You must deal with the dead

January 26, 2016 When the dead become present in the poem, time implodes: past, present and future turn into debris, which then can be combined into something new, something monstrous, something revolutionary. ‘How does time work for you’, Alice Notley asks her dead brother, whom she wants to introduce to the reader: ‘Okay part of it’s / here. See it’. We have to look – this is a presence that is inescapable and is wearing a red shirt with short sleeves. Notley rejects the ‘before’ and ‘after’ and instead uses the word ‘continuum’, which makes strict distinctions disappear.  The dead and the living are primary particles, which extract themselves from the shapes they were fastened to once we observe them. Despite this changeability – this freedom maybe – they shrink, in their recounting, to a person: ‘It's easier to talk / as a person, but why?’ Good question: why do we talk, as people? Still, everything in this poem happens in conversation. Talking constructs, creates shapes, like the Coyote does in the Navajo stories, by throwing stars up into the sky, placing on the firmament random constellations.
 
Once I sat in the audience listening to Bodil Kok discussing her Dutch translation of the poem Punctum, by the Argentinian poet Martín Gambarotta. She explained how, in this underground classic, he reshuffled the chronology of his country. The ‘90s fall backward, the ‘70s fall forward; no one can discern in this collision where one thing starts and the other ends. The fundament of this book is punky, the voices are fragmented. One of the characters of Punctum is called ‘Cadáver’, and this corpse also joins the conversation. ‘Cadáver’ is told that there will be no ‘earthy coloured mornings’, in which triggers are pulled, aimed at enemy targets. This line is part of ‘No hay, no va a haber, no hubo’ (‘There isn’t, there won’t be, there wasn’t’), a poem in which statements are made about now, then and later, but in the negative: this won’t be. However, the line ‘there isn’t, there wasn’t, nor should there have been’ appears twice throughout the poem, undermining the negative statements. What is it that shouldn't have been, or more directly: what happened?
   
What shouldn't have been always is, like a present that doesn’t want to become past. Those who have disappeared keep disappearing. The poetry of trauma – historical, individual, inextricable – is poetry that talks to the dead.
 
In 1993, the Indian poet Mallika Sengupta calls Marx into account. In her poem ‘Tell us Marx’, she asks the following question: if women aren’t workers, then what exactly is work?

 
Housekeeping is not paid labour, so even the wife of the revolutionary remains dependent and must continue to prepare the meals of her comrade. ‘Such injustice does not become You’, Sengupta tells Marx (note the ironic capital letter). And if the Revolution does happen, and the classless Heaven descends onto Earth, will women only be the ‘handmaidens of revolution’? This is her ultimate question to Marx. Not only does poetry allow for love to transcend death, it can also be place of reckonings.
 
You must deal with the dead, you have no choice. They are intruders and agitators, they do not remain passive. They interrupt our conversations. Now they infiltrate the way I read. I’ve begun to read poems, dealing with all kinds of other topics, obsessively as intimate and grim manifestations of the dead amongst the living. The beautiful poem ‘Intruder’ by Eva Cox, which I knew well, I suddenly read in this manner. I begin to get lost in the archive, forget my plans, my intentions, and look up poets’ dates of death. And then, there is a dead Dutchman. It is Herman Gorter. In Verzen (1890) he writes about books as tombstones:
   
What a beautiful first line and how different it sounds in English! The body of the poet is restless, his heart beats intensely, he is working and looking around, but everything appears to him as if they were ‘tombstones’. The weight of all the dead can press heavily upon you, chase you.  While writing this I feel a pressure on my chest, and I think about Gorter’s body, the body that wrote this poem, in which a body is featured that longs, fears, panics. I think about Gorter’s body, the body that no longer exists. It, in me, is touched by panic again. My breathing is short, and I feel what it's like to be a reader – to constantly encounter material that precedes my consciousness, my body.
 
Maarten van der Graaff (The Netherlands, 1987) made his poetry debut in 2013 with the collection Vluchtautogedichten (Getaway car poems). In 2014, he won the C. Buddingh’ Prize for the best Dutch-language debut collection. Subsequently, he published his second book Dood werk (Dead work). Van der Graaff is editor and co-founder of the online literary journal  Samplekanon.