Review of TERSE THIRSTY by MLA Chernoff and rēza rēza by Irteqa Khan
MLA Chernoff, TERSE THIRSTY and other KISSES
Gap Riot Press, 2019. $10 CAD.
Order a copy from Gap Riot Press
At first glance, MLA Chernoff’s TERSE THIRSTY and other KISSES (Gap Riot Press, 2019) and Irteqa Khan’s rēza rēza (Gap Riot Press, 2020) take on different tones. Chernoff’s chapbook is playfully irreverent and bounces with references to internet subcultures and pop culture while Khan’s explores the hybridity of cultural experience in conversation with other literary figures. However, both reflect a deep engagement with fragmentation – Khan’s title, rēza rēza, comes from the Urdu word for “shattering.” For both Chernoff and Khan, fragmentation is not always synonymous with collapse. Instead, it can be generative and full of creative possibility. Fragmentation also raises the difficult question of faith: when we no longer have sound narratives or pretty conclusions to rely on, what remains for us to believe in?
In TERSE THIRSTY, Chernoff documents the logic of late capitalism and the digital age. Their words are scattered with internet-speak and read like fragments from the digital realm itself. Chernoff describes the famous thinkers Derrida, Genet and Celan as “sadboys”[1] and imagines the “HOT #selfies” they would post. Doesn’t the semantic reach of a word like “sadboy” hold novel possibilities for poetry? This throws into question whether “internet-speak” should even be demarcated from other forms of speech when both the internet and its lexicon have become deeply embedded in our lives. Chernoff underscores a sentiment those of us raised in the digital age both love and fear: that the internet’s fragmented terminology or meme-ry can sometimes more perfectly encapsulate a sentiment or subculture than any Merriam-Webster word.
Chernoff is cognizant of how our hasty desires for conclusion or meaning can tear us from context, with often humorous consequences. They write, “I accidentally tripped over a poet on my way to the orthodontist, and he said to me: ‘that’s not very good praxis.’” Meaning is open to distortion, especially when we rely on it the most: “Like piss on a dumpster fire, I miss and I kiss, I kiss and I miss.” The speaker’s repetition reproduces the clumsiness of encounter and compels us to consider how often our attempts at intimacy can fall flat, how communication itself is a form of intimacy, and even how words can “miss” their mark.
Chernoff introduces the idea of POMETICS, which they describe as “a thirst for terse: post-annihilative and fucked-terrestrial.” They are cognizant of the power and dynamism of words, the particularity of the contexts in which language is embedded, and how words themselves shape these contexts. Words can surprise, disgust, render anew. It is this belief in the generative possibilities of words that bolsters this collection. Chernoff writes, “the pome was its own condition of possibility, the sounding-off of a sound off in the distance.” The pome alerts us, but to what? It signals a beginning rather than a conclusion.
“Pometics are not poetics,” Chernoff writes, “pometics have never read poetry, novels, psalms, cookbooks: there are only friendos.” Here, our speaker pokes at various modes of purported instruction, suggesting that “pometics” does not require a learnedness based on engagement with existing texts. They write further, “Pometics are not cybernetics: we’re too bad, bored, and hungry to do the thrust of the reading but also have already done some of it, maybe, like, five years ago.” What possibilities might we generate from taking on a pometics that does not require us to do “the reading”? In some ways, Chernoff’s words point to the ways educational institutions can deaden the pursuit of knowledge. They write, “I’m sick and tired of being pricked and wired, an orbing parergon, flattening earth and frothering forth to stall subways near YU.” Our disembodied speaker’s humanity is denied while their institutional affiliation is underscored.[2] Chernoff’s irreverent writing thus launches a challenge against intellectual and creative gatekeeping: “Pometics are not against expression,” they write, “but they really think ‘poet voice’ is a gassy gas falling from some spectre-God’s steenky ass.”
If we are only left with spectres of authority, then what now? Chernoff calls for a pometics of “taking pride in the self-satisfying narcissism of loving but not knowing, of erotically encountering the All through the boing boing circuit of desire kissing illegibility at the margins of too many books we have gifted each other but never cared to gloss because being roommates is more than enough and we’re scared and you’re scared of forgetting to remember and remembering to forget; that is to say, enacting anxieties and anxieties in action.” Our speaker distrusts knowledge: forgetting and remembering are not depicted as unconscious but rather studied processes and the circuits of knowledge are framed in the language of fear. While our speaker considers “loving but not knowing” as a form of “self-satisfying narcissism,” it remains a humbler alternative to, in the speaker’s earlier words, the “School of Life porn that is literally out there.”[3] The words “desire,” “kissing” and “illegibility,” again evoke the “missed” nature of encounter. But perhaps there is value in these attempts, regardless of how feeble they are, as “being roommates is more than enough.” In other words, there are ways of knowing that cannot come from instruction, but experience. Pometics create space for these ways of knowing.
Irteqa Khan, rēza rēza
Gap Riot Press, 2020. $10 CAD.
Order a copy from Gap Riot Press
The impossibility of a close-ended knowing is also evoked in Khan’s rēza rēza. In the poem “barzakh,” Khan’s speaker desires “the right | to intimate-life-story in peace,” suggesting that what an outsider sees will never encapsulate the full humanity of the self. In “dastan diptych,” Khan writes that “the majazi is the haqeeqi”—or, the illusory is the truth—blurring the lines between these disparate binaries and drawing attention to what the shadows lurking beneath the surface might reveal.
The speaker’s assertion of selfhood echoes in the distrust of belonging apparent across many of the poems in rēza rēza. In “bellona is a chinese woman[4],” Khan writes: “may your rightness / never fall / to the absurdity / of others.” The self-preserving nature of a selfhood that does not require the approval of others to justify its existence is apparent in the poem “barzakh,”[5] where Khan writes, “i will no longer beg the moon for light | for the sake of belonging & other maladies […].” Belonging will not bring the speaker comfort. Rather, the restless desire to belong is depicted as an ailment, bordering on futile desperation. These lines across rēza rēza compel us to ask: what does a focus on “belonging” foreclose? On whose terms is “belonging” articulated to begin with and what unique perspectives, dreams and fears do we allow ourselves to bring to the fore when we don’t belong? In “lemniscate,” Khan hints at the generative potential of not belonging. She writes, “i am i / a daughter cell cleaved / into home and home / i could die in this benevolence.” Here, fragmentation across cultures and geographies produces abundance, allowing the speaker to revel in a multiplicity of selves and homes.
But while fragmentation can be generative, Khan does not limit its depiction to selfhood, and reminds us of the ways communities can be torn through political violence. Throughout rēza rēza, Khan uses various punctuation to fragment her poems, including “/”, “//” and “|”, suggesting that there are different sorts of fragmentation, and some are perhaps more violent than others. In “nuzugum,” the doubled slash “//” makes it impossible to ignore the violence against the martyred Nuzugum, a 19th century heroine of Uyghur history and a symbol of the nationalist movement. Not only does the doubled punctuation hint at the unrelenting nature of political violence, the poem’s blacked out text further draws our attention to the ways Uyghur voices are silenced—a silencing that continues to this day with the Chinese government’s ongoing human rights violations against Uyghur Muslims.
rēza rēza shimmers with intertextual references to other literary figures such as Nurmemet Yasin, Rumi, Khalil Gibran and Hiromi Goto. Nonetheless, in what can be read as a metatextual comment in the poem “barzakh,” Khan writes, “my book says I have a mouth.” In other words, while the poet is constituted by various literary, cultural, and historical influences, her own distinct voice is never lost. Similarly, in TERSE THIRSTY, Chernoff is in conversation with various philosophers, politicians, websites and trends, but with a degree of cultural skepticism that compels us to reckon with the particularity of their narrative: “search me, then, for procedure,” they dare us, in playful irreverence.
[1] Urban Dictionary’s definition of a sadboy is someone who “has a taste for alternative hip-hop music, like Tyler the Creator, Drake and Yung Lean. The sadboy culture glorifies negative emotions and depressed mental states.”
[2] YU refers to York University, where Chernoff is currently competing their doctoral program.
[3] The School of Life YouTube channel (6.43 million followers) often offers simplistic instruction on how to deal with messy, complex human problems. They are popular for videos like “The Three Requirements of a Good Relationship,” “What is Trauma and How to Cope with It,” and “What Everyone Really Wants”—videos that promise enlightenment within 5 to 10 minutes.
[4] Bellona is the ancient Roman goddess of war.
[5] Barzakh is an Arabic word connoting separation or barrier. In Islamic thought, it refers to an intermediate place that separates the corporeal from the spiritual realms. In the Sufi Islamic tradition, there is the belief that one’s soul can visit this place even during meditation or sleep.
Fatima is a writer who moves around a little too much to bother specifying. She is currently completing her master's at the University of Toronto's Centre for Comparative Literature. Catch her in her latest (dramatic/weepy/enraged) outburst on Twitter @fatimaaamir.