New York, NY: Nightboat Books, 2020. 112 pages. $16.95.
In a note published alongside an early version of her poem “rhapsody,” Aditi Machado reflects on her process of production: “I seem to have been especially intrigued by moments when language slips into sounding like ‘just music,’ or ‘pure,’ or ‘noise,’ while remaining attentive to the anxiety-laden artifact of accent.” Such moments are the achievement of her book Emporium (winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award) in which she explores the accents and anxieties of a restless sensibility lost in and wandering through meadows and marketplaces, with a voice both laden and melodic, tangled and profuse.
Indeed, opening with silk—“I came upon a silk route . . .”—the book feels like a woven tapestry, with threads moving in and out of view. The recurrent fabric imagery creates this effect: we see velvet landscapes, muslin cloths, touch brocades, and calico. And countless other echoed phrases and motifs recur. Folding, for instance: “The / chief binaries fold & unfold,” says the speaker of “Emporium,” and later we hear the repeated imperative “fold this,” and again in the last poem: “my own hands / simply fold.”
Here we see Machado toy with different senses of the word, folding as in cloth or paper, OK, but folding, too, as a dialectic by which opposites are brought to touch, or as giving in, hiding away. Machado delights in shifting between the senses of a term, exploiting its ambiguities. Even the word “sense” appears throughout, both as bodily perception and as meaning or reason—and in some wry cases both at once: “there was a sound . . . / . . . I licked it. It made sense.”
This delight in doubling is essential to the sensibility at work, drawn to and driven by dichotomies: body/mind, self/other, city/forest. Rather than limiting, such dualities give the work a greater depth, if only since the speakers are pulled more toward doubt than certainty. “Let us think,” Machado writes in “rhapsody,” though “in the speaking of it, it eludes.” And these poems are never short of any energy of speech. Like the work of Lynn Hejinian, Machado’s poems have a turn for extended and prosodic thoughts, for torquing the sentence “at times / to defamiliarize, at times to attain sublime doubt,” a thinking “by which ordinary speech becomes / vibratory.”
Some of this energy expends in the “pure noise” of language. “I’m only looking for a little homophony,” Machado writes in “rhapsody,” adding afterward this puzzling couplet, “Origins: sovereigns: / oranges.” The colons suggest logical links, though the leaps are tough to trace, and the series feels more like aural toying. But we might pause to learn that oranges originated in what is now India and were traded along the Silk Route (and later by colonizing sovereigns in Europe), the word “orange” coming from Sanskrit नारङ्ग, nāraṅga. While this knowledge may be incidental, such moments give the poems (to me) a pleasingly raised texture. As with the best modernists, Machado’s technique opens the text for meanings to proliferate and bloom through the page.
Out of the Silk Route we also find what seems to be the book’s politics, dealing with the history and borders of the almost-endless marketplace the world has become. Such markets, built on trade and conquest, always establish centers from which all things extraneous to profit (or the cultural hegemony) become expelled. Against this centrifugal force, the speakers of Emporium resist. So do we see language itself decentered, with Latin, French, Hindi, or Kannada spoken and mixed, and the voices “on the margin / creeping in.”
In the last poem, the speaker reflects directly on their status as “alien” or outsider, repeating the refrain “I am reporting on a country.” What country on which they report is not said, leaving us to question our presumptions about where the inside might be located. Instead, we see through the speaker’s gaze—“peeking over the fence, shrieking, look! look! an interiority!”—with its sharpness of poetic and ekphrastic observation, and its profound tenderness: “I try to see people for / what they are. . . .”
With nations comes the specter of violence—“I am stopped from the couplet / or at the border of a country”—a violence linked explicitly to the property relation and the scarcity of economic decline:
. . . I
report on the recession, the long lines
forming onerous, prismatic hedgerows that fatten
on the rib of neighborly divisions, property
perimeters, icy
brinks all the way down to the corner shop. . . .
And what of the shops? In the poem “Emporium,” we are brought to the market’s heart, down its endless aisles. Here is the parade of goods for sale, a carnival of sense, where the speaker is tempted (“an involuntary, not involuntary / exactly, but desired, frisson”) by, say, fingering a silk brocade:
As if I could simply pass through
the carts, hand myself over to some notions
piled on a cart, trade away certain desires
amid the silk & squid. . . .
Under the logic of commodities, not only things but notions (the self, its wants) would be for sale. And if to be sold is to be measurable (“how much of this for that?”), then the traded self becomes a certain thing, no longer shifting or conflicted.
But the speaker feels the limits of this logic, asking “what would I / sell?” Language perhaps—“poets . . . vending short texts”—or intimacy: “would I love these [mongers], I would. / Love now is not so corralled.” Then comes a parenthetical aside, as if interrupting:
( . . . We live in the
clusterfuck. The chief definitions are here now. The chief epics are
of markets spinning, carnival eyes. Pastimes replete with blinds . . .
. . . The extent to which history inscribes industrial products is perfume,
one writes, cupping silver. Petals, petroleum, idioms profuse & tangled in
the neck, a goblet. History paves the emporium & porous the gemlight.)
So lurks behind each commodity the history of its polluted production, the workers, the factories, and the web of social relations which scaffold and pave the marketplace. If shopping is our shared pastime, it is one that blinds us to this history, stamped on every product. But, says the purveyor,
. . . best not study such shapes
but silk, to me of silks, of the brushing of blouses
against silken nipples, of between her legs the stolen
red, & even money isn’t quite like money when silk
buys me. . . .
Such is life in the clusterfuck, with its mix of ethical dilemma and a dizzy panoply of pleasures to be sold.
I have teased some threads here, leaving the others to discovery. Machado’s sensuous intelligence is richly complex and always grounded in the everyday of things, in seeing and in touch. And with her cadenced fugal voice, she speaks to the troubles of our time. Against what the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé might call the prose of “universal reporting,” which reduces language to the transaction of human thought (as if passing back and forth a coin . . . ), Machado works a magic of sound and sense, reveling in things and revealing all the ideas they incorporate. Rather than coins, she offers instead a silk duration,
not a truth but a way, a movement—simply—moving futures
into fuchsias.