I met Carlos Soto-Román in Santiago this January not long after Ugly Duckling Presse’s publication of the English translation of his book 11. Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973.
Twenty Theses for (Any Future) Process Poetics
Postscript // Bibliography // Acknowledgments
T.1 The poem is ontologically dissevering: necessarily fragmenting and fragmentary.
T.2 Holding concretized, readymade “significance” and “value” in abeyance, the poem functions as a catch, an apparatus used to observe the manifestations and codeterminations of entangling and unfurling world(s).
T.3 So as to render inoperative those ossified subject-configurations most exploitable by market vampirism, the poem tears back the veil of the “real” (where flesh meets fluorescence: body/world) to point to the rachitic frame-structure bolstering becoming.
In order to celebrate the conclusion of “Prolegomena to (Any Future) Process Poetics,” I’d like to provide a postscript that distills the central concerns of these twelve dense riffs into a series of pointed propositions. The following twenty theses comprise the core of this thinking and will act (I hope) as a lens for future rereading. Thank you, dear readers, for engaging with/in this work.