Short reviews: SOME BEHEADINGS, Aditi Machado
I'm not done with my review, so to start things off: here are some questions and ideas to guide your review-writing. Take them up as you will.
- What is "beheaded", in this book? What, if anything, regrows, stands in for, or renews the lost head(s)?
- What notions of speakerhood--does such decapitation extend?
- Consider headedness.
- What structures of the book show up in the linguistic habits of the poems? Which poem or section best evinces the thematic concerns of the whole?
- Do the parts form such a self-congruent whole? Is there a different and more suitable framework for thinking of their collectivity (arrangement, bouquet, rhizome, network)?
- What other modes, disciplines, forms intersect on or offscreen?
- Aditi translated the novel Prosopopoeia by Moroccan/Francophone author Farid Tali--excerpts here and here. Do these poems evince a "translational sensibility", and how?
Bonne chance,
Jean
Good questions.
ReplyDeleteAlso, in keeping with the "Zach theme" of the past couple of weeks, here's an interview between him and Aditi: http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/aditi-machado-interview/
Johannes
Order and the Lyric Lack Thereof: Aditi Machado's Some Beheadings
ReplyDeleteIt’s one thing to come across a poetry collection and intuit the order motivating its internal logic. It’s another thing entirely to witness the active uncovering of that order in real time. And it’s the rarest of occasions when those two experiences meet, when the ordering becomes an act in and of itself, and when the thinking that went into such an order is on full display. Such is the case in Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings, a work that assumes as capacious a stance towards lyric potentiality even as it surmounts the longstanding tradition of lyric itself.
Machado’s latest collection does indeed ask its readers to lose their heads for it, to feel its full sway and fall under its own particular spells. Some Beheadings is, in fact, a demanding collection, not because of its uncovering of new terrain, nor for its use of familiar conceits. Rather, the collection’s power rests largely on its own realization of Emily Dickinson’s oft-cited criteria for lyric as a standalone genre: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” As Some Beheadings demonstrates, there is another way: Machado does not assume that her work will blow our heads off—our heads are, in fact, already in the process of coming apart at the seams. To complete the decapitation requires little more than an outside wobble.
To that end, Much of Some Beheadings’ success relies on its deliberate portrayal of the private and public mivide. Machado begins her collection with an explicit connection between them. She writes—with direct attention on order, routine, and dailiness—that “Every day I wake & my life / is private. I see a sun. A coiling / memoir,” but in doing so she eschews the decapitating capacity of poetry (á la Dickinson) in favor of a quieter moment, courtesy of John Stuart Mill’s characterization of lyric as “an utterance overheard.” Overheard and explosive: two actions attributed to lyric that remain entirely antithetical and yet, at the same time, completely in keeping with one another in the world of Machado’s making.
This emergent tension begs for a properly parsed explication, and therein lies the importance of Machado’s ordered investigation into (the unreliability) of “logic” as institution. She gives us the significance early on in the collection by defining both “want” and “need,” arguing in the same poem that “When a body desires / its continuance / that is need” and that “When it desires / its dissipation / that is want.” Such an apparent definitional logic, however, remains up for grabs in Some Beheadings; Machado herself proclaims at the closure of these definitions that “I make an order”—reserving total control to the poet as she activates her own struggle toward lyrical logic and, more broadly, world-making understanding as such.
(Last paragraph of my review below):
DeleteThat said, this world of Beheadings, defying any and all expectations, shakes off the poet’s singular control. To wit, Some Beheadings’ order does not hold its cards close to Machado’s chest alone: at various points, she professes that “One of the world’s patterns is collective,” that the measurable success of a poem rests on “Forget[ting] volta” and “find[ing] its / opposite,” and that, when considering poetry itself as an ordered and ordering mechanism all its own, the language of beheading isn’t encompassed in mere closure alone: “In the medial moments like a closing couplet I said one thing / and then another into a coliseum or seashell.” What Machado gives us instead is the half-baked process of thought itself, a system of ordering, yet a system that fails to encapsulate all that can be overheard, anything that can be ordered in full, offering—more accurately—a sense of the world and of the mind in equal motion, in equilibrium, of a mind striving to meet the world it’s presented with. Such a stance, then, relishes the weeds that lyric finds itself among. Such a stance, then, offers a path to how Machado opens her own approach to the contingent lack of order, while still illustrating how her “head capitulates to [those weeds],” where “Little plants, little events” meld into the same phenomenon so that the poet can aptly and truthfully proclaim “That’s how / I think” so that “A decapitation, a lovely guillotine” are one in the same in effecting what “lays [her] mind / in the weeds.”
In Some Beheadings need and desire, subjecthood and subject-making, god and self all collapse into a shared state, and in this new mobeus-body seek to encounter language's interiors, fashioning of them a moveable, non-static habitation in which the reader finds itself stunned. It is an intimate space that nonetheless casts an eye onto the swirling vortext of uni-verse it's placed in the middle of the floor. "When one enters a room one becomes its audience." One can't help but wonder from whence this omniscient voice is guiding us to this room. From the hole in the floor? Did the voice make this hole? Is one meant to Enter this hole? Disappear?
ReplyDeleteBut then, "[e]vents collate bodies. The copula is/ witting. It nests toward death, chooses to recquisition/ via tongue, unpierced, uncut. I'll cut it when I want to know more."
These gestures of dismantling--especially those working through and against the "I"--bring to life a psycho-spiritual essence of what Homi Bhabha interrogates in How Newness Enters the World, make moves to imbue this newly forged space of universally-aborted-self with generative eyesight, with an eyesight/i-site that utters Itself and Us into being. Through the collapsing of confessional and removed/observational propulsions the I becomes a vehicle--vehemently made up of the You and the One and the gods and the room--for the ''continua of transformation'' embedded in the Use of language. All this crescendos in the penultimate shake, "Archaic". The lip, the precipice from which all words must fall, this lip being a universal site of sitting and gazing into the vortext in the floor: "Speech? The only way is to turn outside turn into an outside./There a lip".
Aditi Machado's book Some Beheadings moves in a calm solipsism through a world constantly materializing and dissolving into the mist, a world only ever reliant on this body's existence in relation to it. The syntax has a categorical impulse, one that documents and dissects the speaker's status as a subject in a sensationalist approach- "Every day I wake...I remember...I see...I think..." In this calm progression, the body is implicated in systems like sexualization, temporality, and society. The materializing body is shifting within fluid contexts, and with calm contemplation, the world rematerializes- "'I am my land, / expressed' & expression."
ReplyDeleteTo foreground this collection with what the poems are "doing" or "achieving" would be reductive. They are living, moving, and experiencing, always with precise intent of the reverberant effects- "I walk as if moving will evaporate as if scent." In a final movement, the ever coalescing body is submitted to sleep. After painstakingly establishing the physical movement, implications, and parameters of this body, it becomes ruled by the evanescent subconscious. With this parting turn, Descartes famous philosophical proposition is pushed into a mystic realm. "I think therefore I am" becomes "I think therefore the world exists."
In conversation with Jane Wong, Aditi Machado asks, “if nothing culture or religion offers you works, what’s left?” This question is directed toward Machado’s translation of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia. Where Prosopopeia attends to another’s decay, Machado’s Some Beheadings inhabits the space created by the assertion of decapitation. Nothing about the book reads as explicitly violent, but haunts permeate the poems and leave permutations of pain: fascists, “thorning paths.”
ReplyDeleteThe language of Some Beheadings bends in its hauntedness, exemplifying a relentless fluidity and authorial grace. Memory and religion dance with each other throughout, among myriad prismatic themes and symbolisms and mappings, through the space that is lack, that is “beheading.” She writes: “I is an orient.” Directed by self, self-that-is-orient (read: noun, adjective and verb), “There is a heart.”
Perhaps it is Machado’s tone of just-barely-detachedness that renders Some Beheadings so transfixing. Self—within and without danger, propaganda—maps self, maps place. Where memory becomes religion, or is classified as such, there is the “deep,” there is an anaphoric “circle,” there is a going inward. Some Beheadings, in its tone of objective-cum-subjective, and/or subjective-cum-objective, holds “what’s left” and widens the spatial remains. She writes with no resolution: “Something inwardly:”
https://lithub.com/silence-is-a-ghost-jane-wong-and-aditi-machado-in-conversation/
Hey! This micro-rev. could obviously use some more thought/consideration, but here's what I have:
ReplyDelete"Some Beheadings" by Indian poet Aditi Machado, is as floral and fresh as a mint leaf snapped. Its skin: a 'textile', "Rayon, a cotton tag" composed in a language privately felt in public. This is a collection whose politics, like the language these poems (as a verb) event, "collocate bodies"; bodies that spill from one to the other, like "a circle empties / into another circle". But what spills? Is it 'water'? Here "one of the [poem] world's patterns is collective," the way images and sounds, like violences, accrue in the invisible.
Indeed, violence and language work hand-in-hand; "a bracken, a tongue meet"; an "I // & the fascist in I...reinventing".
One criticism of this spilling, and accrual of repeated phrases, might be its formal conservatism, and yet, here, the economy of these poems signals, instead, a poetics of scarcity. Among the most striking moments in this collection is when the head of the speaker, or the linguistic subject, "capitulates" into its flora:
...Little plants, little events. That's how // I think. A decapitation, a lovely guillotine wind lays my mind // in the weeds. That's how // I touch a plant. My water touches its."
Scarcity and violence meet in this poem's fecund "water", which the poem has alchemized from blood, urine, and of course itself. This is one of many ways that 'thinking' and 'touching', language and image, meet in this book. The way the multiple "I"s in the introductory poem, 'wend' in their field. These lines become more than image-objects or rhetoric, but become the paths of utterance itself -- "ruminants", simultaneously "grazing & still".
Despite the linguistic flexibility of these poems, they, like their thinking, are also deeply, profoundly felt.
A chicken with its head cut off might still be able to breathe, feed, run around. Certain houseplants can be propagated by cutting any one of its leafy branching stems and placing it in new medium. The poems in Aditi Machado's Some Beheadings makes these kinds of movements—they make various cuts in language that allow meaning to perambulate instinctively, proliferate from fragments. They coil, and they exude. They make space for the reader to step into the observatory globe from which they navigate a world that expands and travels from domicile to valley to desert to somewhere beyond sleep—the speaker invites us to step into the place of their head, rather than to supplant or identify with that head as our own.
ReplyDeleteThe book makes its shocking proposition in a curiously mute way—_Some_ Beheadings, it promises—the indeterminate quantifier demurs a definitive count. And who or what are among the beheaded, here? In one literal instance, the speaker implicates their self in a generalized beheading--"I / supported the ongoingness, // the goingson, some / beheadings, [...]" (23). And then again, "In the Weeds": "my head capitulates to them. Little plants, little events. That's how // I think. A decapitation, a lovely guillotine wind lays my mind / in the weeds." (41) And such beheading, it seems, opens a new, haptic, dialectic way of being in the world--"That's how I touch a plant. My water touches its." These poems consider the capacity of thought to enact the world, to propel the body through it, and the strange self-cancellation that this contact then makes.
The poems themselves are full of paths--garden paths, sentences that unfold syntactic hinges to produce expressions that wend and pivot to arrive in the unexpected. Thoughts that do not close, but gape open: "TO READ A SENTENCE FOLLOW ITS GRAMMAR TO THE PRECIPICE FROM WHICH IT LEAPS INTO SOMETHING LIKE TOTAL SURRENDER TO AN REM CYCLE" (81). Such opening--off with the head.
I am interested in the irony in Some Beheadings. “I” reiterates “my life is private”, yet “a mirror brightens the fascist in me”. “My” ideology is not only reflected, but also intensified in the mirror. The speaker’s “private” life is exposed in the private theatre after the “speech is the made the proscenium”, and the speaker’s language revealed and performed “my” life. In the third and fourth stanza, the lines “o privacy/coiling in the memoir – /a great day I will write/is not my private life.”, the speaker’s writing might be based on his/her personal life, but the narrative of private life is reconstructed and performed for readers.
ReplyDeleteIn the line “I spoke as in a wheel spokes”, spoke becomes the head of the phrase “wheel spokes”, and the speaker’s language might have the capability to mobilize like the spokes which can make a vehicle operate. “Some beheadings” occur when the word “ongoingness” reversed the order, and “on” replaces the original head of “going”. I am curious about the relationship between “the fascist in me” and “reinventing the language”. I wonder why “fascist”, a word associated with genocide, connects with the violent reordering of language.