Responses to American Poetry

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene. The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

Tatiani Rapatzikou 
(Associate Professor, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Advisor and initiative co-ordinator trapatz@enl.auth.gr)

Alexis Almeida

Caetano: On Liquid Intelligence, Speculative Genealogy, and Being Inside the Form

“Some Things I Love” comes from a section of my book titled “Photographs,” which is the first section. I wanted to begin here as a way to think through what a photograph both does and what it might be expected to do. I’ve been reading a lot about different theories of photography; also starting to take more of them myself, as a kind of way of marking time, but I’m also trying to shape them into visual poems or diagrams. The idea that a photograph can become a discrete object of knowledge is something I want to interrogate. I’m thinking of a range of things like a family album, or pieces of “documentary” photography or photographs that are catalogued as being representative of a certain place or culture (Ariella Azoulay writes about this). The idea that a photograph makes something appear naturalized or imposes a sense of the “natural” or the neutral is what I want to unravel with these poems, which each present in roughly the same shape but are also associative and (I hope) create the sense of simultaneous timeframes and narratives. I wanted to see what happened when I went “inside” a photograph – one I found lying around, or a moment in time that felt paused, or that I’m caught on in memory. I’m really interested in Jeff Wall’s idea of “liquid intelligence” (via Kaja Silverman’s book The Miracle of Analogy), which accounts for the chemical processes of development, but also the “lability” and “incalculability” of the form. I think of this section as a language forming, one that moves between states of tenuousness and clarity, like the way my son is slowly learning to talk and so to think about the world.

Thinking about photography has also helped me think through the idea of “the confessional,” or confessionalism, which often carries with it some expectation of an unmediated transmission of experience, knowledge, etc. I often write autobiographically, but more than sharing a narrative that unfolds linearly, I am interested in entering with a specific form in mind – sometimes an abstract one – making the mediated quality of transmission especially clear. For example, the middle section of my book – “I Have Never Been Able to Sing” – is conceived of as a photograph’s negative, a portrait of what the speaker has never done. From this kind of negative portrait a lot of inferences can be made, while a lot of concrete information is also given to the reader. As a writer I find constraint freeing, and as a reader structures, like repeating structures can create a kind of meditative, rarefied space where subtle shifts are the ones that are most deeply felt. There’s also a constant act of translation happening in “Sing” that I hope resonates throughout the book – something like translating between different versions of the self, one that is and one that could be, and getting caught in the blur of that maneuver, like the blur of a photograph.

I think it’s worth it to think more about how translation factors into poems. I am a translator of Spanish to English, and my love of Spanish I believe comes from my grandmother, whom I spoke with when I was very young before she died. Her name was Graciela, and her husband, my grandfather, was Caetano, for whom the book is named. Graciela came to the U.S. from Colombia, and Caetano came here from Portugal without speaking English. He died young, and for many reasons in my family (one of them being the pressure to assimilate) his life before he

got here is very mysterious to me. I never met him, but have always felt his absence is a strong part of who I am. How do I translate that, or re-create that feeling in another language, and what if the original starts to feel very far away – as often happens – what is carried over? What is reproduced differently? A poem can’t answer these questions, but it can create space for them to live, or for something, maybe even a word, to shift in meaning for being repeated, beginning differently each time.

WORKS CITED

Almeida, Alexis. I Have Never Been Able to Sing. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018.
Azoulay, Ariella. “Market Transactions Cannot Abolish Decades of Plunder.” Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography, edited by Tina M. Campt, Marianna Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020, pp. 47-60.
Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy. Stanford UP, 2015.

Contributor Bio: Alexis Almeida
Poem: Some Things I Love
 

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