WITHOUT FUSS: ON THE POETRY OF DANIEL BORZUTZKY

Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. Coffee House Press, 2021. 120 pages. $21.95.

“This mountain appears in every book I have ever written. Sorry if you were expecting something new,” Daniel Borzutzky writes in the final poem of his fourth collection, The Performance of Becoming Human. Reading all of Borzutzky’s books together gives the impression that “this mountain” appears in all of his books because there’s only one shifting, fluctuating book. Borzutzky revises, reiterates, refutes, and recycles language to apply to new atrocities—new violence, same as the old violence. “[T]he key is to write the same book and to write in different ways every time,” he writes in The Book of Interfering Bodies.

The Performance of Becoming Human won the 2016 National Book Award. His 2018 collection, Lake Michigan, was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Both books address, among other things, immigration, state violence, and the tension between the visibility and invisibility of marginalized people. Borzutzky’s work may feel, to a certain segment of people, more urgent in a post-Trump world (“now more than ever”), but as he writes in the endnote of Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, the latest iteration of his project, “We are always writing after a massacre, always writing amid the grief and horror of police and white-supremacist murder.” (In the interest of full disclosure, I was on staff at Coffee House Press, who published Written After a Massacre, from 2016 to 2019, but left before Borzutzky’s book was acquired.)

In recent years there has been a swell of poetry that seeks to be as direct and clear as possible. Take Solmaz Sharif’s Look, finalist for the National Book Award the same year Borzutzky won, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Susan Briante’s The Market Wonders, or, more recently, Éireann Lorsung’s The Century. These poets use the tools of poetry—line breaks and so on—to call attention to the violence inherent in the English language and in American life. “It matters what you call a thing,” writes Sharif. Or, as Borzutzky puts it, “I have been trying to name the violence clearly and resist its routinization and bureaucratization.” In her L.A. Times review of The Performance of Becoming Human, Carol Muske-Dukes notes the “negative response” to Borzutzky’s National Book Award win: “Criticism centered on his language: diction described as flat and repetitive; imagery deemed unrelentingly repellent; an authorial tone rejected as the unpoetic rantings of an ideologue.” Borzutzky’s diction is flat and repetitive, his images are unrelentingly repellent, but that’s the point.

Muske-Dukes goes on to say, “Perhaps [Borzutzky] is not a ‘bad’ writer (his intelligence and learning are formidable); rather, he appears to be writing as a ‘bad’ writer on purpose,” but this characterization misses the impressive technique in his work. His flat diction is a poetic tool, one that creates juxtapositions between the violence of the images and the calm with which they are described; anaphora and repetition create emphasis and can undermine clichés. We learn about the power of these poetic tools in Intro to Poetry classes and Borzutzky uses each of them masterfully. In “Dream Song #322” in Written After a Massacre, he writes, “The critic believed that because I avoided rhyme and meter I was under the illusion my verbal constructs were self-generated by nature.”

Which is not to say that Borzutzky eschews rhyme and meter entirely. In one of the most musical moments in any of his books, at the end of “Day #423” in Written After a Massacre we get these lines:

Griefshame will blow air into my mouth and I won’t die alone today

I’ll eat bread I’ll eat rice and kiss my child and say thank you thank you thank you

To salt and to sweat and to boredom let

Peace explode on my body I am alive and condemned and undone

While these lines don’t scan in a traditional way, the rhythm starts to cohere in the second half of the first line quoted here. The anapest of “I won’t die” mirrors that of “I’ll eat bread,” “and to sweat,” and “and condemned and undone.” Beginning with the repeated thank you, the rhythm is more or less regular, at least within each half-line unit. The four stresses of “to salt and to sweat and to boredomlet” are highlighted by the sweat/let rhyme that punctuates each half of the line. This rhythm gives way to a more stretched out line with three stresses each on either side of an implied caesura: “Peace explode on my body | I am alive and condemned and undone.” All of this suggests an understanding of poetic technique, no “bad” writing evident.

Borzutzky’s use of repetition is one of the most obvious techniques he employs throughout his catalog. This is typified in the fourth of seven poems titled “Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018:”

I won’t worry about buying groceries today

I won’t worry about decolonization today

I won’t worry about the quarantine today

I won’t worry about the angel with prophylactic eyes today

I won’t worry about my antidepressants today

I won’t worry about my dying furnace today

I won’t worry about the speculators looking for the financial potential in the caged-up children today

I won’t even worry about the cage today

In these lines we get both anaphora, or repeated words at the beginning of each clause (“I won’t worry about. . .”) and epistrophe, or repeated words at the ending of each clause (“today”), resulting in what is known as symploce. Another famous example of symploce is Martin Niemöller’s famous “First they came. . .” confession, which is undoubtedly an influence here. These types of repetitions are all over in Borzutzky’s work, including the front and back matter of the books. The dedication for Written After a Massacre repeats the phrase “to the love that survives” five times.

Borzutzky’s repetitions extend beyond individual poems, with words and phrases and images cropping up in multiple poems and across Borzutzky’s books. In The Performance of Becoming Human, the joke set-up, “Did you hear the one about . . . ?” and the phrase “bedtime stories for the end of the world.” In Lake Michigan, the poems “Lake Michigan, Scene 3” and “Lake Michigan, Scene 17” share a final line: “we live in the blankest of times.” This is repeated as the final line in the notes at the end of the book, though here it is appended by an exclamation point. The opening section of Written After a Massacre is titled “The Blankest of Times.” Each of his last three books includes poems titled “Lake Michigan, Scene _____.” Even Borzutzky’s first book gets in on the action, featuring a poem titled “The Performance of Becoming Human.” Following the title poem in The Performance of Becoming Human is a poem called “In the Blazing Cities of Your Rotten Carcass Mouth,” echoing the title of his 2015 book In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy. Indeed, “murmur,” “carcass,” and “economy” might be the words Borzutzky uses most throughout his poems. This shared lexicon across books compounds the sense that each is an extension of the others.

The other purpose repetition serves in Borzutzky’s work, especially in Lake Michigan and Written After a Massacre, is to undermine simile and metaphor. Borzutzky quotes Neruda at the beginning of Lake Michigan’s second act: “y por las calles la sangre de los niños / corría simplemente, como sangre de niños.” Here is Nathaniel Tarn’s translation: “and the blood of children ran through the streets / without fuss, like the blood of children.” In “Lake Michigan, Scene 10,” Borzutzky builds on Neruda’s language:

The police shooting boys are like police shooting boys

And the nazis burning Jews are like nazis burning Jews

And the police protecting nazis are like police protecting nazis

And the prisoners who are tortured are like prisoners who are tortured

And the psychologists overseeing torture are like psychologists overseeing torture

And the mayor privatizing prisons is like the mayor privatizing prisons

Metaphor and simile allow us to look away from something toward a new image that is more palatable. Here, Borzutzky, following Neruda, doesn’t allow us that luxury. These images are “unrelentingly repellant,” but we must look at the thing itself. We cannot look away.

No piece on Borzutzky’s work is complete without mentioning his translations of Raúl Zurita, whose long lines and proselike stanzas—as well as his politics and how they shape his art—inform Borzutzky’s writing and thinking. Written After a Massacre is dedicated partly to Zurita and another Chilean poet, Cecilia Vicuña. Borzutzky calls them his “heroes in art.” Borzutzky’s skill as a poet is informed by a deep conversation with a poetic lineage. That’s not to suggest that simply knowing a lot of poetry is a substitute for technique, but Borzutzky’s references are varied and thoroughly understood. The title of Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 is after Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Written During a Temporary Blindness in the Year 1799.” Neruda, of course, is present, and we also get references to John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, W. E. B. DuBois, Aimé Césaire, and many others.

All of these influences are worth noting because they inform the subjective position of the writer/speaker in Borzutzky’s work. “Latino, Male, Jewish, Caucasian / check, check, check, check,” he writes in The Performance of Becoming Human. The deep histories that shape these various identities are always present in the ongoing project of Borzutzky’s work. “We are always writing after a massacre”—after the Holocaust, after Pinochet, after the mass murder at Tree of Life Synagogue, after—or amid—the COVID-19 pandemic. Borzutzky’s strength as a poet is to describe the violence of the world clearly, without fuss, to show us how that violence has shaped our entire lives, right down to the mundane.