The Appositional Project: Travis Macdonald’s “Concrete Jungle” and the Ethical Possibilities of Conceptual Poetry

Ryan Clark, Series Contributor

Ryan Clark’s series “The Appositional Project” examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination/loss.

Over the last few years, there have been many who have protested against the self-declared “a-ethical” work of Conceptual poets like Kenneth Goldsmith, who in particular seems to relish stirring up controversy with his belief that no text is too sacred to manipulate for the purpose of creating art. Such poets tend to claim that poetry should not be held to any moral standard, that poets should focus solely on creating art rather than become bogged down by concerns over ethics. Without giving this perspective too much credence, however, I want to focus on a work of highly conceptual poetry which does not hesitate to engage questions of morality, and whose author displays consideration for how readers might be moved to be more mindful of their interaction with the various ecosystems they encounter.

Travis Macdonald’s “Concrete Jungle” is a series of concrete poems which take the shape of various American states, creating a sort of map in which instead of one of the standard colors shading bordered areas (pink, orange, light green, etc.) the land mass is filled in with the names of invasive plant species currently found in the state. Rather than standing as an a-ethical art piece encouraging us to think about the meanings and connections behind the poem and its composition, “Concrete Jungle” asks us to think as moral beings about how ecologies of place have become dangerously disrupted. These poems not only push for us to recognize, but to be considerate of our interactions with our ecological surroundings. This alternate mapping asks us to consider our relationship with the environment, particularly relating to the concept of borders and how we move through them.

Speaking about his project in a September 13, 2013 issue of the online literary magazine The Clearing, Macdonald writes:

As a nation of immigrants whose collective identity (our very American-ness) has often defined itself in opposition to a shifting other (most recently those of Hispanic heritage) we Americans tend to be inordinately preoccupied with ideas of border and origin. The fact of the matter is, these plant species did not arrive here by accident. They were brought here, in many cases very deliberately, by our colonist/immigrant ancestors. We label them invasive in order to establish their otherness, their opposition to our idea of a “pure” or “natural” ecosystem. And yet, by doing so, we also seem to be disavowing our own agency in the process, our own invasive nature. We seem to say: “Look, we are working hard to keep these evil invaders in check.” In this way we conveniently gloss over the fact that we ourselves are the invaders responsible for their presence in the first place.

Here is where “Concrete Jungle” highlights the ethical strength of Conceptual Poetry: such work pushes us to think about the world around us and to consider how we might adopt more ethical and responsible ways of being. In this case, we are confronted with a mapping of the ecological threat of invasive plant species, often brought to new ecosystems through human carelessness. Further, this project questions the ideas at work behind native/invasive, man-made borders, and our nation’s status as one founded by immigrants. How many generations must pass before human immigrants become native? How many generations of Russian knapweed? If Ohwi kudzu spreads freely across demarcated lines on a map, then what is a border?

This is a work that is highly conscious of and dependent upon borders. The white space is empty: NOT-Texas, NOT-Iowa; as if there is no possibility of extension, no crossing of lines. We lift this state (or county, or nation) out of the earth as a separate entity from the land that it holds (and that is held away from it). And yet what invasive species so frequently remind us is that lines on a map fail to contain the life which moves as it will (or as we bring it) across continuous stretches of land. Macdonald’s arrangement of the names of invasive species into neatly bordered regions reminds us that only in language can we seek to establish limits on the natural world.

When we replace topography with language (though topographical markings or shading on a map is another kind of language) we encounter space differently. The names of these invasive plant species reflect human interaction, human stories. The example of “itch-grass” in Texas connects the plant to bodily sensation, for instance, while Iowa’s “Queen Anne’s Lace” reflects the flowering plant’s immigration from Europe and particularly the role of the British monarchy in the colonization of what was to become the United States. The idea that a map displays geographic location also becomes disrupted. As it turns out, I have lived in (or will soon have lived in) each state represented in the excerpt from “Concrete Jungle” that was published in The Clearing. If we approximate locations in these poetic mappings, I have lived (in chronological order) in Brazilian peppertree, bindweed, spotted knapweed, Leafy Spurge, and velvetleaf. My grandmother is buried in bull thistle, while my grandfather lives in orange hawkweed.

“Concrete Jungle” is a selective mapping, but then again so is the mapping of human settlements, highways, and even national parks. To what are we paying attention? Here, our attention is being asked of us. Consider our invasiveness, and our complicity with invasiveness. See the arbitrariness with which we choose what or whom is native or invasive. This is a deeply moral question, one which constantly determines how much we are willing to damage our various ecosystems and communities. Particularly when so much language surrounding us has lately become saturated with messages of divisiveness, it is also deeply important.

Ryan Clark's Author PicRyan Clark has dedicated years of his life to homophonic translation and is particularly interested in the reparative potential of appropriative writing, including how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. His poetry has appeared in Smoking Glue Gun, Tenderloin, Seven Corners, and Fact-Simile, and he also has an essay about teaching homophonic translation forthcoming from Something on Paper. He currently teaches composition at Savannah State University.

The Appositional Project: Groundhog Day, Homophonic Translation, and Transformation of the Self

Ryan Clark, Series Contributor

Ryan Clark’s series “The Appositional Project” examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination/loss.

Happy Groundhog Day, SRPR Blog readers. In honor of today’s holiday, I want to talk about a particular form of homophonic translation that offers a poet, to some degree, the opportunity to re-enact the long journey of self-transformation that Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) experiences in the movie, Groundhog Day. While obviously the movie has very little to do with poetry, it does shed light on yet another way that we can understand the Poetics of Emplacement, because emplacement is not only about location; it is also about something that is placed within a location. Often, that something might be the person who is writing the poem, or it might be the poem itself. But to really talk about emplacement, we should pay attention to both the place and the placed, particularly in the effect they have on one another.

For Phil Connors, he finds himself in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a small town 84 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, the city where Phil works as a news weatherman. Something about Punxsutawney and its famous Groundhog Day celebration has trapped Phil in a time loop, and each morning he wakes to live the day over and over again. He is not able to escape this loop until he learns to stop being selfish and egotistical and start being a more caring person. While the town of Punxsutawney becomes something of a character in itself (despite the film actually being filmed in Woodstock, Illinois), it is the town’s effect on Phil (and his subsequent transformation) that is most significant. As he learns more and more about the town and its people through his countless relived days, Phil realizes that other people in the world, apart from himself, need and deserve care and compassion. It is his experience with the town that drives him toward this path to self-transformation, and it reminds us that emplacement can manifest itself in ways that point us toward the internal attributes of the subject that is placed (in this case, Phil Connors) in addition to or even instead of the external features of a geographic location.

In poetry, homophonic translation presents us with an opportunity to place ourselves inside of a similar loop, particularly if we consider the re-sounding method of homophonic translation. The re-sounding method (which differs from the standard method of approximating sounds of a source text, as in the Spanish “rei” becoming the English “ray”) is built upon the idea of re-sounding a word based on each individual letter’s potential to make sound within a single language. For example, “cat” can become “sash” when we use the s-sound of “c” (as in “cede”), the ah-sound of “a” (as in “cat”) and the sh-sound of “t” (as in “ratio”). In this way, a simple three-letter word like “cat” can be be translated into more than sixty different words or phrases. With this method of re-sounding, one could translate a text repeatedly. “Cat” can become “sash,” which can become “essays” (“s” read as “es” and “h” silent), which can become “size” (silent “e” and “a”), which can become “eyes” (silent “s”), and this can go on just about forever. If we use a longer text from which to begin, the possibilities for transformation increase exponentially.

Keeping in mind Phil’s transformation from an egomaniacal jerk to a sensitive and compassionate hero, consider the shift from conquest (represented by Phil’s careerism) to care. This shift is very much at the heart of the Appositional Project, as it involves the repurposing of harmful language for poetry concerned with care and repair, and it is a shift that this method of homophonic translation can handle very well. Just as Phil was given the opportunity to repeat Groundhog Day until he was able to learn how to be a better person, homophonic translation can provide the chance to go back and re-sound language away from domination and toward a place of compassion.

As an example, consider one of the many hurtful things we regretfully say at various points in our lives to people we love. What if we were to take that language and translate it over and over again until we transform these sources of pain into poetry that emphasizes a concern for those whom we have hurt? Perhaps this could be a move toward healing, or at least it could serve as a purposeful self-examination in which we actively choose to move toward the practice of care.

The journey of Phil Connors was one of self-repair, and it was made possible through a long series of repeated attempts to become a better person and to treat others in the world with respect. Only when he succeeded and finally woke up on February 3rd was he able to move on from the town of Punxsutawney, unsticking himself from a time and place to which he was bound until he learned to appreciate it for what it was: a community of people who were no more and no less deserving of love and care than he, himself. His story reminds us that in order to fully grasp a sense of place, we must first clear our vision and learn to see beyond ourselves. Homophonic translation may provide one way to write through this potentially transformative process of self-examination, as it gives us the chance to re-sound and to transform, which at the very least sounds a lot less like a vision of purgatory than the plot of Groundhog Day.

Ryan Clark has dedicated years of his life to homophonic translation and is particularly interested in the reparative potential of appropriative writing, including how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. His poetry has appeared in Smoking Glue GunTenderloinSeven Corners, and Fact-Simile, and he also has an essay about teaching homophonic translation forthcoming from Something on Paper. He currently teaches composition at Savannah State University.

The Appositional Project: Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [saina]

Ryan Clark, Series Contributor

Ryan Clark’s series “The Appositional Project” examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination/loss.

One of the more compelling poetry projects I have come across over the past few years has been Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory series, currently comprised of two titles: [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and [saina] (Omnidawn, 2010). In both books, Santos Perez addresses the history of Guåhan (Guam) and its native Chamorro people. It is a project of repair, one that seeks to incorporate the fragments of Chamorro culture that have survived centuries of colonization at the hands of Spain, Japan, and, presently, the United States. Further, from unincorporated territory enacts a mapping of Guam through the author’s layering of political, cultural, and personal memory that serves to locate that which has become dispersed, replaced, and forgotten.

The act of incorporation is emphasized throughout the series by the preposition “from,” which appears in the title as well as at the start of each poem. Rather than writing stand-alone poems, Santos Perez has woven through each book excerpts from several long poems. In [saina], these include “tidelands,” “all with ocean views,” “sourcings,” “preterrain,” “aerial roots,” and “organic acts.” Each excerpt is therefore titled “from tidelands” or “from organic acts,” or even “ginen aerial roots,” ginen being the Chamorro word for “from.” Additionally, Santos Perez draws from numerous source texts in his poetry, including Chamorro folk tales, travel brochures and websites, and the 1950 Organic Act of Guam, which again places emphasis on the act of incorporating and bringing together. Just as colonization heavily influenced Guam and modern Chamorro culture (most Chamorros are Catholic, a holdover from Spanish rule), Santos Perez brings different texts and voices into contact with one another in order to create poetry that is multivoiced, multilingual, and multicultured, with multiple levels of mixed identity establishing a never singular and never complete representation of the Chamorro experience.

While just about every page merits lengthy discussion, I find myself most drawn to the excerpts “from all with ocean views” (and “ginen all with ocean views”). Each excerpt consists of two parts: the first includes a series of lunes composed of language appropriated from a variety of travel magazines, and the second features a prose block with the words “guåhan is” followed by language that has been remixed from articles from the website of a Guam news network. One excerpt of a lune section is as follows:

‘reinvented by
each new gaze’
the arc of a cliff                     diver’ funeral
complete with
water buffalo

sacrifice’ for those  |  inclined to  |  paradise’ ‘all our
employees are still  |  native and  |  we require no
translations’ (58)

The opening calls attention to the ways that colonialism so frequently attempts to replace an existing culture with the culture of the colonizer. Even the lune itself is the Japanese haiku re-envisioned as an American form. Guam has been “reinvented by / each new gaze” for centuries, and this language also calls attention to the tourist industry. At the end of the excerpt, we are reminded how native cultures are exoticized and held up as living tourist attractions. That “‘all our / employees are still  |  native” is presented as a selling point, just as one might expect a brochure to mention beachfront access or gorgeous scenery (“all with ocean views”).

In this sense, Santos Perez is making evident the way in which tourism in Guam acts as a sort of neo-colonialism. In a later excerpt, “ginen sourcings,” Santos Perez mentions that in 2008 approximately 1.179 million tourists visited Guam, spending an average of “$1,650 for a three-night four-day stay” (89). That the majority of tourists are from Japan, a former colonizer of the island, only reinforces this notion. By using travel magazines as his source text, Santos Perez is turning the language of tourism in on itself.

This serves as a clear example of apposition, and it is a technique that the author turns to repeatedly in the “from organic acts” excerpts, where he appropriates language from the 1950 Organic Act of Guam, the law that designated the island as an unincorporated territory of the United States. In one such excerpt, subtitled “proclamation no 4347 < 2/1/75 40 fr 5129 >”, Santos Perez inserts language from the Catholic rosary, both in Chamorro and in English, into the language of the government document, ending with the mixed lines, “but literate us from] the independence of the united states of america” (101). The “organic acts” poem is the longest that appears in [saina], and it is also the poem that incorporates the most diverse blend of political, cultural, and personal history. On the same page as the above excerpt, Santos Perez draws text from a Chamorro legend and also inserts language from his grandmother talking about how her singing voice resembles that of her mother.

from unincorporated territory is not simply a project of opposition, though opposition is certainly a necessary step in the process of reclaiming Chamorro culture and identity. The project is most importantly one that hopes to incorporate the multidimensional history of Guam and the Chamorro people. In “from preterrain,” Santos Perez writes, “could i break ‘sky’ / into pieces of ‘want’ / to gather all / that [we] remember did i say words show evidence / of how we are made // to see” (69). The words that make up the poetry in these books explore how identity and culture have been formed. How are we made to see Guam, an island invisible on most world maps?

The evidence must come through language, and so this project is charged with the task of creating Guam as a place in words, of incorporating the various elements of the Chamorro experience. It is a project of mapping, of locating the dislocated, and while this work is ambitious, it nonetheless succeeds through the author’s willingness to engage the act of gathering with an attentiveness to the importance of historical facts, cultural values and stories, and the personal experiences of individuals such as his grandmother. Craig Santos Perez reminds us that “from” is a marker not only for location but our relation to location as well.

Ryan Clark has dedicated years of his life to homophonic translation and is particularly interested in the reparative potential of appropriative writing, including how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. His poetry has appeared in Smoking Glue GunTenderloinSeven Corners, and Fact-Simile, and he also has an essay about teaching homophonic translation forthcoming from Something on Paper. He currently teaches composition at Savannah State University.

The Appositional Project: Appositional Writing and Kaia Sand’s Remember to Wave

Ryan Clark, Series Contributor

Ryan Clark’s series “The Appositional Project” examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination/loss.

When I was a kid my parents bought my sister and me some silly putty. We pressed it into the Sunday comics and pulled away Ziggy and Garfield. Even though all the putty did was lift ink from the page, it meant that we could stretch Ziggy tall and thin or enlarge Garfield’s head to the size of our little kid fists.

But what if you could lay a sheet of silly putty over a place? What would it pull back? What would resist? What is the significance of contorting and reshaping that which becomes absorbed? The ink that depicts and the language that describes (or has depicted and has described) is wrapped over and under what we conceptualize as a particular place. Consider Kenneth Goldsmith’s reading at the White House, during which Goldsmith read consecutive excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and his own book Traffic. Each selection was localized at the site of the Brooklyn Bridge, helping to demonstrate the changing character of the site over the past two centuries.

As more and more writers are turning to appropriative writing techniques (within and outside of the conceptualism moniker), so too are poets culling these material representations of place as a means of investigating the relationship between place, history, and language. In particular, a number of poets are exploring social and cultural trauma within a particular region, incorporating archival materials in an attempt to help repair (which includes drawing attention to) historical wounds.

I have begun referring to this type of writing, as a collection of like-minded poetic projects, by the name “appositional writing.” A few useful definitions of “apposition” in this context include: 1) The act of placing together or bringing into proximity; juxtaposition; 2) The putting in contact of two parts or substances; and 3) The condition of being placed or fitted together. The author of an appositional work, much like a collagist, is invested in the arrangement of found materials, but what makes this type of writing so powerful is the author’s use of these materials in a movement toward repair.

In SRPR 37.1, Becca Klaver’s review essay “Bridging the Distance: Documentation and Disappearance in Performatic Poetry” discusses, along with books by Anne Carson and Cecilia Vicuña, Kaia Sand’s Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press, 2010). While Klaver is primarily concerned with the performatic aspects of each book, I found myself fascinated by Sand’s use of archival materials in the first section of the book, titled “Remember to Wave: A Poetry Walk”, which involves Sand recreating on the page her various “poetry walks” investigating the sociopolitical history of Portland, Oregon.

In an introductory essay at the beginning of the book, Sand makes it clear that this project is an investigation into “how we might map the thickness of time and its political history,” particularly in regard to the places we inhabit. Later in the essay Sand describes the present scene surrounding the Portland Metropolitan Exposition Center before suggesting that we can (and likely should) also examine this landscape “in terms of displacements and exclusions,” as the Expo Center (when it was known as the Portland Assembly Center) had been home in the summer of 1942 to more than thirty-six hundred Japanese Americans before they were transferred to a number of different internment camps scattered throughout the western United States.

In an attempt to make these scars of history visible, Sand sets as the backdrop to several pages in the book a collection of flyers, pages from handbooks, and photographs depicting or related to either the internment at the Assembly Center or the Vanport flood of 1948. Over these images Sand types her poetry as a way to engage these documents and transform them into sites of conversation about the scars of history. The poetry forms a layer on top of the archival material much in the same way that the present so often obfuscates the past, and yet there is nothing covered up here. Everything remains visible, and this is of course very much the point. Sand wants us to remember the details of domination and social control so that we might learn to move toward more compassionate models of engagement.

To accomplish this, Sand types over the documents that she has incorporated into her book, writing in response to the trauma reflected there. We might relate this action to “appositional growth,” in which tissue is added to bone or muscle in order to strengthen the preexisting tissue that has become damaged or weakened. By adding her poetry to these documents, one might say that Sand is helping to encourage the process of healing within and surrounding the text.

On one particularly charged page, which features poetry typed over a flyer ordering “ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY” to go to the Assembly Center for evacuation, Sand demonstrates how such engagement should always move in the direction of care. Using only words found on the flyer itself, Sand types beside and under the small print of the flyer: “civil control / civil / control / with sufficient / exclusion / civil control / civil control / transport persons   elsewhere / each member of the family / plainly marked / personal effects / of the living / that which can be carried.” By reminding us that “civil control” often works through “exclusion,” where people become things “which can be carried” or transported “elsewhere,” Sand not only shows us the dark history behind Portland’s Expo Center; she also points out how place and displacement are often used as means of social control.

However, Sand’s work here also reminds us that we have the power to engage and speak/write/act against domination. We are able, at the very least, to turn representations of domination into collaborative sites of engagement. Lastly, we are reminded to consider place not only as a location in space but also in time, and to remember to acknowledge trauma that is imbedded in location. Acknowledgement, of course, can often be given with just a simple wave.

Ryan Clark has dedicated years of his life to homophonic translation and is particularly interested in the reparative potential of appropriative writing, including how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. His poetry has appeared in Smoking Glue GunTenderloinSeven Corners, and Fact-Simile, and he also has an essay about teaching homophonic translation forthcoming from Something on Paper. He currently teaches composition at Savannah State University.