Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

The current issue of Word For/Word features an essay by David-Baptiste Chirot that considers the poetry of Guantanamo detainees as “the New Extreme Experimental Poetry”:

Since, ironically, the translation procedure is not unlike some advocated by such luminaries of American “radical” “experimental” poetries as Charles Bernstein, one might posit the Guantanamo works as simply “bad” Experimental poems by “bad” people, “untrained amateurs,” and relegate it to the dustbins of history along with a lot of other “poetry of witness.” Due to their methodologies of reading and writing, American reviewers and commentators have missed the hidden in plain Site/Sight/Cite nature of these “purloined letters.”

That is, that the poems are the production of American language, American readings and writings and “mistranslations” (non-literary) and the most advanced and most medieval techniques of the “discipline of Writing.”

In effect, the writing has not yet been recognized as American.

But what looks back at American eyes from the poem’s letterings on the page–is the writing produced by years of American training, discipline, censorship, forced and tortured words further tortured along their restricted and supervised journey to the page in a book published only in these versions in the land of the torturer.

The experiment of these poems is not conducted or induced by the nominal writers but, rather, upon and through them. It is an experiment run by people and procedures that much of the reading public, even and especially those who would be likeliest to pick up a book of poems by Guantanamo detainees in order to show their membership in the class of people who reject torture, would prefer not to identify as having any relationship with themselves. Certainly, the would be loath to admit that it has come to define, to some degree (note my hesitation), American.

What I want to think about, then, is what the responsibility and possibilities are for an American poet– a citizen and/or a (sometimes) resident– who is not subject to these horror-experiments. I want some neat solution: imitate or adapt the technical processes that incidentally echo old “radical” & “experimental” poetic processes or resist their use in order to resist or imitate resistance to the forces that have created these torture-experiments. There is nothing so direct to be done, however.

Poetry, of course, has a role in [re]claiming America. It should expand possibilities for language, not because this is a direct response to the strictures of these torture-experiments but because it expands the possibility of social discourse and thus the possibilities for the development of a culture of resistance. Such a culture can also be fermented through acts of resistance in poetry: this includes acts of resistance in structure and in subject matter.

Somehow, though, that culture of resistance seems deeply inadequate since it cannot directly end these horror-experiments. That inadequacy, too, must be in the American poem of today whether through gaps in meaning, syntax, or more physical gaps– white space in lines– or other methods.

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