to be more than a disengagement from the self, any self, as is the wont of language poetry, a la Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Bob Perelman, and others of the West Coast Movement that started circa 1970, as a bold rebuke to the then-resurgent romanticism in the form of 1960s confessionalism.

In the Soraya sonnet I have quoted above, I believe there’s a tension between earthiness (whose most abrupt manifestation can be terrorism or physical devastation or torture) and etherealism (“the Hilbert space” or a sort of infinity of the self, translated through language that elevates itself beyond the weight of history, or historicism), whose resolution is the ongoing struggle of the divided (though not schizophrenic) subject, i.e., the poet who is “left mucking /about the misprision of … [his] mulatto rule.” This is a form of translocational hybridity that refuses to partake of the commercialised transnational hybridity (the easygoing form of multicultural politics) that refuses to come to terms with the weight of history.

This sonnet, I think, is weighty but not sombre, it speaks of “the bravura of bilboes,” the “bead of hijra,” the “monofilament for monition,” all the while as the “earphone …[is trained] to earth”. There might, perhaps, have been an alternate history, not the one we have actually experienced, but where liberation from colonialism’s thought-structures might have occurred, a “no-fault prize” that delivered what it promised, not the desperate state we find ourselves in, “panicking … to monoglot cycling.”

What if I had presented this form of internal dialectic, torn between actual history and an imagined past (that is to say, a future), in language that wasn’t so invested in baroque maximalism? It is immediately obvious that without fracturing, fragmenting, disorienting, marauding, and transplanting language in this form, wilfully indulging in anomaly and anachronism, I couldn’t have presented the impulse to freedom, the naming of enemies, in quite this way. All the while, I think, this sonnet confronts the ultimate enemy — official verse, or the narrative of capitalist realism — that pretends there is a project of history that is distinguished and forward-looking, subject to rational control by the capitalist self. That is a lie, and to delete that lie, it takes outrageous fleetness and dexterity.

Soraya is repetition (100 sonnets in exactly the same style) and collage (fragments of verbal fusillades from dictionaries), as is the wont of postmodernism, and it also sets itself constraints (each sonnet has some consistent peculiarities, such as the recurrence of Soraya in the octave and the sestet, the close juxtaposition of certain discourses such as medieval medicine and 20th-century science, etc.) as a way of liberation, which is true of Oulipo and other ‘mechanically-generated’ poetry of the latter half of the 20th century. But more than that I see Soraya as a specifically postcolonial book; the kind of constraint it operates under is almost a reflection of the constraints imposed upon the narrated self or the colonised subjectivity, and it appropriates the constraints not in a merely parodistic way but as a way of declaring freedom.

If all of world history and all the world languages are the field of poetry, if art, architecture, music, dancing, geology, biology, chemistry, economics, and psychology all make up the field of poetry, then obviously it is a rebuke to capitalism, which only permits a certain narrow terrain upon which to operate the mechanics of poetry or other forms of writing or private thought. It is in this sense too that constraint becomes liberation, because the wide-open — infinite — field of poetry demands a subjecthood that pays attention to itself, its historical presence, by way of mechanical constraint. Again, this is constraint of the poet’s choosing, not imposed upon the poet, as would be true, for example, if I wrote official confessional verse.

The idea of repetition is potent. It has made me think of Soraya as just a prefatory opening, not even a poem but a glance at one, though it is actually 100 sonnets, to the five books (and who knows how many more) that follow in its stylistic vein. This is another way that constraint (because each book predicts the parameters of constraint for the future ones) makes both the poet and the reader more intelligent, because if a book is just a poem (or a partial one) and if a series of books is just a fragmentary poem, then there is the obvious implication that one’s life, measured in days or years or decades, for example, is also just an indefinable continuity, though we do not see it most of the time because the constraints we operate under are not self-imposed. Again, the structure of language, when it is subverted for freedom, has an exact reflection in the structure of reality, as it too is subverted for freedom.

If postmodernism is supposed to be cool, then I would say that Soraya — and the five books of maximalist language-frenzy that I have since written — is a hot book, hot to the senses because it doesn’t know where to stop, where the end-points for realist self-absorption are. It wants to absorb all of history and politics, all of the various discourses (scientific, spiritual, humanist, technocratic, literary), in order to leave the self finally exposed, which is a hot thing, as opposed to the cold cover-up so-called confessionalism represents.

There is an awful lot of ‘waste’ going on with language today, especially with the rise of new communications technologies, and Soraya takes this waste as also an enemy, it constitutes a brief for preservation of language, by way of silence. This is true despite its own indulgence in a fisticuffs of language, because it is not cool parody, it is not replication without a defined enemy, it is not content to make words reappear as lost entities. Ironically, the extent of waste in the use of wordage under capitalist technologies of the self (ranging from self-help and romantic love to management discourse and market ideology) makes words disappear, and while Soraya is a sort of mirror image of the overindulgence, it is not the same thing, because it is historical, it partakes of the histories of capitalism and colonialism and selfhoods old and new.

If I fragment the subject, I’m also claiming a different history for the book, reimagining it as not a capitalist book (of life or manners or literary behaviour) but a book of free-floating discourses no longer able to oppress. Discourse oppresses, discourse does so more than any technique known to modern life, it is how we are constituted as unfree, so fragmentation means that words are appearing on the page not just as enemies of received discourses but as friends of the authentic self.

I do believe that there is a discoverable self, there is original subjecthood, I just don’t think that one gets to it by way of any of the received discourses, and I also don’t think, as opposed to the language poets, that it is not an interesting question in itself. It is, I think, still the only question that matters, because consciousness, as long as it is cluttered, prevents silence from being heard. Again, it is ironic but intentional that a book like Soraya appears to be so cluttered — but it is not! — because that is the mode it most wants to combat, mining the histories of the discourses of language, poetry, and humanist values to offer a “book” that is free, leaving it up to the reader to arrive at its true price, the investment that will make it worthwhile.

All experimental writing does this; it asks the reader the question, what is the price you will pay?

I will end by saying that I have been consistent in thinking that reclaiming language (not just the language one is born with but all the languages extant and dead, obscure and accessible, remote and slangy), taking possession of it, is the most radical political act. If one exits the language of capitalist realism, then one exits that dark reality as well, and starts creating one’s own alternative reality. One name for an alternative reality like that is Soraya, the muse, the lover, the spiritual partner, the literary master and servant, the open book that partakes of the richness of the form and structure of a book but that is its embodied antithesis.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 3rd, 2016