As caretakers of language, poets aren’t shy about expressing their love of words. At the same time, the poet’s affection for language—poetic philology, we could call it--can only be thoroughly understood, or gauged, in reference to its opposite: a fear of language, logophobia. And many people today, it’s clear, experience verbal knowledge and communication with mounting trepidation, arising in part from the unreliability, or mendacity, of the technical media and AI-generated texts, but also from the rapid emergence (and disappearance) of commodified vocabularies--not to mention the verbal dislocation stemming from a global crisis of forced migration. And is there any reason to suppose--despite the poet’s traditional love of words--that poetry remains untouched by the spread of logophobic impulses, gaps, and distortions? Could there be such a thing as poetic logophobia?
The poems in The Pig's Valise probe the condition of logophobia by adopting two basic constraints: first, all the poems are wedged into the angle of solidarity; they inhabit the grammatical and existential grounds of the we-position: the tribal we, the we of collaboration, the fugitive we. Saying we can stir feelings of shame and regret about one’s own language, or resentment towards other languages, but it can also serve as a verbal refuge: a remedial charm warding off dread and affliction.
In order to track these alternating conditions beyond our historical moment, the we-position becomes the object of a second constraint in The Pig's Valise, anchoring it in a literary constellation that is already slipping from memory: the poems search for clues of logophobia in writing borrowed from the past, a compound of twentieth-century texts which are at once nameless and instantly familiar, rehabbed into a lyric “voice” serving as the bed of logophobic experience. Uncertainty about the provenance of words and phrases gives rise, of course, to anxieties about fabrication and originality. But verbal estrangement might also be equated with suspicions that authors remote from our own time and sensibility are somehow speaking to present conditions in these foundling texts, like rubbings from a gravestone.
BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP (BRG) is an anonymous collective of poets, artists, and scholars from diverse backgrounds. Its poems and essays have been published in journals such as Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, and Fence, and in books and pamphlets from Noemi Press (Lost Privilege Company, 2016) and in the Poetry Series of Wesleyan University Press (The Work-Shy, 2016, 2018)--a volume selected by Stephanie Burt in the Yale Review as one of the “Best First Books of Poetry” of 2016. Writing by BRG has also been adapted for theater production by Asher Hartman and incorporated into “States of Incarceration,” a show which traveled to museums in seventeen states in the U.S. between 2016 and 2019. Mike Davis has described the poetry of The Work-Shy as “an archaeology of humanity that should haunt us forever.”