VIOLENCE!

The thing which struck me most about both the Butler and the Borzutzky texts was how violent and violence-centered they are. In Ever, there seems to be a central violence which causes the rest of the book to become destabilized both in terms of the plot and in terms of the language itself. On page 8, some unnamed and seemingly unnatural event causes mass destruction and death. Images of light bursting and bubbling rooms, bodies appearing from thin air, football players torn to pieces / flattened to nothing, fish churned to blood. This outside violence, the destruction of human flesh and buildings, occurs while the speaker remains relatively untouched though without a doubt destabilized.

The very language of the Butler piece suggests this destabilization. It is lush and dense, the syntax is strange and twisting; in certain parts, I found it difficult to follow. I imagined this onslaught of language as a violence done to the reader in a sense, an overload of words and images and phrases which do not necessarily accumulate into a logical sequence but instead builds and beats the reader into submission, much like the outside world destroys and does violence and beats bodies into submission(death). The speaker, then, is this decentralized, insane figure which resides in a house that is relatively untouched by the surrounding apocalypse. The house is strange, and though I only gave you guys a bit of the book, it gets weirder the further the story goes. Rooms twist into more rooms and the house becomes this living labyrinthine type thing in which the speaker stumbles around and attempts to exist, all the while the outside world crumbles (and, it can be argued, the speaker’s inside world as well).

The structure of Butler’s book further suggests a form of violence is being done to the reader and even the very fundamental idea of what a book should be. The inclusion of abstract images creates a dissonance with the text. The use of brackets sectioned off from each other also goes against this idea of what a traditional novel/book is. Because it includes images and these strange brackets/movements, it can be argued that the basic principle of a novel’s construction is in doubt/challenged. The violence of the text is enacted on the characters, the reader, and the abstract idea of a novel’s form.

The Borzutzky text includes some similar elements as the Butler text. Its opening poem “Resuscitation” (the title itself suggests a sort of violence as resuscitation is usually needed after a traumatic violence event, whether it is some form of outside violence [attack, accident] or some form of inward violence [heart failure, disease, whatever]) begins with an image of falling and stumbling over a dead horse and breaking its ribs. The violence here is less abstract than it is in the Butler as the language itself is more, I don’t know, straightforward in some way. It’s easier to grasp how/what the violence is/does as the sentence structures are much more linear and traditional when compared with the Butler sentences. This violence continues throughout the book in various forms.

Another common theme/idea in Borzutzky is the poem/poet itself. This first pops up in “Failure in the Imagination” where the main ‘character’ of the poem is ‘the poet’. The poet wants terrorists to kill his rival poets in NYC and he sortof interacts with disembodied limbs and such. As it moves toward the prose poems, it (the book) starts to meditate on what a book is / what poetry is / what these things do / what people think/feel about these things. Always there are violences done to the body. In “The Readers,” which opens with “Who reads these books?” people’s fingers get pulled off, people have lost their tongues, limbs fall from the sky. What begins as a seemingly straightforward meditation on the readership of poetry ends up venturing into a more surreal/violent territory. (I love that the readers live in a tower of books. Sound familiar guys? Guys? I’m talkin’ about getting an MFA guys. I’m talking about our tower of books.) All of this is funny, to some extent, but it also can be read as critiquing modern poetry culture (and there is a very definite culture).

Anyway, there seem to be violent/harsh attitudes toward poets and poetry in general. From “In my Numb Heart, a Prick of Misgiving”: “I want a poet who can be toilet trained to prevent the shit from spilling out of his mouth.” I’m always a little wary of poets complaining about poets/poetry in a poem unless it is aimed toward the self specifically or else a little tongue in cheek (I almost typed ironic but I guess it’s always ironic when you critique poetry by using poetry). This particular moment is funny, though, and so I forgive it its self-centeredness(masturbatory). Many of the poems in the latter half of the book deal with poets or poetry in some way. The biggest constant in all of these is a focus on the body as a site of violence. From “Love in the Time of Poetry”: “We listened to the poetry of infestation, and from above a giant appendage dug out the pestilence from between my toes . . .” It goes on like this, emphasizing the body in relation to poets/poetry, all the while doing violence to the body. (The Love in the Time of Cholera reference isn’t lost on me, by the way, I’m sortof just ignoring it since I haven’t read the book and only saw a part of the movie).

To conclude, the body is a site of violence perpetrated by the inside and the outside. Poetry (and novels and literature and language) can be used as methods of violence, infesting the bodies of those that read it, burrowing into inherited conventions of what a book/poem is/should be. In both books the author relates to the inner/outer worlds through this violence and enacts a sort of self-effacement (gradual insanity in Butler [possibliy] and physical dismemberment / mocking poetry while writing poetry in Borzutzky).

What do you think?