“I believe that language sterilized or sanitized of its mystery becomes a tool for propaganda and fascist regimes. There are too many “strong poems” which I believe were written with the intention of being anti-fascist agents but in fact wind up so easily as little monuments themselves for those same regimes of thought. If we understand the work of experimental poetry to be to fight against the wieldable story, the wieldable poem, then it becomes very clear what the incantatory possibilities of language can do for us. Incantation is a deviation from ordinary capitalist life. Start chanting on the side of the street and see what accusations emerge. That is the threat of incantation. But our earth-bound traditions are inextricably tied to incantation—rites and rituals, of birth, loss, transformation, and death—our besoiled parts have always used incantation as accompaniment through the painful portals of life because it connects us to the more-than-human, the not yet born, the deepest chasm. Incantation is also that truth of poetry that spits on the ground in front of virtuosity. There is no great poetry without virtuosity—which comes only from reading and absorbing and reading and finding new language to respond to what we have read and encountered not just in books, but in people, in landscapes, in soundscapes, in dialects, in idioms, in legalese, in mistranslations, but there is no poetry at all without duende, what Nathaniel Mackey calls “deep trouble.” I am not greatly moved by writing that isn’t primarily interested in that place where the soul is forced to make a home amidst the groundlessness of everyday death—those poems can veer into becoming soap operas, which of course we go to in order to have a particular kind of experience, but soap operas can make a mockery of duende. Their tears are not real. They are like the tears of someone hired to weep at a funeral. Of course, we hired these professional wailers because our societies so desperately lack the proper mourning infrastructures for real grieving so I do not blame them for that, which is to say I find myself more alienated by language that does not reckon with the truth of the way we are in ways both violent and sublime alienated from our language, and yet I do blame them when alienation becomes the end goal, like it was the only remaining truth. Of course, we should be working with alienation, and we should always be conscious that the hired tears are always threatening us. But ritual returns us to the real collective tears. I seek a place where language is allowed to act as a continuously unfolding ceremony—rather than merely giving form to experience, which feels a bit sheltered or disengaged with the fact that words are receiving things as much as they are expressing things—and so the ritual of poetry is this recognition, that all voices in the room will be picked up by the feedback and that will generate its own experience. I believe that poetry should overtake the writer and become its own demanding existence. Back to the idea of temporality—that is what ritual calls attention to, after all—that we are being gathered by time, because of time, in time, and, even in our lateness, on time. Poetry is the deepest reality to me because it means letting language reveal its own reality to us. This is what true incantation does as well—it opens a portal that connects the unconscious to the future—I’ve always found it strange when people automatically associate the unconscious with a mining of the past when it seems obvious to me that it is our ride to the future. And I guess I feel that this is the possibility of ritual. That it gives us a chance to bridge the past to the future. Perhaps incantation is the recognition that you have to create the thing that destroys you, to make way for the future. Because without it, they will in all likelihood kill us and make us sing their stupid songs about it. I would rather make my own songs to mark the moment. Ritual recognizes that these songs we make are little machines that will take us from the past to the future and back again.”
— An Interview with Valerie Hsiung, Author of The pedestrian – Nightboat Books
