The Beatitudes, by Ignacia Ruiz
by Nick Moss
These are strange times. You can go to bed thinking Labour are still the party of a rank-rotten reformism that equivocates and compromises , and wake up to find that the self-proclaimed party of the working class is now “the party of work” – the drill sergeant for capital – and you can score a 20% Labour Party membership reduction by winning Rachel Reeves’s competition to snatch the most wheelchairs, mobility scooters and walking aids from the disabled poor.
Faced with the relentless one-sided prosecution of the class war being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, we might wonder at the purpose of poetry, other than to give some brief respite – a kind of high-art romcom diversion from the horrors of the day. But poetry can be an aid to clarifying how we think about politics, how we approach practice, how we define who we are and what we stand for. It can help us weigh the ethical challenges posed by how we resist.
Having picked up the baton of this column from Fran Lock, it’s to her new work, and to that of the American poet Diane Seuss, that I want to turn, to consider how some of these issues are addressed in their writings.
The essence of communism
Fran Lock’ s Love is Stronger Than Death: Mary Magdalene and the Insurrection of Jesus (Culture Matters) is an extraordinary demonstration of Fran Lock’s ability to use language as a weapon of resistance , but also to expose the lacunae in our own thinking as to the “how“ of resistance – what we intend and what we ought to intend to bring about.
The book is an attempt to focus attention on “the more disturbing—revolutionary—elements of (Mary Magdalene’s) life and message”. It assumes no familiarity with either Biblical or Gnostic texts. Lock intends to explore how the “medieval Magdalene challenged the social norms and hierarchies of her time, behaving in ways and with a degree of agency that was unusual for women (even saintly ones) in the literature of the period.”
More than this, though, the work seeks to “tap into some of the radical undercurrents of her character and story: her sensuality, her grief, her sense of social justice, and—most importantly—her status as chronicler of the incendiary proto-socialism of Jesus and his disciples.”
No commitment to Christianity in any form is required to comprehend the directions the poetry takes. Rather, this is a book about love and about how a radical, open conceptualisation of love as care, as solidarity, can bring us to see love as the essence of communism. It aims to illuminate “the insurrectionary message carried by Jesus’ words, and that whatever it is we call “God” rides on the side of the poor and the oppressed. I might say I believe that “God” isn’t an entity at all, but an action, something we manifest within ourselves every time we stand up for the marginalised or the abused; when we exhibit courage and kindness in the face of a social order that wishes to crush our most vulnerable.”
Love is Stronger Than Death draws our attention to what a bracing, exhilarating poet Fran Lock is. Reading her, it feels as if her words are steel core bullets rapid-fired at a wall of ideological obfuscation about this world and its possibilities. She is our prophesying poet of rage, but also a poet committed to a project of radical pedagogy, a determination to expand the possibility of poetry itself, and also of how we might engage with it, and what might result from that engagement.
The Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra once released a spoken word album titled I Blow Minds for a Living and that probably best defines what Fran Lock does, if by blowing minds we mean a process of disorientation and a further reorientation, with new ways of living opening up to us, and taking proper account of the fact that making a living from poetry is impossible today unless you’re a white collar screw-cum-Royal toady.
The poems make use of a frantic, agitated alliteration, and the kind of disorientated exhilaration which is linked with the sprung rhythms of John Milton and Gerard Manley Hopkins. We are taken through Mary’s encounter with Christ, Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion, and to the resurrection of Christ. It is Mary’s solidarity with Christ, her love for Christ that Lock explores:-
What has continued to stand out to me is that when Jesus’ male disciples abandoned him at his moment of greatest crisis and most pressing danger, Mary Magdalene stayed with him. She stayed with him even to the Crucifixion. She was present at the tomb. She was the first person to whom Christ appeared after his resurrection. To me, this is huge. It argues powerfully for the role of women within Jesus’ ministry, and for Christ’s implicit challenge to patriarchal dominance.
This manifests in a precision of language, a particular capacity of clarity:-
we were despised, our only covenant was
suffering. but he called me daughter
that day. the heart was a rinsed wound.
there would be miracle stitched into
musht. even my tears would run clear.
– Tower of the Fishes
At other times, the words become a torrent: a relentless, furious, scouring sleet of intensity that whiplashes you awake:-
…….the devils know.
they have declared a permanent
victory over the possible. that is
what devils do, dressed in the date stamped
jowls of realised design.
they have made my body a cell,
an absolute unit of present time.
the body will not be escaped or
endured. their future is false
and already here. you talk of love,
small words breaking through
their lucifugous fug. devils, devils.
they are corking their faculty plonk
as we speak; they are dressing their
wives in our fumigated skins
and calling it a compliment. devils
have no substance. for them, life is
anything projected onto the scrim
of salary. they like fixtures, busy
continuums, the law. they are
gorged on and clamour for vagabond
bogeys, something to stick their
forked tongues out at. women.
whores. i am not woke, but i live
in the wake, with a quango of devils
on my back. cast them out.
the corporate aura they pass off
as halo. cast them out. why not?
give me a reason to fight.
– Seven Devils (reprise)
This is wonderful, blow-to the-face poetry. Its engagement with the narrative set out in the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Mary forces you into an encounter with Lock’s core idea and her ethical demand: “You can put a person to death, but not an idea. That doesn’t make the idea more important or precious than the person. It means that the way in which we honour them, the way we keep their fire burning, and love them past death is to work tirelessly toward a better, more loving world—the coming change.”
This, expressed in the poem The Nature of Sacrifice sets out a definition of communism as love that forces us to recognise solidarity as a duty to the Other, a risk to be taken ,a real risk with the possibility of a real loss – Christ on the cross, Fred Hampton shot and killed in Chicago, Rosa Luxemburg ‘s body in the Landwehr Canal. Love is:-
the rift that words can raise, to be
torn and cauterised by anger; a rage
that turns the mind to fire, a rogue
and wagging tongue of flame. love
is that which no one can possess,
but everyone must give; exists
in its transmission, nowhere else.
This is an essential work, beautifully illustrated by Ignacia Ruiz, and it’s Culture Matters’ most powerful collection to date.
Diane Seuss: communism as ‘the care and feeding of things’
Fitzcarraldo Books have brought out two works by Michigan-based poet Diane Seuss. Seuss matches Fran Lock’s technical capacity, but her poetry walks a different terrain. She is a poet of abjection and alienation, of poverty and addiction. One of the books, Modern Poetry, is in part an engagement with Keats, and Keats’ s “relapse into those abstractions which are my only life” and works through the issue as to whether the abstractions of poetry can be a retreat from or an engagement with Keats’s “threatening sorrow.” Seuss, like Keats, is:
Not at home in the world
And I imagine
Never again at home in the world
– Curl
Modern Poetry contends with what that “not being at home” means, and, sometimes, at times when the “not at home” means being without any physical home. There is a beautiful musicality to Seuss’s work, but her perspective is that of an outsider, who has lived through an onslaught of deaths, addictions, self-harm, in an America that sets out to break outsiders: “You can’t stay vigilant and remain alive/Or infinite vigilance is a kind of death.” – Little Song.
Seuss’s work is really about endurance, and finding moments of sublimity as best you can along the way. She is an able guide to how to survive in a harsh world. Modern Poetry is about how to find yourself in and through poetry and how not to do so. Seuss writes about how different works make more sense at different stages of her life, of encountering “Toni Morrison. Adrienne Rich. Plath. Sexton. Lorde” and “beginning to understand, but barely.” This finding a place within poetry, while studying “Women’s Literature/ at the public university” is both derailed and yet also fixed, cemented by a sudden intrusion of the hard, cold, despairing life outside:-
A woman who drove
a motorcycle to Women’s Literature, wore a fringed
black leather jacket, and worked at the Kalamazoo airport
in the booth where people pay for parking was shot and killed there
by her ex-boyfriend. From then on, the class became
something else…
The books had become more, and less, important.
– Modern Poetry
There is a deadpan, terse, unblinking engagement at work here. Seuss walks the same path as Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Eileen Myles, but she does not want to surrender to the rot and ruin around her. She is Lydia Lunch shadowed by Emily Dickinson – always aware of horror but always looking for the sublime. She knows that her originality lies not only in technique but in “my unscholarliness/my rawness” (what Graham Greene called the “sliver of ice in the heart” of the writer, Seuss calls an awareness of the “shotgun pellets in the rabbit meat.”) The task of the working-class writer, she knows, is to write without shame:-
You have to be willing to self-educate
at a moment’s notice, and to be caught
in your ignorance by people who will
use it against you. You will mispronounce
words in front of a crowd. It cannot be
avoided. But your poems, with all of their
deficiencies, products of lifelong observation
and asymmetric knowledge, will be your own.
– My Education
It is Seuss’s remorselessness that makes her stand out, because her gaze is so often fixed on what she sees as her own shortcomings. She is unafraid to lacerate herself in poems that repeatedly combine grim autobiography with astounding technique, so that what occurs is elevated through form. And this is difficult ground to tread (and to address critically here) because it is not to suggest that the application of poetic technique to poverty and addiction makes it worthy of the consideration of the middle-class gaze through its aestheticization. It is in fact to propose the opposite – that the poeticization allows the writer and reader to make sense of the “situation” by virtue of its poetic abstraction.
As Seuss says in “My Education” the process of poetic observation allows the life to fully become your own. Poetic reflection-as active consideration (whether as writer or reader) becomes a process of (in Hegelian terms) for-itself subject-creation. Diane Seuss’s other Fitzcarraldo Editions book, Frank: Sonnets exemplifies this, but the process is harder to convey, as the work is possessed of such detail and skilful manipulation of form that it needs to be read as a whole rather than excerpted here.
The book is a set of perfectly constructed but yet jagged-edged sonnets that address AIDS, addiction, childbirth, sheer despair, post-recovery religious introspection, rural life and the New York punk scene. Seuss writes about the death of her father, her friend, the suicide attempts of her child, and of finding yourself in “the ever-later looking back at the half-assery / of my days and the redness of my nights” and “who will hold me when I die?”
Seuss gives us a definition of survival despite all of the wreckage of life that is not unlike Fran Lock’s definition of communism, although with Seuss it is a definition written provisionally, a statement in lower-case – “the small stuff, the care and feeding of things.”
A wish in one hand and shit in the other
I want, though, to conclude by looking at Seuss’s definition of poetry and what that means as practice. To start, perversely, with the latter, it plays out as a kind of beautiful, lyrical understatement: “legless homeless talking to themselves on red dirt corners , laughing/ at the nothing there is to laugh at “ and a refusal to look away from ugliness: “I wanted to leave that place. I wanted to leave him to die /without me. And soon that’s what I did.”
She sets out a definition of her intent in a way that clarifies what poetry means for her, and what the best poetry should aim to do: “Is there nobility in poems? Let’s hope not. Nobility is another place/ to hide.” Elsewhere: “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without. To have, as my mother says, a wish in one hand / and shit in the other.”
She aims at a paring-back, taking the scalpel to the life-image, hacking away what is not essential to see what remains. And this is why she matters. Because in order to read her fully, we have to do the same. And in order to find out how we have ended up here, this world of walking wounded and real estate fascists that is capitalism, and how we might transform it, we need to leave ourselves nowhere to hide. To work through the knockdowns, the defeats, the ruins, so that we can find ourselves in that place – where we have “a wish in one hand / and shit in the other.”
