The Exclusion Zone contains many ‘left’ bodies, and a few eaten bodies, too (“no meat wasted”; “such tender want”). Here, in ‘The Question of the Ethical Shot,’ the left bodies work in ways that seem at fundamental odds with elegy. It is as if the figuration means to work as an anti-cenotaph: instead of the marker for the missing body, we have the body but no marker. No ceremony (“no incense for your brother, no burial”) only the “goneness of him clean and hot.” Only the goneness. It’s an interesting idea, poetry as denial of or even protection against the purported comforts borne by the linguistic ritual of elegy, as if poetry, as the preserve of the melancholic male genius (to speak like Juliana Schiesari), could be returned to the rest of us to properly mourn the losses and lay them to rest. Bodies could just be bodies, goneness could just be goneness. It is the idea of the book, really, the possibility of another reality where the elegiac has been removed from our collective processes of losing. This is why, I think, Deo’s major interlocutor, W. H. Auden, remains unnamed in the book. The ‘Notes’ section provides generous coordination points for intertextual material: poets including Anne Carson, Ezra Pound, e.e. Cummings, Wilfred Owen, Emily Dickinson, Brownyn Lea, Ada Limón, and Kenneth Koch are mentioned alongside a range of other material, genre-hopping from the Yakuza videogame series, Marvel’s temporary reality, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and, in a way that keeps stunning me, the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook series.
The name, Auden, is nowhere to be seen, but the poet’s presence must be felt in the title of the book’s first poem, ‘It Survives.’ ‘It Survives’ is two things at once: it is a shout-out to the most quoted lines from Auden’s famous elegy, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’; and perhaps, in a way no one could have ever expected, it is a non-aleatory (yet simultaneously recombinant) narrative par excellence in its direct riffing on the premise of the gamebook. The book’s poem that is not quite a poem (like the nlog, this poem is not like the other poems), unaccounted for in the contents page except for its first page, weaves its way through the entirety of the collection with second-person apostrophic address (“You have crossed the length of this land and back on / your hands and knees” (3)) in tandem with these kinds of directives: “Turn to page 5” (3). The poem has its own logic, extra-literary and extra-linear, directing the reader into a material choice. Choose your own adventure! Should you turn to the next page, or turn to page 5? What a trickster-poet Deo is, though! The first page of ‘It Survives’ is page 3; turning the page over is the same physical act as turning to page 5 (though the question of where your eye rests remains). Once, I read ‘It Survives’ within its own terms, playing the game, choosing my own adventure. I can’t remember how it ended, other than with the vaguely frustrated feeling that the choice, after all, hadn’t really been mine and perhaps hadn’t really been a choice. How is the reader expected to make contact with the non-choiceness of language, the primacy of discourse, to speak like a post-structuralist? What was the adventure? (Was this what I previously saw as the dreaded comment on the insufficiency of language?)
I love the strange way this poem (that is also not a poem) extends through the book, tense and textured, like a mineral deposit (‘like’!). The juxtapositions between this and the main-body poems of the collection were intricately wrought, exciting, often kind of crazy. A poem called ‘Bone Nest’ ends with the line, “to hold little birds in their nests” on page 76. Then immediately, ‘It Survives’ reappears on page 77:
No nests here.
There is a legend that says human history was hidden
in the shell of a sparrow’s egg, but all your prophets
have forgotten how to read
the birds. For here
you can see the thorns radiate, fill an entire expanse.
From here you can pretend that you are separate from this.
To climb down and go further, turn to page 63.
To leave, turn to page 89.
Not meaning to push the point, this strikes me as so Audenesque, both in its picture of the now as the ambiguous presence of a negated past (‘It Survives’ cancels the nest of the previous page), as well as its connecting poetry and prophecy, even if by negation (“all your prophets / have forgotten to read”). There is an event here, something that is happening — a way of happening.
But what is happening? (As in, what is the thing that we call ‘happening’?) In ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats,’ we find the pivotal lines:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. (Part II)
One often feels drawn back to that line — are we meant to read “poetry makes nothing happen” as an outright denial of the political agency of poetry? Or perhaps, as a wish for poetry to not inspire people to go out and get themselves killed in some war (as something like Yeats’ own poetry might have)? Does poetry do anything other than its own doing, performing the singular nowness that makes lyrical time so iconic? What do we make of the repetition of “it survives”? Is this insistence or negation? For all the points one might make about poetry’s enduring structure of violence, its very durability, it doesn’t survive. Surprise to the post-structuralists — while they were busy winning the war for the primacy of discourse over reality, scientists for nuclear-powered nations were dumping high level radioactive waste in the ocean. It survives, a way of happening? As Deo writes in her ‘Notes’ section, “language will degrade faster than radioactive waste, highlighting the difficulty of communicating with far-future generations [the danger of digging]” (91). It survives? No. The time of poetry is not so iconic now! With its ray cats and its hostile architecture, nuclear semiotics is the bracing iconoclasm to the icon of poetic time. And as far as the durability of language goes, we really ought to know better. It survives? Again, as Deo writes in her ‘Notes,’ “[‘It Survives’] is also partly written in Hindi, a language that was lost to me over one generation alone” (91). Yes, I know this, too. Minnan, then Vietnamese, were also lost over single generations of my family. Language is not durable. Language is kind of the first thing to go.
Bodies might survive, if bodies could just be bodies, hungry:
After a hunger inside them so raw he retches handful after handful of petrified wood, they say, TELL ME A STORY (‘Aubade (Earth-TRN688),’ 14)
Bodies could be bodies that survive because, when hungry, they might eat other bodies: “HUNGRY / the other says” (‘Aubade (TRN-688),’ 12). Is the cannibal body a symbol, or is it the symbol of symbols, so maximally symbolic that it exceeds the limit of the symbolic? In her review of The Exclusion Zone, Joan Fleming pauses in her description of the symbiotic ingestion of one boy by another (“the other” is he who somehow lives on within the boy he has ingested) as follows: “What the actual fuck” (‘The Half-Life of Caution,’ SRB, 2023). It’s a great scene, particularly when it comes to the thyroid:
On the fortieth day the boy’s thyroid begins to turn so the other decides to eat it. He tastes like a river in spring. Inside is a pearl that pops to tar warm as a live rabbit. They chew thoughtfully, leak a sliver of themself into the boy’s mouth and grasp his trachea, tender as a wound. (13)
It survives, a way of happening, a mouth. I have to stop myself from digging now. Because I am about to open an ecstatic, radiating, and probably toxic reading of the poem. (If you hover your translation app over the Hindi text in ‘It Survives,’ you’ll find the warnings to stop.) I am at the locked door of the poetry collection: the thyroid as paraklausithyron. Paraklausithyroid? I want to say: eating a body is like eating a text, the way the Old Testament prophet, Ezekiel, did (and the way the spurious New Testament counterpart, John, also did, in the Book of Revelation). Thyroid swallowers, scroll swallowers, those swallowers are poets — those who know that we need not read when “they have learnt […] the surest archive is a body” (‘Aubade (TRN-688,’ 15). Stopping myself again: obscure etymological roots of thyroid include two references to a shield (one has ‘thyroid’ as ‘shield-like’ in botany; the other, a 17th century medical description of the thyroid gland as ‘shield-gristle’ (Oxford English Dictionary, as at July 2023). To eat the thyroid is to eat the shield, which is a short way to say, the shield of Achilles (now, the bomb). The poet may not look upon the bomb. But could the poet eat the bomb? Should they ingest and metabolise what has come before so that the energy may be directed another way? I think this is akin to what the speaker says on the final page: “There is nothing I wouldn’t give to try again” (89). Poetry against poetry. The proposition means to say, we already have everything we need to survive. We do not need any new poetry; we must simply metabolise what we already have so that we might do something differently and, hopefully, more effectively in the future.
