The Aesthetics of Ruin Pt. 2: “a sucking century and its empty gold coat” [by Rochelle Hurt]

Yesterday I wrote about Rust Belt and ruin poetry mostly in terms of content and motifs, but today I’m thinking about form and style. What kinds of sounds and structures, for example, acknowledge and respond to post-industrial (or industrial) ruin?

The Hum of Jamaal May’s book (from yesterday's post) refers to a kind of music made by both man and machine, challenging the natural/manmade binary. In the post-industrial age, this binary is false, outdated, and irrelevant. Our food is engineered and chemically altered, our soil and water sources are laced with pipes, drills, wells, and fracking fluids (more hidden Gothic monsters). By the same token, however, our bodies are bolstered by titanium limbs and pacemakers, our pets are implanted with microchips, and we can replicate our cells in laboratories. For better and worse, we live in a hybrid world, and the natural is no longer strictly natural.

A post-pastoral poetics recognizes this. How is it reflected in form? Hybridity is one answer, but that can mean many things—blurred genre lines, multiple voices and modes of communication, aesthetic juxtapositions—which can look radically different.

In Traci Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins (Norton, 2012), the post-apocalyptic world is rife with unsettling post-pastoral imagery:

His apiaries are empty except for dead queens, and he sits

on his quiet boxes humming as he licks honey from the bodies
of drones. He tells me he smelled my southern skin for miles,

says the graveyard is full of dead prophets.

. . .
When you ask about resurrection, he says, How can you doubt?
and shows you a deer licking salt from a lynched man’s palm.

(from "Our Bodies Break Light") 

 This last image can be read as hopeful, but it reveals (remember that an ‘apocalypse’ is an 'unveiling') a dark truth about the natural world: it thrives on death. In the literal sense, this is old news—animals kill and eat other animals, worms and vultures feed on corpses, decomposing organic matter nurtures soil and roots, etc. The newness of this image has more to do with its corruption of the Romantic notion of the pastoral as bucolic, nostalgic, a salve for urban industrial life. This is what Brimhall’s apocalypse (of war, of social or ecological collapse, etc.) reveals.

 

photo: Thomas Hawk

 Joyelle McSweeney (who has written about the post-pastoral) incorporates post-pastoral ruin (of bodies) into her own apocalyptic vision. In her “King Prion” series from Percussion Grenade (Fence, 2012), mass production (of food) meets (meats) nature in the form of a prion, the type of fatally infectious protein that causes mad cow disease, a consequence of bad factory farming practices. The result is a musically frenzied voice that employs language as an infection, allowing each word’s sounds to spill into the next so that syntax and even meaning seem always in flux:

Crepe’d up a knife blade ladder on
Spectator shoes or gladiator sandals
Cut to the glut, Fata Androgyna,
To the fat of the matter.

The play of the form colonizes its content, mimicking the subject. The poem progresses lyrically more than logically. Likewise, linguistic mutations and lyric jump-cuts lead us through “What Work is by Philip Levine,” in which Levine’s old line of men waiting for work transforms into “a shipping line, corporate freight incarnate.”

And a vein is an artery of another color
but disguises itself when air touches it
like a server farm inside a shipping container
Knows no air
And ne’er shall be severed from its energy source

The laboring human body mutates into a server farm, veins and arteries into wires and data paths. The ‘ruin’ here looks shiny and modern, less like garbage—it is “the munificence/of a sucking century and its empty gold coat.”

I want to talk about this empty gold coat. We are surrounded by flashy products—disposable products so flashy that even our garbage glitters. In a poem that references Levine’s work, I can’t help but think about the irony in this fact, given the economic and ecological decay in which we live—due in part to the dysfunction of the post-industrial economic system, and in part to the product-obsessed culture born of that industrial economy in the first place. The gold coat is decadence in more than once sense.

It’s also an aesthetic. In his article on “the nearly baroque” in contemporary poetry, Stephen Burt describes an aesthetic “that puts excess, invention, and ornament first”—which, not so coincidentally, also seems likea great way to characterize consumer culture. All gold coat, no body—since the ‘natural’ human body seems almost obsolete. In the context of the poem, this image is post-pastoral, and in a way it is also baroque (perhaps more than nearly). If the (nearly or fully) baroque is concerned primarily with formal pyrotechnics, then it is a poetic manifestation of this age of artifice, overflow, and flashy junk. And if it is this excess that has created ecological, economic, and social ruin, then the baroque can be an aesthetic of ruin.  

photo: George Thomas

 

When I say ‘junk,’ it’s not an insult. I think there is room for quite a bit of variety in the category of the baroque, but McSweeney has made it clear that she wants to “go all the way”. Her voice is excessive, ecstatic, hyperactive, and in this way reflective of the things that fill her poems—infections, chemical irritants, consumer goods.

A baroque aesthetic can also say a lot about class—another connection to the post-industrial US economy, in which the middle class is forced by and large into the lower class. I use these terms in an economic sense, but there is, of course, another interpretation. As Johannes Göransson points out, the baroque is often thought of as tasteless (low-class).

Now, I’m not in the business of making manifestos, but an aesthetic that draws attention to formal excess in order to question the value of consumer culture, class distinctions, and cultural taste-making seems incredibly important and contemporary.

Tomorrow: an interview & poem from Lo Kwa Mei-en!

Comments

[David Forman]

To those concerned with this particular turf, I would also strongly recommend Jacob Rakovan's The Devil's Radio (2013, Small Doggies Press). His work structured around a series of elegies, shows this same landscape through its effects on young people, the identities and relationships they struggle to form, or don't. Lyrically brilliant, the voice blends high and low, fairy tale imagination and the stark details of the real world.

[Rochelle Hurt]

Rakovan's book sounds interesting! Thanks!

[Ethel Jackson]

Thanks!