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Across a long, extraordinarily prolific career, Cuban poet José Kozer (born in Havana, 1940) is remarkable for the consistency of his style. His work has been viewed as part of the Latin American neobaroque movement — a loose grouping of poets from the 1970s onwards who preferred a dense, multidimensional approach rather than the then-common plainspoken colloquial or conversational style — yet Kozer’s poetry is very much sui generis.

Even before being read, a Kozer poem proclaims itself by its scroll-like layout, and one quickly notices the disruptive syntax, the use of parentheses, the signature repetition of words, and the diversity of a vocabulary garnered from across the Spanish-speaking world, where Cubanisms, Mexicanisms, and words peculiar to Chile or Peru, jostle against the Spanish of the Siglo de Oro. The versicle layout in the form

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
      xxxxxxx
      xxxxxxx
      xxxxxxx
      xxxxxxx

suggests a Biblical scroll that the yad or pointer moves down and, equally, a Chinese or Japanese scroll where poetry is a visual, as well as auditory, aesthetic experience. The reader’s experience of Kozer’s poetry is also shaped by the general absence of punctuation, the sudden shifts in grammatical structure, the tendency for past tense to glide into present tense, for third-person pronouns or verb endings to suddenly become first person: in short, a series of devices that help create an experience of simultaneity and immediacy.

Often, in Kozer’s poems, there is a collapsing of sequential or historic time into a single present. In “Indicios, del inscrito” (“Traces, of the inscribed”),[1] for example, a grandfather in the hour of death reciting or tracing with his finger a prayer enters into the presence of his namesake David going down with his chariots. There is also the experience of fusion, as in the Zen-like moment of identification when the poet chewing a biscuit and the caterpillar chewing a leaf merge into each other.[2] A sense that the religious impulse speaks directly into our profound incomprehension before death is at the core of much of Kozer’s poetry. The religious dimension to his poetry (and to his stylistics) helps explain why Kozer’s poems of childhood, family, Cuba, and everyday life are so distinctive when compared with many North American poems dealing with similar subject matter. The poem does not resolve into a story, nor does it settle into the contemplation or celebration of the strangeness of language. In an interview with Jacobo Sefamí, Kozer states that calling his poetry “neobaroque” or concerned with “language” is only one way to situate it, but that calling it “religious” might be another, even more valid way:

I don’t have a problem of language, I have a religious, metaphysical, philosophical, ethical problem. Language after all is not an end in itself, it’s an instrument; it’s not autonomous, it’s a vehicle … yes, for me, what moves me is religious difficulty, the difficulty before the death of the body.[3]

A second aspect of Kozer’s manner of being neobaroque concerns the surrealist strain in his work. This has been largely underrepresented in the selections made of his poetry, especially in websites and anthologies in English, which tend to focus on his poems of family life, childhood in Cuba, and everyday married life or his Buddhist poems. The three poems presented in Jacket2 highlight this other, surrealist side of Kozer’s work. As Melanie Nicholson argues persuasively, surrealism reinvented itself in Latin America, leaving a widespread, diffuse trace, particularly from the start of the 1950s, among poets like Olga Orozco, Octavio Paz, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Marosa di Giorgio.[4] It was not the surrealism of automatic writing or of wordplay for its own sake that interested these poets — rather, they were drawn to surrealism’s “conviction that poetry is a path to knowledge,”[5] tapping into forces of eros, magic, and dream material to make poetry a place of revelation. The inclusion of oneiric material, trust in the poem as a journey that escapes one’s control, wildly disruptive images, and rapid syntactic transformations: all these surrealist traces are visible in Kozer’s poetry. 

It is interesting to think how differently surrealism was interpreted or bent as it was adopted, around the same time, in North America and in Latin America. Where New York poets and others (even in their selections and translations of French Surrealists) tended to hear a “cool,” abstract, even cerebral, poetry, in Latin America a more emotional, threatening, and visceral “magic” surrealism developed. While such poets as Ashbery, O’Hara, or Koch valued surrealism, perhaps above all, for its liberating effect, the way it gave permission for the poem to cast off the moorings of subject matter or preimposed unity, trusting the poem could “make its own days,” in Latin America the connections between surrealism and eros and thanatos predominated. (In making this contrast I’m thinking most of all of the New York poets and of the period roughly between 1945 and 1975. Charles Simic and Russell Edson, for example, with their darkly visceral surrealism, are a different story again.) In poets as diverse as Paz, Orozco, Pizarnik, and di Giorgio, there is the vision of a poetry that is neither narrowly personal nor social nor political (nor purely experimental), but arises from a level below such categories, incorporating a strong presence of nonrational elements. Traces of that emotionally charged surrealism help explain the sense of depth in Kozer’s poetry, grounding his distinctive stylistics in an underlying oneiric energy. I must stress that I use the word “surrealism” here very loosely — it is not a label Kozer would apply to himself.

Three poems from Carece de causa

José Kozer’s 1988 collection Carece de causa (“No known cause” or “It lacks a cause”) marks a significant growth in the level of complexity, strangeness, and difficulty of his poetry. Compared to earlier poems like “Te acuerdas, Sylvia,” “Gramática de papá,” or “Mi padre, que está vivo todavía”[6] (all from Este judío de números y letras [1975] or Bajo este cien [1983]), the poems gathered in Carece de causa signal a turning away from linear narrative, a dislocation of reader expectation, the simultaneity of many levels. While the earlier poems — had they been written in English — would not have looked out of place in North American poetry, in Carece de causa and his subsequent books Kozer develops a style of poetry unlike anything I know of in North America, an approach to poetry very much his own. Partly this has to do with the number of poems that lack obvious references to personal or social narrative. Partly it is a matter of how strangely compounded, inverted, and encrusted his poems become — even when they do seem to start from a clear focus, such as the illness of his father or his grandfather’s death. Often we don’t know where we are, or the apparent location of the poem’s “action” fractures to reveal layer upon layer. There is a liturgical, ritualistic dimension to the poetry, a deliberate splicing between language levels and dialects of Spanish, the inclusion of biblical and mythical presences that undermines realist expectations. Yet, at the same time, the surrounding everyday world is presented in its precise minutiae, recorded in a language that seeks to claim “the totality” of Spanish vocabulary. This combination of indeterminate location, suspended narrative, and very specific vocabulary helps give Kozer’s poetry its unique feel. Of equal importance, the poems respond to psychic, emotional, and religious pressures that shape the whole. Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo in his reflections on poetry suggests: 

In all the words of a poem you must be able to read their necessity, that is, one by one they should convince us that they are there because they are more necessary than other words which were not used, and, what is more complicated, that they are more valid than silence itself. (“In art it is difficult to say something which would be as good as saying nothing,” affirmed Wittgenstein.)[7] 

In other words, as well as surprising us, poetry ideally convinces us of its necessity. In Kozer that driving force, that necessity in the writing, most often involves the religious dimension to life, the proximity of death. 

The three poems presented here — “Retributions” (“Las retribuciones”), “Things near at hand” (“Proximidades”), and “Echoes” (“Ecos”) — share a strange oneiric quality. Although I have been labeling this quality “surrealist,” perhaps “cabalistic” would be a better description. It seems concerned with realities underlying this reality — or at least, invisibly present in it. We do not know where we are. Is this the Cuba of Kozer’s childhoood or Forest Hills, New York, where he lived at the time of writing, or perhaps somewhere in the Middle East or Eastern Europe? In “Retributions,” for example, the wicker easy chairs where the ladies and gentlemen doze suggest Cuba, but the city’s domes suggest Jerusalem. The cap and gown of the magistrates and the bonnets of the ladies suggest a genteel world, Jane Austen’s England perhaps, yet this outdoor tea party takes place in the presence of a highly ritualized butcher contemplating a cow that has been or is about to be slaughtered. Repetition heightens the ritualistic effect. The time frame is deliberately unclear. Of the poem’s twenty stanzas, seven are predominantly cast in some form of the past tense, nine in the present; elsewhere the future or the imperative takes prominence. The effect is to strip us of easy bearings, an effect increased by the general absence of punctuation. In the final stanza, for example, we could read the final lines in Spanish as “begins the reverse of shadow [of darkness?] / the apogee of the breeze among the poppies splashes the walls,” taking “the apogee of the breeze” as one more subject of “begins.” We could even go back to near the beginning of the stanza and read “the shape of the cups” as the subject of “splashes the walls.” The difficulty of tracking the subjects of verbs is one of the challenges of translating Kozer’s poetry. Yet a translation into English also opens up ambiguities not present in the Spanish. In the original, for example, it is not possible to interpret this last stanza as saying that the reverse of shadow begins the apogee of the breezes, as “se inicia” (“begins”) is intransitive. In English, without adding a lot of punctuation or overdirecting the reader, it is impossible to rule out all such “illegitimate” ambiguities, over and above the real ambiguities. 

In “Things near at hand” (“Proximidades”) and “Echoes” (“Ecos”) not only do we not know where we are, but both poems are built around strange presences that belong to some oneiric or cabalistic strata. The three old ladies in “Things near at hand” are clearly much more than old ladies — their ancientness goes much further back. They lie down to sleep under frost. Forming the flowerbeds into some ritualistic cross they lay down conditions that look very like a spell or curse. Who are their children (or should it be more specifically “sons,” another possible reading of the Spanish)? And who is the “I” of this poem? In “Echoes,” mysterious word-eating animals seem to have evolved from metal alloys by some strange alchemy and to exist alongside Orpheus. And yet in the last stanza the poet’s wife is there, naked while he wears some very specific clothing — a “dark blue woollen sweater” and “a sienna polka-dot tie.” It is these sudden, unexplained, disruptive transformations that explain why I use the word “surrealist” to characterize these poems. Moreover, what unfolds does not have the implicit narrative or concern with constructing a self, or with questioning the frailty and exposed nature of an identity, that can be found in such North American poems inflected by surrealism as Frank O’Hara’s “In memory of my feelings” or “Mayakovsky.” Kozer’s poetry does not seem interested in such narratives of the self. We are truly in the presence of a very different poetic. Everything unfolds with an impersonal authority — the “I” is not particularly a biographic “I.” Each image that moves us forward becomes a new reality: a city lying below a city, the German phrase “Ich möchte rauchen” (why German?), and the roof slates that have just now rained down. None of these images — or should we say “moments”? — is given greater importance than the others. There is no hierarchy. There is, however, a compelling dream logic to it all. Death, the exposure of being naked, creativity, and wonder — these forces assemble and reassemble a great diversity of material and of language. Admittedly Cuba is never very far — just as the Holocaust, Eastern Europe, and Jerusalem are never very far — but not as any kind of subject matter capable of being described, much less fixed, rather as resonances that continue to speak through the poems.

One of the challenges of translating Kozer’s poetry in general — and these three poems are no exception — concerns his range of both formal and highly colloquial, often regional, vocabulary and the resultant interplay of ritualistic and conversational tones. In “Echoes” (“Ecos”) the word “féferes,” for example, points simultaneously in several directions. I have translated it as “thingamies” but, as a synonym for “trastos,” it could also be taken to mean junk, useless things, or it could be used by a workman to refer to his tools, as someone might say “my gear,” “my things.” In the Dominican Republic it could mean the male sex organs, or in Cuba food for babies or farm animals — “pap” or “fodder” perhaps. In the context it seems to refer above all to a lazy way of talking, almost like saying “what’s-it’s-name,” but it also suggests something looked down on, such as leftover corn stalks used to feed horses. Of equal importance, I suspect, coming after the reference to a nasal voice, it has to my ear an almost comical sound, like someone with a slight speech defect. There is no way I can think of to match all these options. “Thingamies” is not particularly used of human or animal food, and while it captures a lazy way of speaking, it is not exactly comical. Overall, I am sure, my translations of Kozer’s poems are relatively more formal and employ a more standard English than his “total” Spanish. This is largely inevitable in translation as it would seem arbitrary and odd to fill his poems (in translation) with Cockney slang or regional words from 1950s rural Alabama, for example, apart from the problem of such regional expressions being incomprehensible to most readers. On a few occasions over the years, where Kozer uses a word heavily marked with a specifically regional status, I have worked in a couple of Australianisms. In one poem published by Shearsman I used the Australian “woop woop,”[8] meaning a remote place, and in another “feeling real crook,”[9] a tough old Aussie’s way of saying “about to die.” Apart from highlighting the shared fact of writing from inside marginal dialects of an immense world language, these small gestures hint at the commonalities of our two “island homes.” However, in the case of the three poems presented here in Jacket2, hunting for Australianisms did not seem appropriate.

My initial engagement with and understanding of the expanded practices of Conceptual writing is situated within a particular geography — Denendeh, or the Northwest Territories of Canada — during the proposed Mackenzie Valley Gas Project hearings held throughout the territory. The purpose of the proposed pipeline was to pump natural gas from Arctic Ocean reserves south across the entire territory to Alberta, where it would fuel the production of tar sands oil. Many considered the project to be “basin-opening,” meaning that it would serve as a main artery for dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller pipelines that would tap into it, accelerating the infectious spread of Alberta’s boom-and-bust petro-economics throughout the North.

The pipeline hearings and media depicting the hearings — testimonies; court transcripts; environmental impact assessments; informative publications such as pamphlets and websites produced by groups with competing interests, i.e. the National Energy Board, Indigenous governments, the pipeline proponents, and environmental organizations; radio and newspaper coverage — were a complex milieu of language. Eleven different languages were used throughout the proceedings: Chipewyan, Cree, Dogrib, English, French, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey, and South Slavey. Often, specific terms and phrases made translation — into other languages, into other epistemological frameworks — exceptionally difficult: for example, words regarding land and livelihood in the various Indigenous languages, or the scientific terms and practices of biologists and ecologists, or the industrial specificities and corporate-speak of the pipeline proponents. Additionally, these languages and their vocabularies were staged within the settler-colonial process of the hearings, which had their own procedures and jargon that were alienating to many while benefitting the corporations and governmental departments that have historically catalyzed social violence and environmental devastation in the North.

I remember attending the hearings and listening to the proponents’ lawyers speak variations of the word “mitigation” over and over. The proponents would employ “mitigation measures” to offset any adverse impact the pipeline and its construction would have on the land, its animals, and inhabitants. The effects that increased resource exploration and excavation would have on the Beaufort Sea, the Arctic tundra, and Mackenzie-Valley corridor would be “mitigated.” The impact the pipeline would have on the bird sanctuary where the natural gas fields were located would be “mitigated.” The fact that herds of caribou would not be able to cross into their calving grounds during construction would be “mitigated.” Changes to the permafrost around the pipeline would be “mitigated.” The social repercussions of hundreds of temporary workers — mostly men from the south — moving into small, remote Indigenous communities would be “mitigated.” Again and again, they said it. “Mitigation” became a concept that, in their mouths, had no meaning whatsoever. Yet its function was clear: “Mitigation” was a word that could satisfy the juridical demands of the process, ward off further scrutiny from environmental groups, while obfuscating and deterring others from challenging the proposal.

I remember listening to an afternoon Dogrib radio broadcast in which the pipeline was discussed at length. I wrote a list of every English word spoken during that hour:

environmental impact assessment
Norman Wells
pipeline
National Energy Board
joint review panel
Northwest Territories
Exxon-Mobil
Premier Floyd Roland
Aboriginal Pipeline Group
access agreement
Alberta-based developer
Imperial Oil
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada
community consultation

These were the words — proper nouns and phrases particular to settler-colonial governance in the North — that could not be translated, the only ones that retained their Anglo-composition in the Dogrib broadcast. If one wanted to pinpoint exact instances in which a settler-colonial epistemology infiltrates another language, one might begin with these terms and the contexts of their use.

I remember reading the National Energy Board’s published final decision that approved the construction of the pipeline. It is titled: “Respecting All Voices: Our Journey to a Decision.” In it, many of the Indigenous and environmental critiques of the pipeline and the hearings process are ventriloquized and recontextualized, while dissent is edited or erased. A Dene Elder’s testimony about honoring the land, its peoples and animals, and her continued efforts fighting against the pipeline appears in the report, with a notable difference. Her comments about honoring the land are there — in large font beside a picture of Deh Cho (or the Mackenzie River) — but the remark about her opposition is absent. One finds instances like this again and again throughout the report. The outright protest against the pipeline is transformed into a gentle suggestion; certain Indigenous perspectives appear in the overall package to highlight the National Energy Board’s “consultations”; violences past and future are acknowledged, yet done in a manner so as to be immediately eschewed.

What these examples highlight is how language enacts power, how language enforces power, how language becomes a record of that power. These figurings of settler colonialism is what initially drew me toward the expanded practices of Conceptual writing. At the time of the Mackenzie Gas Project hearings, I sought a poetic practice that engaged the ways language functioned in these milieus, not simply at the level of the word or phrase but as an overall process and structure. I wanted a poetry that confronted the various collective assemblages of enunciation that address particular structures of power. I sought a poetics that documented the institutional violences of settler-colonial empire — its texts, processes, and performances.

I looked for precedents. I read Vanessa Place’s Tragodía, and its procedural vampiricisms resonated deeply with many aspects of the pipeline hearings, from individual utterance to total schema. I read Kenneth Goldsmith’s American trilogy — The Weather, Traffic, and Sports — and found there the idiom of US empire, its carnivals, jingles, and mascots. I read Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary and was stunned by the paratactical orchestration of the global coal industry’s official rhetoric and the personal testimonies of extractive disaster. I read M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and then I listened to the work performed and heard there the stutters and moans and forced silences of documented massacre, its fractured resounding.

These works have in common a transcriptive poetics and a repositorial logic, two compositional features that can effectively portray the nexus of power and language. By transcriptive poetics, I mean that the language of the poems is sourced from various “information genres,” as John Guillory phrases it — transcripts of testimonies, broadcasts, manuals, newspapers, legal texts — and is rewritten, reframed, or reformatted within a poetic text; by repositorial logic, I mean that the authors are working with specific collections of archival materials from which they intentionally select, edit, and construct their poetic text.

I understand that these works arguably are or are not “Conceptual writing.” I am less dedicated to a taxonomical title, and more concerned with the compositional tactics they share. They are tactics that on their own do not determine whether or not a work is an example of Conceptual writing, yet they are tactics scrutinized primarily within the milieus in which Conceptual writing has been discussed and debated. They are tactics that continue to be tested and transformed in recent works framed within the milieus of Conceptual writing: in Carlos Soto-Román’s Chile Project: Re-Classified, a work that documents an attempted blackout of neoliberal terror; in Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia, which dredges up and disrupts narratives of colonizing what is presently known as the Canadian prairies; and in Jordan Abel’s Un/Inhabited, an attempt to dismantle the entire pulp-fiction genre of settler-colonial romance.

“I want a literature that is not made from literature.” I read this line from Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue as I complete this writing, and it expresses exactly what was and continues to be for me the primary intrigue of Conceptual writing. I want a literature that is composed of an array of inscriptive practices: their systems, devices, logics. I want a literature that engages the language that forms power relations — modes of supremacy and domination — in the world. Within the milieus of contemporary poetry and poetics, Conceptual writing’s ability to take up an array of inscriptive modes and to portray specific enactments of power through language is to my mind its most poignant and provocative contribution. What remains to be thoroughly examined are the differences, responsibilities, and effectivity of these textual transfigurations.