"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Our manifesto is an act of substantiation.
We reject all forms of futilitarianism, in whatever disguise.
We believe that comedy is the song of the village and tragedy the song of the goat.
We believe what is written in the books, but now we want to see for ourselves.
The single idea, beating on the same doors in vain.
The analogue and the invention.
The death cell.
The first permission.
Though we watch the stage for things to happen, though our minds wander.
By ourselves in the green field, playing our diversion.
Though the story begins with the loss of a home.
Out of the machine, we shift restlessly in our seats.
A Film in Which I Play Everyone, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf, 2023)
To assign the female subject the role of spectacular object is, well, not so spectacular. Nor is it terribly new. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” concludes John Berger in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing. “Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Rejecting essentialism to consider the “social presence” of men and women, Berger’s inquiries into the gendered power asymmetries inherent to looking have since been taken as a priori dogma when it comes to the omnipotence of the “male gaze” in visual culture, cinema its chief medium in the twentieth century. A Film in Which I Play Everyone, Mary Jo Bang’s ninth book of poems, unleashes said dogma to trot it through a “densely forested park” of wonder and woe. Across a whimsical, often surrealist reel of images, we meet, among others, a “dog walking along beside Anna Freud,” “a mistreated dog … eyed / by an indifferent crowd,” and “a toy dog left on a rowboat adrift in the midst.”
But this is, of course, not a book about dogs, though dogs are, like women, creatures both beheld and beholden. The gaze in A Film in Which I Play Everyone is unwaveringly feminine, and the speakers are keenly alert to what about themselves warrants watching. While scholar Laura Mulvey never makes a cameo in these poems, the influence of feminist film theory is ever present, if scrubbed of its reductive pontificating on who sees whom, and how. That is, Bang intercepts her own eyes—and lustrous imagination—for that of the imagined male auteur. The female subjects who express themselves are not just looked at by a man, or men, but by a wild array of retinas that blur gender binaries. Perhaps even more relevantly, these same female subjects present themselves as active flaneuses in their own right. A feminine love of looking becomes a kind of feminist scopophilia, upending conventions of pleasure and desire, while obscuring the line between subject and object. “You have to be a seer to see,” asserts the speaker of “Some Identical Sister, One Step Ahead,” leading to the admission: “What you really want is to be a camera.”
Throughout the book, the speaker becomes a sort of camera, seeing herself see the small and great, the sudden and endless, while also being seen. As is the case in Bang’s oeuvre more broadly, the minute doesn’t court the epic; they are betrothed from the start. Their inevitable marriage makes up the tangible, empirical realm as well as the vast interiority of her subjects. Memory and observation hoist the other up to the window of knowledge. Windows themselves play a crucial role: In the opening sections of the book, we find “plate glass / corner windows” (“Our Evening Is Over Us”), “fireworks in windows” (“Four Boxes of Everything”), and “the dawn window / grows into the maggot day” (“This Morning”).
The film screen serves as yet another window, one designed to transport, soothe, and seduce. Bang’s speakers do not distract themselves by scrolling the screens of today but rather stroll through the rich, disjunctive image-scape of motion picture history, a history that celebrated women as larger-than-life goddesses while subjugating them to narratives that, in most cases, denied them autonomy and healthy desire. “The walls of time dissolve whenever / the lights are turned off,” says the speaker in “How will it feel months from now.” And isn’t cinema the one space where humans continue to congregate in the dark as a matter of course?
The book is divided into five sections, each designated with the crosshaired numeral of a film leader, the strip attached to the head or tail of a film to assist in threading a projector. 5-4-3-2-1 becomes 1-2-3-4-5, reversing the traditional countdown onscreen before a movie’s start—and fitting for a collection of verse in which time, and timelessness, is of central concern. “The year is still the perpetual now,” starts the first line of the first poem, “From Another Approach.” “The inevitable present” (“The Actual Occurrences”) is also a bottomless lake of past and future.
But how does the clock tick in a world where “moonlit details go on and on” and “the personified day / has effaced herself from the calendar”? The question posed in “Some Identical Twin Sister …”—“Can time keep capturing an animal / even after it’s turned itself in?”—is answered by a list merging the temporal with the carceral, the medical with the mythic: “Cellblock of an instant, / mug shot of an afternoon faun, a disappearance / at the border of the forest, a bed of narrow-gauge needles.” In the lush lyric mise-en-scėne conjured in this book, “cellblock” may as well be “cel-block,” since celluloid both imprisons the female subject and liberates her from human death.
Which is to say, when dwelling in a suspended present feels preferable to the alternative, film offers a temporary escape into the illusion of immortality—“that surrealist train,” summoned in “The Theory of Personality,” that is “continually leaving the station while staying right where it is.” People and cities and parks long gone flicker to life again. Death is less a discrete event than a constant foil for the flourish of a film reel. “We are all dying but some more than most,” says the speaker of “Here We All Are with Daphne,” “so says my interiority.”
In “Reign of Terror” and “The Crowd Closes In,” death takes the form of the guillotine, honoring Olympe de Gouges, a French aristocrat best known for the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. Other poems pay homage to those lost in recent times, such as “Elegy for Two,” “How will it feel months from now,” and “The Echo,” which is dedicated to the late American poet Lucie Brock-Broido. But amid the steady contemplations of mortality in the book—sudden or slow-in-coming—a cheeky irreverence peeks through like a child plucking flowers from a grave. “To Say Please and Yet Not Please” reads the title of one poem: defiance despite decorum, or the other way around. Syntactically and otherwise, Bang’s recurrent playfulness comes not at the expense of gravity so much as in service to a levity without which it cannot exist.
In keeping with such antinomies, for a book invested in the image-scape and production of the motion picture, the motif of waiting and stillness doesn’t seem a surprise. “This is all / the waiting you could ever want,” declares the speaker in “From Another Approach,” belying the labor—and indeed, the tedium—of onscreen, and real life, performance. After all, playing “everyone” means playing the vast majority of the cast relegated to background and extra roles, roles no less crucial, Bang seems to suggest, to creating the magic whole.
Opening with a dedication to Norma Jean (otherwise known as Marilyn Monroe), Bang’s female cast of screen stars remains predominantly anonymous and, in the diegesis of the film at least, without dialogue. “Isn’t this all for the better? You with no mouth / to speak of?” says “a man [who] turned me into a tree” (“Here We All Are with Daphne”). In “A Miniature”, “a hand (not mine) / covers my mouth.”
The book’s title comes from a statement by David Bowie, himself a gender avenger of sorts. Resistant as her work is to overtly political interpretation, Bang’s poetry is rarely categorized as feminist—arguably a mistake given how consistently her work probes gendered assumptions and exposes the erasure of female voices. As in so many of her earlier books (Louise in Love and A Doll for Throwing) in A Film in Which I Play Everyone, the feminine is recast as a mode of both oppression and resistance. But this time around the speaker’s awareness of patriarchy is more directly expressed. “Power / got concentrated in the hands of a conquering few // who swept aside freedom and invented a female avatar / for every anxious damning force,” recounts the speaker of “Far from Here.” In “The Problem of the Present,” the speaker denudes the dangerous pageantry undergirding marriage: “because who would ever // want a diamond unless they were told to. / Here, someone must have said, you want this.”
As in many of Bang’s earlier books, the image of a supine female speaker resurfaces, this time emboldened by a greater sense of feminist consciousness. In “A Set Sketched by Light and Sound,” the speaker describes “An alarm that tells // of the need to absent yourself, to lie down / and behave as if you have no agency,” whereas in “No Questions,” the enforcement of gender is made painfully clear: “You know all / there is to know about lying down / and about taking it and this is because / you are a woman and this is what / you were taught women do.”
The subjects that speak out against male oppression do so not in anger as much as clear-eyed recognition. Perhaps this is why, when presenting subjectivities seemingly from the past, Bang never seems revisionist, never endows these historic personas with ra-ra girl-boss motives. And perhaps speaking itself is overrated: “Speaking is / a way of living with the ruin we were given,” concludes “Our Evening Is Over Us,” with the phrase “over us” having the double meaning of “sick of us” or “dismissive of our human folly.”
When speaking of eros, Bang’s subjects are often shut down by others or themselves. “I love you, I wanted to say / to the girl, but silence kept sounding // its silver bell,” reads “Staying Is a Form of Haunting.” Across the book, desire for a female beloved isn’t fixed to a particular woman, or girl, but many that have touched the speaker’s heart, body, or both. This desire for another may also be read at times as a wistfulness for a former feminine self—one less world-weary and resigned. “That hat attracts me. As does the woman,” admits the speaker in the final tercet of “Think of Jane and the Regency Era,” only to follow the line with the declarative, “But not everything is possible. / You are only the heroine in your own story.”
Timeless and evanescent, bold and blinkered, Bang’s speakers resonate as heroines of their own artful invention, ever mindful of the fact that their time—on the screen, on the page—will come to a close, the curtains falling as the crowd shuffles out. “ ‘That’s all,’ she said, ‘then, it’s over,’ ” reads the first line of the book’s last poem, “Once Upon a Time,” whose last stanza starts, “The deaths past and present / in ashes, each discrete moment / a memory palace to be built.” A Film in Which I Play Everyone erects a glittering temple to the splendors of perception, one that, unlike the Alhambra or Versailles, can withstand the ravages of the material world. Under Bang’s direction, the seer and the seen need not be separated by the screen between them—nor by gendered theories of the gaze. Both film and femme are as fragile as they are indelible, forever impressed on our collective conscience.
The Gone Thing, by Monica McClure (Winter Editions, 2023)
If the political subject is formed by the relation between the social and the psychic, “consciousness raising” might be described as the recognition of new values, beliefs, or desires related to social power. What role can literature play in this process of heightening awareness? How can a writer inspire others to look at their lived experience in order to connect themselves to the social structure? How can poetry show us better ways to be in relation to those around us?
The Gone Thing by Monica McClure follows the contrapuntal lines that divide our personal and economic realities: labor vs. leisure, production vs. consumption, home and family vs. alienation. Rage, finely processed, mounts against a shallow, pill-induced tranquility. The modern economy iswound up with dehumanization, a lack of intimacy and authenticity. Separated into five sections, this collection of poems rises like a metallic yet living thing welded of the corporate and the pastoral, braced against uncertainty and instability. Dreams are tied up in “money and its needs”:
But I'm no longer my own agent I belong to the land and it belongs to me
I belong to my money and it belongs to this tree You belong to my dreams Which belong to a god Who slithers through the weeds Of our money and its needs
I'm possessed by a landman And that landman is me
Bound to the material of the world, an animal driven by survival and smelling of the fluids we both ingest and release, the body as an aspect of earth takes precedence over language:
A body's memory is not so Distorted by language
And then:
Terranean worship of my body as a passage.
This is a rooted yet expansive, interconnected view of the body to ground us, recalling Silvia Federici's magical conception of the pre-capitalist body. Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch that capitalism could not take hold without conducting a historical battle against anything that posed a limit to the full exploitation of the body, starting with the web of relations that tied individuals to one another and the natural world:
A precondition of the development of capitalism was the destruction of the magical conception of the body of the Middle Ages, which attributed to it powers that the capitalist could not exploit.
“Pleasure is an identity requiring consumption,” McClure writes in a similar spirit, identifying our consumerist impulses as a coping mechanism, a necessary salve for the alienated body inscribed with its own loss, lack, and exploitation, numbed to its inherent magical capacities.
Early in The Gone Thing, the rush of detail or debris is upheld as “valuable” in that it latches onto the mythic and holds on for dear life. Temporal dissociation unmoors the reader as memories arise, as if from the afterlife: “And we moved inside a system that suffered / But never died.” Ironic if not vitriolic diction is placed within situations where the gendered, moneyed power structure would dictate subservience: “When they handed back my underwear I said thank you.”
Throughout the section of the book called “INHERITANCE,” defiance is disguised as realism and repetition with variation holds narrative density at bay. Family roles determine what is given and what is received. Fast life through capacious eyes stuff these rewards and consequences like pillows:
… Their weight loss journals their savings their hangovers and schemes the husbands with second families on an island our sugar daddies our cocaine straws I'm wearing the dress she wore to her mother's funeral It's black and white I keep it …
I am waiting for the break, to see what remains: the remains. McClure does not disappoint. Death rises before, but also as, the speaker's daughter, holding a scythe. This figure, with its transformative impulse, guides us into the section that follows.
The speaker, having ascended through the economic system from low-wage jobs to high-paying employment, considers work with the wryness of stark necessity:
Suck my dick I am no longer poor I'm high-salaried
My work is seated now and dignified
Back then work had a weight, you could feel it
I've lived like a poet And worked like a man
So long as you work, you, too, can be a luxury consumer, and likely already are:
… Joy is Sharing domination and the art of everyday terror With a spouse with whom you've made Irreversible mistakes that still feel trivial but someday, This day, will become a whole life of wrongheaded impulse buys.
Such macroscopic takes on American life telescope to the microscopic, as when nestling birds become “cotton burs.” The system of the poem moves like a feeding snake, shedding collective delusions. Economic security, the leisure it affords, becomes a dehumanizing trap, swallowing the hours:
It is a kind of leisure to watch the figures you once knew Become hallucinations in the long waves of a spent day.
Perhaps these hallucinatory figures from the past are the “RISING FURIES” noted by the poem's title.
In the face of the “small” or “wrongheaded” life of capitalist production and consumption, McClure's text craves upheaval—the churning of land, the transformation of culture, the renewal of human connection—while accepting those cycles and trajectories beyond human control:
And soon very soon I know the stomach of civilization will rupture
When the poems get decorative—I am talking about the (very contemporary) strobing through images as in “BAKED ALASKA BOMBES”—I feel a temporary disconnect, although the excess may, for some, illuminate a relationship between capitalism, appetite, and wreckage. Regardless, the writing consistently reclaims my attention with spare lines of conceptual clarity:
You're a long arc knifed between what I know And what I suspect is always happening.
The fearless self-doubt of this thought points to genuine intimacy, or at least an acceptance of how separate subjectivities introduce counter-melodies that both undercut and reinforce our own—a kaleidoscopic, if tenuous, at times uncomfortable, arrangement.
Near the end of The Gone Thing, financial bondage finds relief in alternative forms of relation, like the promise, the gift, or the simple “golden rule”:
Money, they say, is uninhabitable
But I promise My sheep will guard you as I have guarded them
And in this way, you'll never owe
Gift (and theft) are alternative ways of existing in or despite the market society, where alienation might refer to an involuntary severance of oneself from one's latent creativity because we have to pay rent and buy food and clothing. If artificial scarcity were to give way to abundance, could the gift be a gesture of pure generosity? Marcel Mauss, theorist of the gift economy, might say the emotional impetus of the gift is not always so simple, but does kind treatment not imprint itself and self-replicate like any other?
The speaker in The Gone Thing makes definitive statements that seem to indicate a kind of defeat: “All that was going is already gone.” I know the sentiment well. But conventional cynicism and nostalgia, anger at or fear of the empty venture and wasted existence, are not the core of my reading, even if, at times, they dull the surface: “We marched and didn't progress.” As I make my way through McClure's work, I am thinking of how we might build the new in the shell of the old, until the old no longer makes sense. I am not thinking only of a seismic revolution, but more cunning modes of resistance, a kind of justice that could recuperate and balance the scales, not serving the powers that exist solely to tip them:
At best, I can do an interpretation of justice And hope it doesn't go up in smoke.
Let's just get this out of the way: "AI" is a silly term. Or at least, it's a bad fit for the current wave of computer technology getting labeled as such. Historically, "artificial intelligence" has referred to a kind of sci-fi dream state: a cognizant, autonomous, person-like mind, created out of machine parts. This recently developed software1 is not that at all—rather, these technologies leverage large sets of existing data to generate newspaper articles, children's book illustrations, film stills…the results aren't great, but they've been impressive enough to raise serious questions around creativity, authorship, and media, and also to get a lot of people fired (because why not just have the computer do it?). For better or worse (but let's be honest—generally worse), this is the terrain that artists and galleries have to forge through right now: where the very concept of human creativity is under weird scrutiny, in ways it's never been.
The Whitney has heeded this call by mounting an impressive show of Harold Cohen's AARON project2. At its heart, AARON is a collection of software that generates drawings and paintings. Cohen started the project in the late 1960s—before computers even had screens—and kept at it until his death in 2016. He had a distinct painterly style and, under his guidance, AARON's images tend toward a lightheartedness and buoyancy, with shades of easygoing portraiture reminiscent of Cohen's 20th-century peers, like Alex Katz and Alice Neel. It's a sharp—and welcome—contrast to the machine's inner logic: the herky-jerk robotics and endless lines of code that make AARON move. To me, it feels a bit off to call AARON an "AI" program—though the Whitney seems to have no qualms about doing just that—because the undergirding 'intelligence' here is clearly Cohen's: He's the one who built the robots and carefully defined their visual/symbolic parameters. Sure, there are elements of chance and volatility involved, but you could say the same thing about a blob of paint splashed onto a Pollock canvas. The trick is, contemporary "AI" image generators are doing the same thing as AARON, really: starting from a pre-defined visual lexicon and then semi-randomly combining those elements until, hey look, a picture.
Speaking of visual lexicons, Raymond Saunders's paintings3 don't try to hide or distort their assembled stores of cultural detritus, and that's a good thing. Saunders tends to start with a black ground, onto which he collages found image-objects (some examples: a page from an old anatomy textbook, a flattened carnival popcorn bag, a child's drawing of a Thanksgiving hand-turkey, a 'No Parking' sign, a strip of 19th-century wallpaper, a crushed cardboard fan, a photograph of a flower); each object hits its own particular frequency, and it's amazing how harmonious the end results are. I must admit that at first, I doubted these works, or maybe I was jealous—I felt like there wasn't enough change happening, between the objects being found and then being applied to canvas. I was wrong, though, and eventually I started to see how each thing is radically transformed through the act of being carefully chosen. These paintings avoid the tired pop-art trope of the overwhelmed consumer-subject, because they don't overwhelm, they're not trying to. It's like a dictionary where every word could also be a poem.
Rirkrit Tiravanija is best known for staging experiential happenings, like pad thai (1990), in which he constructed a simple, functional kitchen within a gallery, then served fresh plates of pad thai to visitors. While Saunders's paintings are nice examples of how anything can be incorporated into a work of art, Tiravanija's retrospective4 is a nice demonstration of how, through the simple magic of intentionality, anything can just be a work of art. There are some uncomfortable political questions floating around in that formulation, though—questions of who gets to choose which anything is art, and whose anything(s) actually get exhibited in museums. But if you're okay with that, then this show is honestly a lot of fun. You could drink strong coffee in a makeshift tented cafe, listen to a group of musicians laying down tracks in an open-walled recording studio, watch hours and hours of homemade Super 8 movies, or even just look at some paintings hanging on a wall, if that's your thing (pad thai was also on view, but I got there too late to get any pad thai, so that sucked). Tiravanija's work involves a sort of multi-directional openness—a willingness to accept choices made by the audience, by the exhibiting institution, or by Tiravanija himself, even. In our current high-tech context, it's also a reminder that intentionality is the key thing missing from ostensibly "intelligent" systems. Computers can do a lot, but only what they're commanded to—no one has yet figured out how to get them to choose anything.
Technological fascination is nothing new (of course) but, as of lately, there seems to be a glut of tech-minded tourist-trap exhibition halls cropping up in various big cities (New York chief among them). These places tend to promise some degree of interactivity and "immersion" (but what are you being immersed in, exactly?), all in service of a vaguely defined art-viewing experience: something to do with gauzy, projected videos, motion sensors, and pulsing LED lamps. There's nothing wrong with a cheap thrill, but these places aren't cheap (tickets tend to be around $50), and you probably won't be very thrilled.
I speculate that Pipilotti Rist's 2016 retrospective, Pixel Forest5, was ground zero for this phenomenon (or at least, one of a few grounds zero), especially the Pixel Forest itself: a dark room filled with hanging, color-changing lights. Ever since that show exploded on social media, there's been a push to replicate that same bit of paradise, that same sort of buzzing, candy-colored, populist, de facto photo studio. In her recent two-part exhibit in Chelsea6, Rist's pixel-y maximalism felt as beguilingly colorful as ever, with theatrical building façades, walls of dreamy video, and even comfortable beds to lay on, but it suffers a bit in context. It's a problem, because Rist's work would feel very different if it no longer felt like an escape—the utopian and feminist edges of her project getting slowly dulled by a world that's catching-up to her in terms of raw spectacle.
The videos in Rist's installations are often deliberately bleary and indistinct, and that lack of specificity can sometimes get frustrating. On the other hand, the projected slides in the pivotal late-'60s and early-'70s installations/happenings known as Cosmococas—devised by exiled Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and filmmaker Neville D'Almeida—stick within a tightly, almost bizarrely circumscribed cycle of images drawn from that heady cultural moment. There are photographs of Luis Buñuel, John Cage, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, and Yoko Ono, borrowed from mass media and decorated with artful strips of powdered cocaine. That's it. At Hunter College's Leubsdorf Gallery7, visitors could partake in two Cosmococas intended for domestic spaces, with telephones, couches, and coloring books awash in Oiticica's coked-out imagery; Yoko Ono's Fly (1971) echoing out of a tinny set of speakers. I don't know what Oiticica and D'Almeida imagined of the future but, in plotting these spaces more than a half-century ago, it was wise of them to stay with their beloved counterculture: not just because the figures they chose have remained (as the kids say) iconic, but because the particular brew of avant-garde otherness, pop-culture fun, and druggy hedonism makes for a potent utopian shorthand, even still. Like, imagine a Cosmococa from the '90s where, instead of Hendrix, Ono, and Monroe, you were staring at slides of Eddie Vedder, Kim Basinger, and Björk. See what I mean? It wouldn't really work (though I guess it doesn't sound that bad).
All that said, in a time overrun with spectacle and "interaction," it can be so rewarding to find good art that knows how to stand still. As seen in Tribeca, Diane Simpson's late-'70s sculptures8 are resolutely material, proud to be what they are, playing with illusion and fantasy while refusing to stray past their own physical boundaries: cardboard, tape, pencil. They feel like the industrial discards of a more beautiful world (but not that much more beautiful, not necessarily). Down the street were Jennie C. Jones's sculptural canvases9, which use orderly strips of gray and red fabric to emit a sort of hauntingly soft glow. I kept pretty quiet while I was in the gallery, and I think the other visitors did, too: the work's effect was so delicate that it felt as if the show might collapse if we were too noisy. It didn't, though.
In Chelsea, there was a show of legendary "outsider" artist Bill Traylor10 who, famously, didn't start making his singularly dense, lively drawings until he was 85 years old. In SoHo, there was a modest but worthwhile exhibit of painting and collage by the underrated 20th-century master Jess (a.k.a. Jess Collins)11, who had a gift for creating smallish work of boundless intimacy and strangeness.
Our brave new world of constant input/output is also one of perpetual discord, you see. A sense of contemporary alienation is one of the rare threads binding the work in Mary Helena Clark's recent solo show12—a show of miscommunications and disparities that don't wish to be reconciled. There were motorized deadbolts writhing on the floor to no apparent end, fragile photographs of what may or may not be shoebox-sized egg incubators, and a two-channel collage-film (Neighboring Animals, 2024) which seems to speculate on how captive animals might interpret the human world. It's within this zone of calibrated estrangement that I found one of the most personally relatable artworks I've seen in a long time: Monitors (2024), in which two heavy, steel doors are hollowed-out and then filled with sounds of enthused, unintelligible conversation. The audio was recorded at a zoo, but it readily evokes the feeling of standing uncomfortably at the edge of a crowded party or reception, or something—you know what I mean. I'm sure you've stood on at least one side of that door.
Richard Mosse's Broken Spectre (2018-2022)13—an ambitious, sensorial film on modern environmental exploitation and devastation—features years' worth of carefully collected documentary footage, including airborne shots of the Amazon rainforest. Those overhead shots were captured with sophisticated multispectral cameras, but the final imagery feels like the result of a simple—almost childlike—palette-swapping trick: the verdant forest landscape becoming red instead of green. Is that all it takes, to make this world of ours feel alien and hostile? Yes, apparently.
It's a bit tricky to summarize Auriea Harvey—her work includes websites and commercially released video games, as well as drawings and paintings, 3D-modeled creatures, and eerie digital landscapes, along with cast-metal Medusas and Minotaurs. Harvey was there in the '90s for the first wave of online art, while her more-recent practice utilizes computer tools to realize refreshingly old-fashioned sculptures. Seeing it all together, though—as in her retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image14—there's a remarkable continuity across the decades: the gritty, nervous early-internet experiments and the fleshy, mythopoeic monsters of bronze and wax; the distorted, monochromatic photos of Harvey and her then-boyfriend hidden behind esoteric digital interfaces, and the horned demons grinning within state-of-the-art holographic displays. It all goes together, because her work doesn't divorce the digital from the corporeal—at every technological inflection point, it moves toward the body, rather than attempting a retreat into some post-human virtual nothingness (as so much modern tech seems to be doing).
Perhaps that's the real problem with the current culture of "AI" and concomitant attempts to digitize everything: It imagines the body as obsolete. Because, I mean, if you try to scrub-out the blood and skin, sex and death, pleasure and pain, then what are you left with? Just a bunch of stupid computers.
1
GPT-4, DALL-E, Midjourney, and many others
2
Harold Cohen: AARON; Whitney Museum; the name 'AARON' is not an acronym, FYI
3
Raymond Saunders: Post No Bills; David Zwirner, Andrew Kreps
4
Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE; PS1
5
Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest; New Museum, October 2016–January 2017
Shortly after her second daughter was born in fall 2016, the German poet Uljana Wolf found poems about motherhood beginning to take shape.
“I was jotting down lines in mental states of exhaustion and absurd motherly multitasking, or formulating lines in my head in strange physical states, for example bent over the crib with my head hanging down because my daughter, for a while, needed to feel the tips of my hair with her thumb to fall asleep.”
Those jottings became the basis for Wolf's 2023 book muttertask (kookbooks), a volume often in dialogue with her award-winning first book from 2005, kochanie ich habe brot gekauft, recently published in a bilingual volume by World Poetry Books as kochanie, today I bought bread. The original German poems sit next to Greg Nissan's dazzling English translations, giving U.S. readers new access to the poet.
The two books share the theme of family. “If you shrink human life down to its last few elements, family is on the short list,” says translator Susan Bernofsky. “Even if it's the absence of family, it's a primal thing.”
Uljana Wolf was born in East Berlin in 1979. Her memories of reunification are unclear.
“A lot of things were not talked about, it was a difficult time for everyone to readjust,” says Wolf. “So a child will pick up signals and decode them many years later.”
Wolf started writing at 12 and attended weekly workshops from age 14. At 26, Wolf won a top German poetry prize for kochanie, published while she was still in college. Having become a respected poet across Europe, she has also translated writers into German including John Ashbery, Yoko Ono and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs1.
Wolf's poetics administer slight shocks via poems that can feel playful, sorrowful, or sinister.2 Wolf has described a poem as a “space walk” and translation as a “bouncy castle,” as in kids' backyard birthday parties. A place that throws you, knocks you off guard.
“[Wolf] grew up in East Germany where there was censorship and control of language, propagandistic use of language,” says Bernofsky. “Which there also is in the United States but we're not so aware of it. In East Germany, it's right in your face and you cannot escape that. She thematizes that in her work.”
kochanie opens with “displacement of the mouth,” where a 4 a.m. view of dawn over a house and forest is figured as a mouth. Eyelid-thin lips close, the “sky cracks back its jaw.” The woods (“die wälder”) are the tongue-arch of the yawn. “A long held breath unravels” as rain-speech, emerging as mist from a mouth, as if through eyelashes.
Nissan sees a theme of “formative entries into language at different levels,” including some “emergences received as silences.”
In a “recovery room” sequence, babies (poems? people?) are born into the “chill of historical judgment,” where they are carried around by “nurse-judges,” writes Valzhyna Mort in kochanie's introduction. A “postnarcotic sniffle” never quite goes away.
Wolf decomposes fairy tale logic in a series called “my cadastre.” While traditional fairy tales resolve tension—children love them repeated exactly the same way—Wolf's are false starts, a signature device. They “exclaim at the unyielding lock: hrrrr, agghhh, nnnh!”
fruit translated by Greg Nissan
one can never
says father herr father
hold the family of fruit
in his hands
he can only
says father herr father
hold one offspring
apple or pear
in his hands
herr
“[kochanie] is about daughters responding to patriarchal fathers, or responding to a certain heaviness in history,” says Nissan.
Wolf's responses reference her personal canon. Familiar poems and stories are an antechamber leading from the known to “nowhere.”3 The poems can feel explicitly theatrical—Wolf says she “is interested in creating myths and masks”—invoking familiar characters from films, novels, and plays.
One such personage is Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, in Wolf's four-poem “wood lord shaft.” Titus was a Roman general who won a war against Tamora, a German queen. To avenge his 26 sons killed in war, Titus orders Tamora's son killed. Tamora's lover Aaron then orders the rape of Titus's daughter Lavinia, calling her a “dainty doe.” Lavinia is also mutilated; her tongue is cut out and her hands amputated. After the crime, Lavinia opens her mouth, and blood flows “as from a conduit with three issuing spouts.”
wood lord shaft II translated by Greg Nissan
don't say rome and roe don't say dainty
doe chant hunt not pluck a flower plow
a field not plunder back or bedyard not judge
absolightly but take flight inwaterworks: to tug
the plug out of the captainless speech out
of the faithless stuttertrough which spills
forth lavinia red the legend you are and are
not oh conduit with three issuing spouts speak:
dark torrents flush your word into the ground
dark with blazon and blahblah from the fountain's
floodmouth blundering now and ever blinder
i greet you later, your reader i your re-offender
Nissan extends Wolf's signature neologisms into English with “absolightly” and “stuttertrough.” (Read a neologism enough times and it starts to feel like a familiar word.) Nested negations “don't say … don't say … not” yield to rushing fluid rhythms. Shakespeare's phrase “oh conduit with three issuing spouts,”quoted twice,is like fluid spurting unevenly or hitting rocks. The ominous final line reveals an 'I', a reader (Titus? a contemporary reader?) who will harm Lavinia again.
In the sequence's final poem, Lavinia's corpse is a gray shape across eyes watching the play on a computer screen.
in livestream Lavinia we read and in all eyes
you were cataract, the dread-gray star.
The last third of kochanie moves to Silesia, an area on the Polish-German border. On the eve of World War II, Wolf's paternal grandmother, a German-speaking woman from Maltsch (now Malczyce), daughter of a station master, met her future husband, an apprentice land surveyor. He was from Glauchau, five hours away by train. A series called “The Ovens Slept” has one poem each for four places: Berlin, Glauchau, Maltsch, and Legnica. A train switches rail lines throughout the series.
“Silesia is where Robert Walser worked as a butler in a castle in a German-speaking context,” says Bernofsky. “It used to be very multilingual and predominantly German-speaking but there was always a mix there. The towns had German names. The town now called Wrocław was called Breslau. A smaller town, Opola, used to be Oppen. [After 1945] the German speakers who lived in that territory were displaced and had to move west into main Germany, of which there's still a lot of resentment. The Poles did everything to remove the German language, and it's now totally Poland.”
Wolf took several trips to Poland as a student and then as a poet. She did a book tour with a Polish-German poetry anthology in 2002 and studied in Kraków in 2003. She got to know many Polish poets and literary critics. ('Kochanie' is a Polish term of endearment, and a series of love poems mark a change in tone and style from the earlier parts of Wolf's book.) In 2004, she had a three-month residency in Kreisau, on what had been the estate of an anti-Hitler German lawyer executed in 1945 for planning a coup.
Wolf ends kochanie with a trio of poems focused on birds and dogs, creatures that (merrily or obsessively) travel to find food. These dogs are frenzied yappers and “cassandras,” marking their language territory (“sprachrevier”) with echoing, billowing sound, as in these lines from “to the dogs of kreisau”:
jedes echo gehört euch: der zuckende rückstoß
von klang an den hügeln hierarchisches knurren
und bellen in wellen: heraklisch erst dann hünen
haft im abklang fast nur ein hühnchen das weiß:
Here are the same lines in Nissan's translation:
every echo is yours: twitching blowback
of sound from the hills, hierarchical snarl
and billowing bark: herculean at first, then a bit
leaner, at last but a chicken who reckons:
One dog bites Wolf, leaving his mark on her, “as if a leg were but a page.”
Nissan's translation was developed on and off over ten years, first as an undergraduate at Brown, then after World Poetry Books decided to publish the book in English. It was an unusual and lucky experience to be able to spend that length of time on a project, he says.
The book's German title does not include the word “today.” Nissan wanted the title to feel like something “unfamiliar and foreign, but everyday.”
“Wolf's sense of that line is that you enter into language with a sort of excitement: 'I learned to buy bread in language!' ” he says. “[Adding 'today'] brought it down to earth, because the 'kochanie' is a little bit further [for an English-only reader] than it was for Uljana. Also we did it for sound reasons.”
“Uljana has both a really tight and sharp ear, but also a wild playfulness with sound too,” he adds. “Often her poetry takes place at the nexus between centrifugal wildness of language and this more centripetal structuring force of the rhyme that's really tight.”
Wolf's chosen constraints were hard to recreate in another language. That meant a lot of reinventing in English.
“Some things in translation become closer to home, some things become further at the same time,” Nissan says. “What you lose you gain elsewhere in different ways.”
“Greg has a really good ear for contemporary American poetry,” says Wolf. “His translations could dock onto something [in English]. When I wanted to make a line more melodious or longer, he had the right intuition to let it end just before.”
After Nissan finished his translation, Wolf told him the stories behind the poems, like the time a Kreisau village dog actually bit her on the calf.
“It was fun for me to say, 'Ok, we've put on the show, let's peek behind the curtain a little bit,' ” he says, “And say, 'Oh I had no idea that's what that was!' We were careful not to let those get into the translation too much. [They were] present in the German only in a transformed way.”
Wolf was 26 and working part-time jobs when kochanie was published in 2005. She had not yet graduated from Humboldt University. The following year she won Germany's prestigious Peter Huckel prize, which “was a little bit of a shock.”
The award made it easier to write a second book by going in a completely different direction. After the lyrical kochanie, Wolf says she “wanted to push myself into new forms.”
Around 2007, Wolf met her now ex-husband, the poet Christian Hawkey. She moved to Brooklyn for most of each year, a pattern that continued for the next 10 years. She found Brooklyn's poetry scene to be less institutionalized than Berlin's. Social life, university life, and poetry mix together in New York, whereas in Berlin, the state subsidizes events and publishers. Wolf connected to other poets interested in multilingual poetry, including poets like Don Mee Choi, who came to read at Pratt, where Wolf worked. American poets explored many forms. Wolf was influenced by greater use of the prose poem, a more conceptual approach to serial composition, and different layouts on the page.
Wolf's second poetry book, falsche freunde, followed in 2009. “False friends” are homonyms, words with the same sounds but different meanings in different languages, like 'gift,' which means present in English but poison in German. Wolf wrote 26 prose poems based on these word confusions, one for each letter in the English alphabet.
In “Subsisters,” published in falsche freunde, Wolf crafted seven dazzling pairs of prose poems4, some hushed and confiding, others remote or irreverent.
“Subsisters” began as an investigation into dubbing. In Germany, the film industry uses dubbing, “mostly thanks to the U.S. and French allies who invested in dubbed film after the war to help ease the Germans into denazification and learning about 'democratic culture,' ” explains Wolf.
Wolf found it hard to represent dubbing in poetry—“there is only one language left”—so she switched to subtitling, which makes translation visible to most of us every day.
“I took the experience of watching subtitled films and applied them to these poems, setting up rules for myself: i.e. one poem is the Original version (OV), one version is the OmU (Original mit Untertitel) version—it's the same film but the language gets messed up a bit as if you're watching it only half-knowing the language, and then there's a subtitle to further confuse you, in another language.”
Wolf has described the OmU subsisters as “less obedient, less coherent, with more messiness and desire.” Wolf says she “didn't have clear persons in mind as speakers for these poems. It's more of an ambient subsisterly 'I', something that speaks from the cracks of translation—the space between language and representation, a longing that allows for playful distortion of gender roles, if that makes sense.”
Watch the films and the poems expand: The Big Sleep, Clash by Night, All That Heaven Allows, Lifeboat, Morocco, Imitation of Life, and Laura. Only one features an actual sister (Lauren Bacall's in The Big Sleep). The rest are more ambiguous figures: in Clash by Night, Marilyn Monroe is dating Barbara Stanwyck's brother. Tallulah Bankhead has a sisterly dynamic with another character in Lifeboat. Marlene Dietrich has two highly racialized dolls she places on a bedside table in Morocco. The Imitation of Life speaker may be the quasi-adopted, white-passing black daughter/sister.
In Wolf's poems, the names of stars are used to narrate events that happen to characters, as if words play meanings like actors play roles. The effect is apparent in poems such as “Subsisters VII,” translated by Sophie Seita, which is based on Otto Preminger's Laura andGene Tierney's biography.
Original version
gene's a genie, bashful. i want to paint her portrait but she doesn't stay still. her coat is white, her hat is white, and then the quiet, grey flicker of the fireplace— it's hard to find her contours, a shadow's cast on the fauteil, he shows us his credentials. gene said I don't waver, we leave the canvas, which we call laura, to him, and run past his immobile face, the old grandfather clock and the testimony of the false interior.
Original version with subtitles
gene's a genius, embarrassed by her genes. neither she nor i can picture that. a white coat, that yes, fires the pace a whit, we quiet the hot bickering, not hard to call it borderline. not even the color of the armchair lends us credence, released from the canvassed witness, the aura of a false name, gene and I wager that our interior shadow will pass, we clock him, steadfast, granted there's no further fuss.
Electroshock? Sister, being in the picture doesn't mean you have to play a painting.
The near–Mae West intonations of “Sister, being in the picture doesn't mean you have to play a painting” is an eye roll at Tierney's cool remove. One subsister notes Tierney's depression, her “interior shadow.” Tierney was given multiple rounds of electroshock therapy, giving “white coat” a second meaning.
When asked who is speaking in these poems, Wolf can only speculate. “Perhaps the 'subsister' speaking the Gene Tierney poems was in my imagination the portrait hanging in the room with the fauteuils. Not actually, logically, but internally.”
Wolf is a co-translator of the Austrian experimental writer Ilse Aichinger. She admires Aichinger's “humor … of suffering” that is “always lightly slanted, [with] hellish laughter.”5 The subsisters recall “The Mouse,” a nervously observant character in Aichinger's story of the same name. The Mouse is hiding, likely in a wall, but can distinguish child from adult footsteps. It is trying to calculate risk and danger. The subsisterly 'I' watches and speculates.
Between 2007 and 2017, Wolf was moving between languages multiple times each year. She wrote doubly and triply distorted poems that knock language off its moorings, even if only while you read the poems. Some poems written during these years relate to Wolf's shame at speaking imperfect English.6 Others, like babeltrack, look at children's preverbal phase of development.
“I was interested in the early stages of parenting, the permeability of my boundaries, the acute sense of not being one anymore but being another being also,” says Wolf. “And on speech formation, preverbal and early stages, as before formation of 'mother tongue,' as a site of multilingual possibilities. I was experiencing writer's block and also a sense of attrition in my own language after living in New York for some years, and writing through or thinking about the babel of child languaging allowed me to explore deeply rooted notions about language correctness or mastery, the 'monolingual paradigm.' ”
In 2012, Wolf and Hawkey published sonne from ort (kookbooks), paired erasures of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and Rilke's German translation of the poems. Barrett Browning presented her poems to the public as if they were translations, although they were not. Wolf and Hawkey's title, mixing German and English, means “Sun from Place.” Annette Gilbert has said that the poems show “the inextricable interlacing of voices across eras, generations, languages.”
Bernofsky has translated Wolf's “false friends” sequence and “Bring Your Own Blendling,” an unpublished 2019 essay on translation. In “Blendling,” Wolf notes that Schleiermacher thought that a “form of humiliation” was inherent to the role of translator. She quotes Schleiermacher at length on this:
“To make the foreign perceptible in the target language, the translator, according to Schleiermacher (but he uses the word 'writer'), must enter into '... the most extraordinary form of humiliation to which a writer of some quality can subject himself, since his creation must necessarily bump up against the boundaries of what we can expect or even endure … Who would not like to make his native tongue appear everywhere displaying the most splendid characteristic beauty allowed by each genre? Who would not prefer to beget children who would purely represent their fathers' lineage, rather than mongrels [Blendlinge]?' ”
Wolf argues for the mongrels. For her, language is always internally hybrid and “dirty,” and better off for it.
“The hybrid is the richest,” says Bernofsky. “The supposedly ugly children are actually the most beautiful. It was a misunderstanding all along to think they were ugly.”
Asked what she means by her recurring phrase “dirty bird language,” Wolf says, “I don't know. I picked up the colloquial phrase that I thought meant that something was done a bit messily or not accurate. Of course it mostly sounds good, the rolling 'r's after the 'y' sound. Birds will carry traces of seeds or fruit they picked up on their beaks, their claws, their feathers, in their poop, sometimes over hundreds of miles. They fertilize, cross pollinate, disperse, change context. And of course, they can be migrants. In that sense maybe dirty bird language is language migrating, smudging clear boundaries, leaving traces sometimes unawares.”
Wolf's last residency was at a family-friendly program in Rome, from 2017 to 2018. She went back to living in Berlin fulltime in 2018, the same year that Brooklyn's Belladonna* press published selected poems in an English translation by Sophie Seita, as Subsisters. As Wolf re-engaged with kochanie around Nissan's English translation, she became immersed again in meter. This in turn informed her work on muttertask, which she designed as a collection entirely about motherhood.
“Mutter” is a word in both German and English, while “multitasking” lurks in the background of Wolf's title as well. “Mut” means courage in German, but the English “mutter” means mumbling, a form of language that kind of communicates. It connects to the “good enough mother,” a pop psychology concept Wolf has referenced when arguing for a “good enough poetry.” Something less than ideal, but hopefully adequate.
“The word 'task' is not a German word,” observes Bernofsky. “And 'task' is a word that I associate with Walter Benjamin. He is important for her also. The task of the mother is already one of translation.”
Looking back at her work, Wolf sees kochanie as lyrical, her subsequent books as experimental, and muttertask as a combination of the two. This is most obvious in a suite of matryoshka poems that pair a metered poem with a prose one. The polyvocal matryoshkas are cousins to the subsisters. muttertask also references Medea, Athena, Emmy Henning, Max Beckmann, Hannah Höch, and a Hölderlin fragment about Christopher Columbus. One chapter, written in 2010 before Wolf became a parent, contains erasures based on a (presumably fraudulent) chapbook of letters said to be written by Calamity Jane to her daughter.
The title poem contains the lines “die abende sind fort / die morgende sind fort. Alles / geborgene von sich selbst / nur geborgt,” which roughly means: “The evenings are gone. The mornings are gone. Everything that you borrowed for yourself was just borrowed.”
Wolf had retrieved something she'd lost: “As time went by, I returned to the couplet form, with obsessively constructed same line lengths (purposefully ignoring dynamics of lines as sense units or line breaks as pauses or accents).”
In one bilingual poem, “jane spricht motherese,” the couplets play with singsong patterns:
wo s beginnt bist du horny
wo s endet bist du matter
wo s beginnt bist du maid
wo s endet bist du mad
Nissan sees “the expansion of [Wolf's] formal techniques … even greater resonance of form and content with [the matryoshka poems] as nested devices. You feel the little phonemes that fold into one another. And that was so difficult in translation. You have to start making sounds in your head, rhyming things, seeing what comes out of the English to make it have that effect.”
Literary and other cultural institutions often commission speeches from Wolf, several of which were collected in the prize-winning collection Etymological Gossip (kookbooks, 2021), which is being translated by Sophie Seita for Nightboat Books. The “gossip” of the book's title refers to “the secret histories that words bring with them,” says Bernofsky.
“In German, you're very conscious about what is a Germanic root word and what is a Latinate word, because the Latinate words stick out and if you use them you sound kind of academic,” she explains. “In English, we're not really so conscious about the words we use. Because our language is such a mishmash of Anglo-Saxon and others, we're [used to hybridity]. I'm in the middle of doing a translation of the Magic Mountain and I'm thinking hard about the etymology of the words. I've begun to actually look up the etymologies of the words I'm using, for example translating the German word 'vernichten' which has the word 'nicht' in it—no or not. That word can mean destroy, but I decided to use annihilate because the 'nihil' also means not, nothing. Thomas Mann picked that word [because] it had a 'no' in the middle of it. Making non-existent, making not. We understand the difference in tone between destroy and annihilate even if we don't know why. The why is in etymology. The etymologies of the words shape the history of the usage of the word, and through the usage we understand the difference in tone between different words.”
Wolf's life now consists of teaching (both workshops and university courses), raising her daughters (with her mother helping with childcare), and trying to make time to write and translate. Yet she continues to wander in new regions of language, primarily through translation. As different as their histories are, Germany and Korea both experienced a form of Cold War partition, and Wolf now focuses on contemporary Korean and Korean-American poetry. South Korean government subsidies make such translations more financially sustainable for publishers. Wolf and German-Korean writer Sool Park are working on Korean poet Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death for Fischer-Verlag. Park will write the first draft, Wolf the second, and they will collaborate on the third. With Charlotte Thießen, Wolf will translate MacArthur fellow Don Mee Choi's English-language Hardly War for Spector Books.
“Once the internet made it possible to reach a wider audience for cheaper, suddenly all these smaller presses sprang up and a lot of them are very translation-centric,” says Bernofsky.
Wolf is often described as a poet of liminal spaces between languages. This is entirely true, but it should not obscure her poems' vitality and primal power. She explodes the singular idea of “place” into a web of meanings in a “star shaped formation” or “constellation,” in Yoko Tawada's words.
“When we talk about places, we are perhaps talking more about something that happens in time,” Wolf has said. “Perhaps we should do away with the concept of place, and talk instead about intersections, nodules and tendrils. And of languages.”
"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire