Robbie Burr Eginton

Let me begin. I am 



a Grinder. Bones are what I grind. 



  



I come from a long line. 



  



And I haven’t spoken recently 



to a child, but 



I remember 



  



childhood well – 



  



remember half cocked, livid, nowhere to climb. 



I mean to come on strong; 



  



maybe we can get acquainted here. 



  



You can’t know a man until you know his profession. 



Will you get to know me, boy? Will you 



  



walk with me while I explain 



how to grind an Englishman? 



  



In my work 



  



I don’t use many metal tools 



save a knife to ease the husking; 



  



instead I push my hands 



  



at what-was-flesh, unrigging it, 



at huddled masses of unincorporated cells 



and through fluids. 



  



Where at first they are dead bodies, tangent to my table, 



  



when I’m halfway through they carpet it 



and run apart through its grooves. 



  



And then the grinding of the bare bones. 



And then the baking of the white meal, 



  



alchemy! born 



  



into bones into 



bread I come (from a long line) from my workshop 



  



stained 



  



with no remorse Jack 



I am tired though 



and a Grinder is what I am; 



  



when I go to church my body 



is loose lost fumbling in the blind pew. 



  



Still you don’t know that my mother asked for no husband, 



  



and raised me up in this tall thin house; 



suckled me in the nursery down the hall, you must have passed it. 



  



And I chose to walk the church with a ruddy girl, 



  



purple pink and dust her skin - 



but you’ve met my wife. You clung to her 



breasts like her own babe, though I think your thoughts were less than filial. 



  



But you will never know her, never 



  



work in her as sunrise works in night, 



as my grindstone in bone. 



  



Jack, Jack. 



  



I still remember - it’s not easy to forget - 



my mother’s motto, passed to me: 



  



fee, fie, foe – 



  



meaning first 



the holding of land 



second the cursing of lovers 



  



and third, one on whom you’ll have to set your sight, 



  



someday, Jack, who will 



want you gone. 

I  have  been  fumbling  around  for  a  golden  ring



     polishing  a  golden  ring



*WH*ispers  :  there  will  be  a  murder  in  the  library



but



*there  is  something*,  maybe  a  silk  scarf



      maybe  a  red­-gel'd  footlight



maybe  a  golden  house



      Its  thatch  golden



     Its  wings  nesting



      Its  breath  baby  and  gentlefolk



       Its  inhabitant  skeletal



but  there  is  something            I  don't  know



   light  is  wild  and  cellular



  life  is  spiral  and  godlike



  I  never  had  a  sister



* What  is  it? *



     not the  murder  everyone  is



not    the  way  my  toes  sink  into  the  earth  like  they  were  rehearsing



for  something                      that  there  is  something



*  have  you  made  me  a  nameday  card? *



     Am  I  breathing  lace?   ice?



Porcelain  image  of  a  dear  old  bear



 but  there  is  something  /  but  there  is  something



  maybe just *gone *



*and  a  little  slant *



   porcelain  sister



    make  a  terrible  breathing  through  your  scarf



    it  is  to  make  a  golden  ring  bright  again



    someday  I  will  wander  up  and  down  the  bare  hill  wailing



  someday  the  difference  in  our  borrows  will  revolt



       cold  clouds  that  sweep  through  here



       don't  know  how  much  we  want  to  make  our  lives  right

This is my body.



This is my body.



This is my body, help me hold it together. 



Help me hold it together.



Help me hold it in tight.



Keep me from writing another



tonight. You



 



dumb piece of shit. You



think I should think



*brevity* is the soul of wit?



Liar, lyre. Veins on fire.



Wrapped round my body like piano wire.



 



Oh I can’t count my fits 



or the rest of my bits. 



But it says on my lid



 



that I come complete



with scandals and beatz



and sublime, ravine-ous, Venusian conceits.



 



switch.



*Satan broke his mirror when I came to you.*



*I sent a list of everyone I wanna maim to you.*



*And it was hot. But if it’s all the same to you,*



*I’ve been put off by the feeling you’re a game to you.*



*I’d effuse jagged flesh, leave my fame to you,*



Wait.



Was that a sigh, you



depreciated fuck?



Are my lines going nowhere? Am I too



embarrassingly millenarian for 2014? I know I really should be scrubbing amnion’s tatters 



with *this*



till they shiiiine like the top of the Chrysler Building. Or



is it that I seem...



tame to you?



Render me bread:



I’ll pass the blame to you.



 



switch.



Oh, to be fecund,



roiling, vast.



I scan in Widener



and poetry class.



My skeleton’s shaking, 



possessed of an ass. 



*Enough* inked twice on my 



biomass.



In my unending quest



to break* with the past



* even, up, bad, ground,



   clean, and last



I am going to dearticulate the joint between my tongue and throat.



 



Comes break, on loping on long. Suds came armies on hot concrete: ticker feed. Ragged skinjob. 



You should



understand that you do non-trivial harm.



 



*Temet nosce.*



What art thou?



-- Fuck, shit, ass, balls, 



*ow, ow, ow.*

In the United Federation of Planets 



pain 



  is not gone



 



In that Federation we still have memory   



  And it has not brought us down yet  



 



in the United Federation of Planets



                



we have abstracted away location



We know no place               



                   There is none. 



Where we once were, 



 



we have abstracted away language, 



   we have stripped off our zippers, 



we have found wisdom. 



 



 



And on the Starship



   swiftly a god         among men he walks consider                    it



   *walks*      commanding the ship voicewise    chainwise      anticipating



   counteraction, action the sweep of his stride.   This is Lt. Cmdr. Data. 



 



 



Let me remind you that he is trustworthy. Though gendered Data slick haired 



is stable. He is interface and rationale and execution. 



Let me remind you that we have beaten our televisions into agricultural implements. 



And to put *this* TV show in context: Let me remind you: Bursting forth 



like a time lapse flower: *Comes the knowledge that this kingdom will come to us.* 



We will abstract away hunger. There will be a season for every thing, 



time will turn each moment and bury it after. 



There will be a way through. There will be a number for every day, 



we will call to our gods still insistently but less urgently. 



We will hurt so much but pain will not be execrable. We will trust our machines to hold us, 



we will be able to afford to be careless of our genders, careless of our clothing, of our needs, 



we will perform the manners of the past and we will seek out new life and new civilizations 



and *walk* without location without appearance -- we will feel the counteraction 



swinging back to meet the action 



even as we are the action -- even unto the dusk aboard a starship, 



even through the night watch, the bent shoulders of hurting friends when we don’t know how to help them, 



even unto the return to Earth, the memory of what you were and the process by which you were changed, 



even unto the death of comrades children parents lovers, even forgiving, 



because if a MEASURABLE CHANGE has occurred then there is a beginning and an end, 



then somewhere somewhen we are certain of anything at all. 



 



 



                                                                When



                                            the cold dawn lurches over an alien world



                                I will lean my head on the chest of an android. Just for a moment.



          And then              we will see to the wounded.   



                              You may not know:



                   we have never been safe before.



    But in the 24th century morality will   burn



              like a warp core. 



 



 



How do you do it, Android? 



How, How to speak with steady voice, without pull to home or need for sex or need for anything to distract. 



How to follow rule, to stare economics down. 



How to find a path without place. 



How to insist upon what you don’t need, or want. 



How: an absurd ethics. How: search *as though* in need. 



How you changed everything, loose-limbed and striving 



    and clear-eyed ---- 



How can you live perfect, 



Data Why don’t you go to your quarters and just sit and stare?  



     Small wonder you have hoped to acquire our imperfections -- Data 



       your love



       is plain to see. 



  Lt. Cmdr. Data you have the bridge. 



Do us proud.

Look at the opening of Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” her monument or memorial to the years of Stalin’s Terror:



             No, not under the vault of alien skies,

             And not under the shelter of alien wings—

             I was with my people then,

             There, where my people, unfortunately, were.   



 



“There, where my people, unfortunately, were.”1  Could you write that line as an American poet? Even laying aside the “my people,” could you say “unfortunately”? To say unfortunately about the Terror is to reclaim that word completely—it was not merely injustice, sin, mass murder, but mishap, the utter failure of good fortune—and, by linkage, to make every surrounding word new and real again. American poetry is afraid, I think, of that total, reconstructive accuracy.



This accuracy is not unique to Akhmatova. Nor is it entirely a matter of content: it’s actually part of a style common to translated poems. This has something to do with what Steven Owen described, in his 1990 essay “What is World Poetry?”, as poetry that succeeds “not by words, which are always trapped within the nationality of language and its borders, but by the envisagements of images possible only with words.” But it’s not just portable images, not just poetry at one remove from native verse. Translated work has a linguistic style at the native level of the target language, a blessed awkwardness that we can value on its own terms, even if it is merely the accidental result of “bad” (overly literal) translation.



I’m going to call that style “adjective,” not because poems written like this are particularly adjective-rich, but because they throw themselves at (ad + ject) meanings which may not exist yet. Like noun phrases with a lot of modifiers, adjective poems fail to provide us with exact coordinates, making us triangulate—unsurprising, since translations require words that don’t exist, or don’t quite exist, in the target language. (Adjectives are the opposite of connotations.)  Adjective poems have air in them. They abandon puns in favor of literalism or unfamiliar clichés. Because they stand in ethical relation to their subjects, they are accurate even where they cannot be precise. The bee in my bonnet: why do I feel, reading translated “adjective” poems, that they touch the untouched parts of my language in a way only a foreigner could?



It’s hard to separate this style from the poetry of witness—poems, like “Requiem,” that mark public trauma on time. And we do have a sense that trauma is something that only happens to other people. Consider the following (translated) lines, found more or less by flipping at random through Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (hereafter AF; all emphases mine):



  



    and in their eyes worms pretended to be

            question marks



There is a literalism to the translation that produces awkward constructions in English, which,



            And in that cry such horror

            and such supplication

            so great was its despair

            that I asked the helmsman



reinterpreted as native poetic choices,



            I saw a man who had been tortured

            he now sat safely in the family circle

            cracked jokes ate soup



exemplify an aesthetic of accuracy, one genetically linked to a reportorial stance.

You may respond, isn’t this kind of witness poetry a twentieth-century practice? Why write about it in 2015? Just nostalgia for the 20th-century left? But look at Kirill Medvedev, writing in 2002 a poem only collected in English in 2012:



            Who’s to blame that

            Leni Riefenstahl remained alive

            while thousands starved to death in Leningrad;

            it’s not clear why we need to

            think about this now;

            tell us about something else,



 



This—witness poetry, adjective witness—is not a naïve or a fixed style, lacking in historical dimension. Medvedev is playing7  here with the history of the politics of memory, and the poetics. This might be how he deals with the commodification of public trauma (which—shocker—happens in Russia too). And others, like Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, or Israeli national poet Yehuda Amichai, write poems informed by public trauma but not centered around the need to bear witness.

But it’s also not an entirely native style. Medvedev and Akhmatova feel similar in part because the translation obscures the size of the gap between them; Akhmatova writes in fine rhyme and meter, while Medvedev uses free verse and seems in search of what a Slavist friend of mine called a “maximally blunt idiom.” Adjective style comes in part out of the ethical imperative that drives witness poetry, but it’s also created by the translator’s own ethical imperative to render the original as accurately as possible. This is not utilitarian protest poetry—it is the sought-after aesthetic byproduct of ethics, the pearl of translation. If we want to understand what feels like the honesty of such poetry, we have to postmodernly abandon the idea of the poet as the source of their own work.



And yet a lot of what draws us to this translated poetry—and to adjectivity generally—is its feeling of reportorial authenticity, that “total, reconstructive accuracy” which we (Americans, and especially White Americans) are not sure we have any right to claim ourselves, but which we are desperate to hear in others. And there’s something disturbingly imperialistic, or at least hegemonic, about this demand to eat other people’s tragedies. Owen thinks we accept “world poetry” only because we are “assured that the poetry was lost in translation.” But with the poetry of public trauma, we actively seek out the brutal, witnessing voice, and in the broader case of adjective poetry, we crave the blunt instrument of our own language made simple and strange. The foreignness of the poet merely authorizes the consumption of the style we are already hungry for. These, then, are practices of the undeniable, and we support them because we want to feel unable to deny them. A little bent, no?



I’ll end with an (overstated) speculation. Might the problem lie in the outlook of American poets? Far from strutting with unearned authority, we parody that strut. We pun. Compulsively talkative, we are actually too afraid of our own voices, too convinced of having no news to report, no public life to witness. Might this learned helplessness be why we (especially we on the left) try and get our jollies from foreign pain?



No, with a question. How do we get out of this?