from Report from the Mangold Society, Vol. 1 No. 1
After Sarah Mangold
I. Intentions towards invisibility.
“The
beginning,” “this,” “the shape
of
the sound.”
Generalities
build up into a specificity,
“The
comb in her hair.” Things you contemplate
and
their placement. A specific shape,
undetailed.
Unfortunate,
meaning steps towards reality,
meaning
steps towards full engagement
with
reality.
A
space that means a pause
as
we evolve, our bodies
become
like letters, alphabetical,
“typographic.”
“A book is a site.”
As
if we know what it is
rather
than looking on
critiquing
that we and others like us
don’t
know what it is to experience, be in it.
Partial
solids purring.
A
perfect place to escape to.
The
end of something or someone.
A
student asks me what’s the difference
between
being cancelled and being
socially
dead.
Ghostlike
through the corridors.
A
victim as otherworldly.
“There were no babies but now it’s all babies.”
I would ask the question, but you already answered it.
II. Elephants, references erased
The
animal repeated as sound,
not
imagery. Or as a new grammar.
Everything
good is chiseled, or is
an
accident of habitation.
History
will incriminate us.
The
present moment a recycling of a past
moment,
but with more clarity.
Lessons
that lessen.
The
difference of positionality.
In the spaces in between story.
You
can’t really escape the content.
Less
interested if I know the names.
I
dream of Sarah Mangold at Sarah Rosenthal’s house.
Sarah
M asks Sarah R why don’t you have any pets anymore?
Sarah
R explains that they got rid of them in the 1970s.
We
are sitting in chairs that are like pews with red fabric.
I
am just observing.
Poets
live the imaginary. Important,
but
useless. Outside of ought, possibility
is
or is not possibility. New combinations.
A
pen has somehow fallen under the scale,
and
so it tells me something absurd. I tell
my mother it is a mother’s day miracle.
We
love the useless.
Expertise
inside a void.
The
city poem series that becomes poems about time.
Not
required but allowed.
But
what is allowed is a type of requirement.
Post-colonial/post-national.
What
are countries?
The
individualist narrative.
Copying
copious passages.
Friendship’s
process of attachment.
A
constant cycle of tests.
Time
to close that door.
III. Abstraction is our Lineage
What
you know when you know it
that
you refuse to know vs
the
urge to move closer
and
so you move closer
but
you don’t know that you’re doing it.
The
famous thing in between the two things mentioned,
unmentioned.
The feminine machine. Confusing contempt
and
compulsion. Building up to the full experience.
Confusing
pronouns for sonorous.
Agent,
angel, angle.
Tagging
is a type of glue, cohesion.
The
past situations’ clarity is a present tense.
The
machine’s error, a sexual error.
Evil,
intention, guilt, chaos.
Important
messages, beside the point.
It
couldn’t possibly be better, so
it
must be worse. Distracted estimation
amidst
faith in something we can’t see
“Mandates
hoping.”
As
if we could touch numbers.
These
superscript zeroes, clitoral.
Trying
to figure out my identity:
what
I am and who I am connected to.
Art is a form of loving the world or at least not avoiding it.
At
an impasse. While driving, I wrote down Teju Cole’s phrasing
“pointless
impasse.” A poetics that has a missing word,
a
missing context, a missing specificity.
Abstraction
is our lineage.
The
deictic gesture, but the self-deictic.
A
conclusion that is a mistake but maybe a necessary one.
How
we save ourselves for reading.
IV. The Dead as Archive
A
pre-modern modernism.
“Electricity
itself put an end to this.”
Information
as information.
Grammar,
a corporeality.
Only
one poem has the word “precision”
in
the title, but it feels like they’re all about precision.
Representation
as duplication as falsity.
Missing
citations, the bibliography’s lie.
What
the reader misunderstands
through
their own understanding
of
themselves. A hyper-focused understanding
that
leaves out circumference, or leaves out
what
is outside circumference.
The idea of a reader as a sort of purpose.
History
as an obsession.
Salvage vs salvation.
Antenna
vs radar.
The nonfiction books that lie behind the poetry book.
Metaphors
for reading.
How
texts are indicative of their era.
No
longer able to see what separates us
due
to the age we are living in,
or
only seeing separation.
If
the machine is a weapon that devours,
not
us, but expanse. It could be any place
and
time.
Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was on the editorial board of Black Radish Books, and for 11 years, edited the chapbook press, ypolita press. She has published around 15 chapbooks and has two books out with Black Radish Books, The Incompossible and Orphan Machines, and a third full length, Vibratory Milieu, out with Nightboat Books. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.
