Reading semiautomatic by evie shockley

24 February 2020 - 2 March 2020

semiautomatic

by Evie Shockley

Wesleyan University Press, 2017

I was recently on a few long plane rides, during which I finished Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, and Evie Shockley’s semiautomatic. I left Economy of the Unlost in Texas with my dad, and Emily borrowed The Baudelaire Fractal, which I had already responded to in verse anyway.

Though I know her by reputation, I haven’t read anything by Shockley before. My friend Emily let me borrow it, so this is a letter to her about what I thought.

The cover: I’ve been trying to give covers a closer stare. semiautomatic’s cover features a reproduction of the painting Confrontation by Norman Lewis (1971). I’m glad this cover gave me an occasion to look up his work. From his profile on the Smithsonian site, I learn:

During the mid-1940s New York painter Norman Lewis abandoned the social realist style that he had pursued for more than a decade, having decided that painting "an illustrative statement that merely mirrors some of the social conditions" was not an effective agent for change. Around 1946 he began exploring an overall, gestural approach to abstraction, establishing himself as the only African American among the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists.

 Reading the cover, you begin with Shockley’s name in grey, and the title in black, over a band of white. Below this, is an abstract canvas dominated by the color red. The upper and lower fourths of the image fade into smoky darkness towards the center. This darkness gives way, through the mediation of shapes, suggestive of figures without resolving into them, outlined in the same shade as the smoke, to a haze of bright raw vivid red. Through this central band of red, parade another set of forms, pink and flecked with white.

Now here’s Stan Mir from Hyperallergic on the same painting:

In this painting [“Confrontation” (1971)], the artist viscerally links a skirmish between Civil Rights protesters and law enforcement to the power of color. He once said, “color can evoke a great deal of visual excitement, to see colors that you don’t ordinarily see, that you take for granted. I don’t think that so many people would be killed on the street if they really saw a red light, if they really looked at it.” Within the cloud of red hovering across the painting, there are shapes suggestive of flags and violent altercations between protesters and riot police. Lewis remarked in 1968 that violence is “as homogenous as apple pie to America.”

Since I borrowed this from a friend, I thought a potential way in to talking about the text is through the pages they dog-eared. The first, “mirror and canvas,” comes early in the book. The poem bounces through a series of couplets that string together anaphorically with the repeated signal phrase, “self-portrait with…” I interpret the mirror of the title as referring to the more visually mimetic moments. The first few couplets are a good example of what I mean:

self-portrait with cats, with purple, with stacks

       of half-read books adorning my desk, with coffee,

                     with mug, with yesterday’s mug. self-portrait

               with guilt, with fear, with thick-banded silver ring,

            painted toes, and no make-up on my face.

The above lines feel like Shockley describing what she sees in the mirror. In contrast, take some of the other self-portraits mixed in:

self-

portrait voodoo, self-portrait hijinks, self-portrait

surprise. self-portrait with patience, with political

   protest, with poetry, with papers to grade. self-

portrait as thaumaturgic lass, self-portrait as luna

       larva, self-portrait as your mama.

 These lines take advantage of the open field of the canvas to deepen what the mirror reflects to include style, approach, attitude, work, passion, other times, magic, and all the other things that might not necessarily be visible on the reflecting surface.

 The above passage should also queue you in to Shockley’s virtuosic linguistic playfulness (which for me always evokes the work of Harryette Mullen), from the alliterative popping of the letter p, to the assonance of “luna larva” and “your mama,” to the high serious spookiness of “thaumaturgic” undercut with “lass.”

From a representational portrait, to a characterological one, to a stylistic one, or, “…with glasses, with cream, with fries, with / a way with words, with a propositional phrase.”

The poem “banking on amnesia” is another short poem (~1 1/3 pages, like “mirror and canvas”). In it, Shockley starts each line with a US city or state, “manhattan” or “chicago, illinois,” then pithily and powerfully catalogues its price, and how it, “was preoccupied.”

“manhattan was preoccupied with the price of beads” the first line reads, alluding to the infamous ‘purchase’ of Manhattan. Shockley plays with the multiple meanings of the word “preoccupied,” which Merriam-Webster gives as: “1 : to engage or engross the interest or attention of beforehand or preferentially 2 : to take possession of or fill beforehand or before another.” Shockley invokes preferential colonial narratives then undercuts them as she points to how these narrative conceal more egregious occupations.

Take the third line and fourth line. “Tennessee was preoccupied with following the market in lachrymal saline :: it had / been trailing since Jackson was in office.” “Lachrymal saline” of course is another way of saying, the salt in tears. Pair with “trailing” and “Jackson” and you have been directed to the Trail of Tears. There’s a grim humor here, whose punchline is the cruel conquest of a continent.

The facing poems “acrobatic” and “song in the back yard” were also dog-eared. “acrobatic” is an abecedarian poem, with each line beginning with the next letter of the English alphabet, from “acrophiliac” in the first line to “zeus” in the last.

“song in the back yard” is “a golden shovel for rihanna,” a golden shovel being the form invented by Terrance Hayes. Hayes ended the lines of his “The Golden Shovel” with words or lines from the classic Gwendolyn Brooks poem “We Real Cool.” In Shockley’s version good girl gone bad of course starts us off with the dedicatee, Rihanna, whose words Shockley sprinkles through the poem. She also quotes from Ntozake Shange, my love is too complicated to have thrown back in my face. The mirage of Rihanna’s fame, for Shockley, actually conceals an ancient script, and Rihanna writes her politics on the surface of her body for those who know how to read: “mi paint / mi politics pon mi lips for de young girls to read.”

“cogito ergo loquor” is a take on Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum,” except instead of “I think therefore I am” it would translate to, “I think therefore I speak.” Shockley uses Descartes’s famous line as an epigraph, pairing it would a line from poet Ching-In Chen, “some brutalities are unspeakable, and we shouldn’t / force ourselves to speak of them.” This cues me to expect that speech, and the limits of the sayable will be what is at issue in this poem.

Shockley begins in the subjunctive, “I could speak of the economic fist that slammed / into the body of the elderly woman downstairs.” What authorizes her to speak on this? That she is both “a diplomat and a survivor” of this “war on poverty.”

Into the next stanza Shockley proceeds through sonic play, revealing real truths by riffing on false cognates, sending me on a chilling query in search of the story of Anarcha Westcott, experimented upon, sans anesthesia or consent, by J. Marion Sims. Shockley ups the ante in stanza three, insisting, “nor should we force ourselves to be silent,” linking “unmentionable” to “underwear” and in these few short steps arguing how what is declared “unspeakable” quickly becomes “unthinkable.”

Her repetition of the prefix “un-” leads us to the last stanza, where with the word “unimaginable” Shockley frames her final queries, like, “if i spare us the graphic / details will we still write checks to fund the less / poetic work of others ?” “can we empathize without taking on the trauma ?” and “can we pursue cognition by / a path that cuts through the body but bypasses / the gut ?” This is a key final question, because the poem’s logic is as alimentary as it is etymological, and I ultimately came to read its colons and double colons as being as much evocations of windpipe and gullet and urethra and vagina as they are metrical devices.

This poem put me back in a grad school reading list kind of place, recalling to me the work of Hortense Spillers on the flesh, the dichotomous-yet-synonymous relationship of tongue and language in the “Language” chapter of Roland Greene’s Five Words, and of course Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” This is a telling convergence, since I’m sure I read the Spillers for a class on race and ethnicity, the Greene for a philology class, and Anzaldúa’s essay was included in the anthology graduate assistants were required to use in our first-year writing classes, and Shockley’s work in semiautomatic often gathers considerations of race and language together in a poetry that is educational without being heavy-handedly didactic.

The final poem Emily dogeared is “cosmography,” or the science of the cosmos or the description of the contours of cosmos. Cosmos as universe, with the undertone of orderliness, or the potential to discover order within it. In “cosmography” (the poem), the cosmos is personal, the poem is written in the first person singular.

“a call opera’d me open” plays on the multiple meanings in opera: song, but also work. “cosmography” makes opera operate as a verb, and tweaks the use of verb to dance such that it dance light itself. The poem’s “evidence” is “dusty” because in this short lyric there is wind and what it carries, that is, “motes” and “notes” and “light.”  “cosmography” ends with “dancing illumination in / and out on my individual wind.” Perhaps the wind her alludes to spirit, which derives from the Latin word for breathe. This poem is written “after Jay Wright” whose poetry, perhaps, issues the call that inspires, that is operas open, Shockley. But since the illumination dances “in / and out,” inspiration is figured here as a dialogic process—or perhaps a polylogic one, since we the readers can partake here of the inspiration flowing back and forth between Wright and Shockley, issuing inspiration of our own.