Trace Happenings
Dominick Knowles, in Glass Poetry: Poets who would torch the world as it is, who recognize the urgency of overthrow, live with a devastating awareness that their poems (to borrow Auden’s well-worn line) “make nothing happen.” Poet and translator Mathilda Cullen’s first chapbook, Trace Happenings(Occupied Lenapehoking: marlskarx press, 2019), takes this nothing as its premise and problem. As her title suggests, the poems collected here ache to be both less and more than they are, each one “a great hole in the sky” desperate for a storm to trace its edges. Emptiness and density, emptiness as density — every line break’s political impotence cleaves to this substance we mis/recognize as “nothing.”
Some poets think nothing is actually something, and that it is enough. Don Share, who recently resigned as chief editor of Poetry amid charges of the magazine’s antiblackness, argues that Auden’s phrase is in fact a testament to poetry’s universal, redemptive capacities: Share points out that, in a later line of his elegy for Yeats, Auden describes poetry as “a way of happening, a mouth.”1 Such nuances as these allow us, somehow, to “grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is: this is at once political, personal… and poetical.”2 But Cullen, a trans woman and a communist, doesn’t waste her time grasping at essences. After all, what is a mouth but a necessary hole, a nothing that makes something happen.
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Nothing is a way in. While poetry might make it possible to think the torching of the world, it’s also a machinic assemblage of already “Burnt / verbs, devoid of connection, endlessly reaching.”3 Nothing is a way out, too: immediately following those lines from “The Sun A Pendulum, Strung Up,” the poem imagines its transformation from charred emptiness into dynamic, breathing material: “portrayed as trains, the infinitive melted in order to expand.”4 Cullen placing “infinitive” beside “to expand” is no accident: the former derives from the Latin “infinitus,” making the disappearance of words a necessary condition for their emergence as expanding objects: lungs, a railroad, the extractive violence of capital.
In all its uninflected breadth, the infinitive wants to be a train. It yearns to gather freight and transport resources from one place to another, blaring its horn and careening across borders into “Justified darkness, splendid wordless momentum.”5 Nothing, then, is also a way around. But despite its aspirations, the poem is not a train. Even when read by a good public it refuses to melt its metals into a public good.
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“Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” one of the collection’s final poems, gets us nearer to where we began: nothing is what happens in the mouth, and what happens in the mouth is an ache to be filled. It opens with Husserl who, after announcing the death of orality invites us to “look at a piece of chalk.”6 Nothing moves upward from tongue to eye and extends outward towards an instrument for writing what can no longer be mouthed. The fleeting speaker then “gather[s] what remains of the approach,” her method of offering up dead sound to inscription.7
This approach belongs to “the felt / happening // Of continuity beginning in the sky,” although it leaves us two poems later as the hole we have shoveled in it but, like the “neighbor” whose mouth we did not even “perceive,” have failed to fill.8
Why do Cullen’s poems conjure things — chalk, sky, mouths — just to disappear them?
Why the discontinuity of subjects writhing in the maze of their margins? Suturing one poem to the next, these “Strained endings” behave “Like power.”9 Her cryptic analogy, I think, gives us real insight into the dense, nascent politics of these nothings. Let us gather them in our own mouths and look backward to the book’s first poem.
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In “Another Hauntology,” “A village [is] assembled to mourn futurity.”10 There are many empty gatherings and assemblages throughout Trace Happenings, but here, nothing is neither an event, nor a method, nor a quality of language. It is a collective feeling, “a gesture of strength against repetition.” “Their heads bent against the / weight of the sunset” in a ritual of grief, the villagers “are trying… /… failing to hold it up.”11 Unlike nearly every other invocation of sky in the book, the falling sun materializes itself upon the grieving bodies as more-than-trace. Its weight causes them to “form a line and the line is this one.”12 From line of light to line of bodies to line of poetry: for a second they align along the “continuity beginning in the sky.”13 Against the atmosphere of loss, we confront a form that signifies a “break in the chain of the poem that is these people / that is this history”: a nothing that might make something — people, history — happen.14
The most significant moment, however, occurs immediately after this brief eclipse of things with nothings. In its afterglow a single nameless speaker appears, armed and “walking towards / Wall Street aiming at the idea of it.”15 That she is “firing blanks” is unimportant; that “the gun is jammed and I am / without a gun,” equally so. We know a poem can never hold bullets, that it merely traces the weapon it wants to be. Against Wall Street, that monstrous father of repetition, expansion, extraction, so what if “there is no revolution.”16 To imagine one here would be to betray Trace Happenings’s unfinished insurrectionism, which necessarily goes beyond the poem.
What matters is that nothing has been transformed — or rather, nothing has transformed itself — after encountering a collective gesture that survives the fallen sky. Transformed not into the impossible objects of chalk or trains, which bind words to commerce, but into the not-yet of overthrow, of torching the world as it is, as it was, as capital dictates it will be. “From the cold dark,” the poem continues, “a tongue reaches out to lick” an envelope.17 The letter is “stampless,” but there’s no need to send it, since a licking tongue can be both flesh and flame. “Hauntology” ends, like the rest of Cullen’s book, by frustrating that moment of hot contact. “Some shit like that” always obstructs the poem. But outside, in the burning world, our neighbor’s mouth is full, patient, and wanting nothing.18