POETRY: Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry of exploitation impoverishes the reading experience

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POETRY: Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry of exploitation impoverishes the reading experience
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Borzutzky writes poetry about modern America | Amazon

The National Book Award selection panel pulled no punches with their poetry winner this year. But Daniel Borzutzky’s achievement was a political victory, not a poetic one.

In “The Performance of Becoming Human,” Daniel Borzutzky’s National Book Award-winning collection, poetry is a political weapon, a bombshell meant to explode Americans’ delusions about their privileged position in the world, and to shame readers awake to the suffering both within and without the borders of their “rotting carcass” country.

“This is a story about diplomatic protections,” writes our already abrasive poet.

“The children were eating the bushes outside of their former houses that had been crushed by The Bank of America,” laments Borzutzky in “In the Blazing Cities of Your Rotten Carcass Mouth.”

There is little room for beauty in this dystopian view of America, and no time for subtle poetic devices. Borzutzky’s poetry is full of long lines, frequent parallelism, and page after paragraph-heavy page overflowing with newsreel images of darkness, death, and destruction.

Borzutzky’s style of prose-poetry — his long lines, frequent parallelism, and wide-reaching scope of subject matter — are nothing new to American poetry: Walt Whitman’s expansive long songs to America swept readers up with a similar fervor. But while Whitman drew the darkest corners of his country into the spirit of growth that he believed was the essence of America, Borzutzky’s America is nothing more than a “rotting carcass economy.” In a country built on injustice and maintained by bureaucracy, privatization, and exploitation (an unholy trinity that serves as the source and subject of Borzutzky’s rage), a poem can be no more than a macabre “bedtime story for the end of the world.”

Other poets are swept up in Borzutzky’s whirlwind, as well. Echoes of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” are repurposed for a new era: “I am with you in Rockland” becomes “I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Pasadena,” itself a throwback that mashes together genres in a poetics of chaos. John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” flash by, an appropriation of a poet who was himself fascinated by the fragmented nature of human experience.

These poets, dismissive of traditional poetry as they may have been, drew the brokenness of their existence into a greater whole (even T. S. Eliot, the poet of brokenness par excellence, shored these fragments against his ruins, in the famous line from “The Waste Land”). They found meaning, or at least sympathy, in man’s universal experience of confusion, disappointment, and despair in the modern world.

But Borzutzky’s mission is to raze the whole rotten system to the ground: “Sorry, sing the bankers to the proletariat, you don’t really exist right now / A glitch in the system / Nothing that can’t be fixed / By a full-scale overhaul / Of absolutely everything.” Or “We say that in this country the mouth and the lips rent the present tense to the humans who rummage through the garbage in the bodies of the ghosts.” Or “And the bureaucrats allocate $643,000 so that in the next narrative we will become other than what we are.”

And the “frugal bureaucrat poet” himself is not exempt from this excoriation. After all, who is he to speak of pain in his life of privilege, feeding off the “rotten carcass economy” like a vulture and dedicating his life to an illusion of beauty through his work? “Memories of my Overdevelopment” suggest that the core of this work is guilt: “I have run out of all my imperialist shampoos” … “I look vulgar lately” … “I have nothing to do I want to suffocate myself in the most painless way possible” … “I want to talk, today, about my overdevelopment.”

This critique of the spoils of capitalism is later extended into critiques of country, class, and race relations. Borzutzky writes powerfully of the struggles of immigrants and refugees in war- and poverty-torn countries. And while their suffering is certainly pitiable, the contrast between their lives and the lives of those in cushy capitalist America is what truly pains Borzutzky, especially since he — rather guiltily — belongs in the ranks of the “unitedstatesian” (his word) privilege he despises.

“The immigrant is a racially ambiguous stateless poet from a country whose name for unitedstatesians is hard to pronounce,” he writes in “The Gross and Borderless Body.”

But this compelling glimpse into the poet’s interior struggles is drowned out in the fury of Borzutzky’s ceaseless depiction of destruction. This glance into the motivations of the poet could have lended sympathy and relatability (and poetry) to a book that now reads as a self-righteous, self-hating, deadly serious shame session for America. “The Performance of Becoming Human” is a call to repentance for sins modern Americans may or may not have committed, delivered at maximum volume and peak drama.

Burzotzky’s mistake lies in his assumption that ugly words are the only way to express suffering. With the hammer of his words, Borzutzky sacrifices sympathy at the altar of shame and shock value. Guilt, repentance, and forgiveness for shortcomings are certainly universal themes that can and should be explored through the self-searching voice of poetry. Poets awaken readers — sometimes softly and subtly, and other times at the top of their lungs — to other lives, experiences, and worldviews beyond their own. Borzutzky’s voice, however, is no wake-up call; it is a bullhorn in the ears of an American readership that is increasingly deaf to empathy and understanding for others. How can we hear one another when even our poets are screaming?