Partisans

Description: 64 pages
Partisans

In prose, the novelist Douglas Woolf once said verb tenses are like gears that will have driven their truck payload over the mountains (or that streak across the Bonneville Flats). In poetry, the grammatical determinacy of verbs may be likened to an unacknowledged engine in a more constructivist sense. Rodrigo Toscano’s Partisans works the mechanics of language to unveil the conjoined agency of human labor and grammatical component. Toscano shows how an ethics of the present tense, one that is at once always contingent, always mediated by the precise valences of language, is anything but a uniform aporia of surfaces and disavowed meanings. Rejecting both univocal materiality and its supporting idealist investments, he brilliantly renews a tradition of poetics based in the structuring work of grammar that begins with Louis Zukofsky and continues in Kit Robinson’s The Dolch Stanzas and Alan Davies’ Name. This work is an ethical disquisition "As against / The set relations" that revises much current doxa about the nature of linguistic agency.

Rodrigo Toscano’s poetry — positing a relation of "one" (of the person) to force/world/class/transformation or control by the outside — moves that relation itself to be that transformation (to be "one" as "their" "us" "we"). The relation he makes is language-flicker of motion: "Those objects, she said, subjectify one."

His Partisans manufactures space — is a relation of times, gleams as future/past, that is "historically-soluble" — "WHAT WILL CAPITAL’S CULTURE BE TIMING (then)? — "WHAT WILL MANUFACTURED SPACE BE DEFINING (then)?" That is, "then" is the present: "But to dream now/of something/that isn’t that..."

The individual is a worker as a "wordworker." Toscano places "one" in relation to that "force" or "world" as an intentionality. There is a simultaneity created by his language’s motion that is a contemplation that is an occurrence itself. Line/word as motion/shape becomes a motion, also perceptual motion, that moves ‘the terrain’ (language and world).

In this collection the alarms are coming from all directions, but a song is floating through. What is the song doing there? "Is it commemorating resistance?" Yes, but in a completely unsentimental way. The lyric necessity behind these poems is the elastic and quixotic form that resistance takes. — Fanny Howe

Toscano's Partisans injects a startling new breath of urgency in contemporary poetics, one that skates awfully close to such politically activated texts as Bruce Andrews' I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up or Myung Mi Kim's Dura, but which doesn't lose its very specific questioning of political agency beneath its cross-cut surface. The twelve parts of this book-length work each consider a specific moment in thinking about progressive politics - "unveil[ing] the conjoined agency of human labor and grammatical component" in Barrett Watten' s phrase from the book jacket - with such titles as "Present Perfect Progressive" and "Simple Past" identifying the perspective taken amidst the historical flux, pointing to concepts of closed historical determinacies and never ironic ideas of utopias to-be. Its short, tight lines, which move through several modes of rhetoric from the direct address, the declamatory, the lyric and the quasi-hermetic, never lose steam as Toscano plows through his manic considerations of aesthetics and society. The following is near-Poundian razzling of activist poetics, condemning as it is precise: "Flouting history, rambling spleen'd / <sign of Timidity> II Fumbling segues, trancing sex'd / <a sign of Banality> II Spouting ethics, shunning touch / <a sign of Celebrity> II Sorting concepts, draping needs / <a sign of Obscurity>" (9). Toscano's "wordwork" - the poem is obsessed with the nature of poetry as "labor" in an poetic economy that is, even at its margins, compromised by the exigencies of the "market" - is always tempered by his quest for the "collective" revolutionary consciousness, such that even the short time it takes to bring the poem to the print drops it from its immediate social moment: "By the time this all gets sketched, typed / circulated, confiscated, allocated / celebrated, denigrated, reiterated / obfuscated, recuperated, activated I/it will have lost its gain / so to speak / will have had to begin / again / between" (12) he writes, mourning, perhaps, the lost of his address to the confines of the white page and the bookshelf Partisans takes a stance against "beauty" -- it is as pared and honed as Brecht's later poetry - and certainly against the idea of a beautiful soul, but consequently avoids the pessimism and turn toward the ironic that much latter-day lyricism possesses in the face of disappointment with the revolutionary moment: "So back to irony-ville / petty bourgeois-ville II round and round / eclectic hectic and peptic" (20). His metaphysics of social "Agent(cy)" seems to center around the idea of a "social surplus" which can be engaged for social transformation for "Doing" - a surplus created in the margins of the bourgeois self and which, to this time, has been the static, inactive area from which most avant-garde American poetries have surfaced. "And why not / partisans II So so democratic / postmodern muzzling /1 Having been fitted / having been summoned by it I/In the present (but of the past) / the subject II We 'ye, as a has been / or stand in - for// Now? A muffled yet pressing now "(41), he asks, bringing to light the necessity of a singular, staunch view amongst the calls for plurality and untranslatability that have become catchwords of late-progressive literary and political theory. However, even Toscano realizes that, in this case at least, his verbal assay may not be more than a tone mourning the loss of collective action and will in the later 20th century, an urge toward "the dazzling brightness / of realism," the "tattered / fettered / committed." Poetry may very well be the unsatisfactory vehicle, as he writes toward the end, imagining himself before a crowd: "So I'm facing faces / as I recite this / as I'm looked at II quizzically?" (47) But this line is followed by "toward yourselves too", throwing the ball back in the court where he has, fairly and unpretentiously, returned it, into the minds and hearts of the readers who are being challenged by this extraordinary, difficult, but noble and ennobling text. "Readers / as agents" (49)

Present Perfect Progressive

Through weeks of exchanges
of speech

(and not only speech)

Between persons
toward objects

Between products
toward futures

At a time like this
but of the past
toward up ahead · here
up ahead · here

Worlds

As in a tangled net

These attempts at inquiry
as blades

Or treats
perhaps
as samplers
of wordwork

For handlers
of wordwork

Albeit
muster
spite

(if not comedy)

An extracted surplus
does
go somewhere

A surplus
transforming
does
cause something

Who’s been verbing
around noun-fields

Flouting history, rambling spleen’d
< a sign of Timidity >

Fumbling segues, trancing sex’d
< a sign of banality >

Spouting ethics, shunning touch
< a sign of Celebrity >

Sorting concepts, draping needs
< a sign of Obscurity >

Been reading "world"
through shards, reflexive
famed "fragments"

(as compelled to)

Non-collective
petty
rebellions

Nevertheless
how could one have them translate
another’s
mine to yours
yours to mine
ours to theirs
theirs · to who’s?

(and why would one care to know)

Collective Desire

Consider
what can be sparked
by something like
how have you been?

how have you been
is an initial
seemingly containable
question / greeting

Been