Weird Material
Emmalea Russo
Of poetry, I will now say that it is, I believe, the sacrifice in which words are victims. Words--we use them, we make of them the instruments of useful acts. We would in no way have anything of the human about us if language had to be entirely servile within us. Neither can we do without the efficacious relations which words introduce between men and things. But we tear words from these links in delirium.
Should words such as HORSE or BUTTER enter into a poem, they do so detached from interested concerns. For as many times as the words BUTTER, HORSE are put to practical ends, the use which poetry makes of them liberates human life from these ends.
– Georges Bataille, Inner Experience
To talk about poetry is impossible. It is both intoxicating and a total buzzkill. When it’s working, poetry muffles and transcends our attempts to describe, introduce, or induce it. Lines fuzz into clear blur. Another kind of vision rides shotgun, charioted by sacred inaction. A mind-altering substance that makes us rethink language.
It’s hard to extract quick meaning from poetry or hold fast to whatever substance it’s made from. Thomas Hardy, who famously quit prose for poetry, said that poetry is emotion put into measure. It emerges from and creates excess—a berserk residue measuring what cannot ever be measured.
Poetry, from the Greek poiesis, means “to make.” Poiesis is contrasted with praxis (broadly, the practical application of an idea: action, doing). The process of making poetry, then, is not a process of doing or acting. Poetry slashes words at their most utilitarian and active and renders them derangedly new. Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of the senses” has something to do with magic. Because it unleashes what’s been there all along in vertiginous plays of poison and panacea, poetry is both healing and dangerous. Like pornography, we know poetry when we see it. And sometimes poetry doesn’t look or feel like poetry. In our online times of constant posting, obsessions with labeling, categorization, identity, and activity: what becomes of poetry, of making that troubles action?
Is poetry made of something eternal and/or perishable? In Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille wrote the following of Charles Baudelaire: “It is also true that poetry which survives is always the opposite of poetry for, having the perishable as its subject, it transforms it into something eternal.” Poetry as the opposite of poetry? It tends to stop-up the productive machinery. Plato kicked poets out of his ideal city, as they were not trustworthy.
Before psychoanalysis and before Marx and before Hegel and before Freud, there existed the sister art-sciences of alchemy and astrology. Alchemy is a language of paradox and riddle, filled with playful seriousness whose essence is the God-substance-planet known as Mercury, ruler of poetry, traveling, and thieves. To preside over poetry is an odd job and Mercury (Hermes in the Greek) is tricky, bringing labyrinthine instability and limit-testing. Like Jefferson Airplane said—Feed your head. The risk of poetry is madness, just as the risk of handling Mercury is getting poisoned by its silver tongue, which is also a gun. This is what Derrida dubbed the pharmakon of written language. Poetry is not from around here, even when it is. Think of Socrates outside city walls, totally given over to the nymphs, their seductive and word-freaking influence.
In alchemy, the word and the world begin with a primal material or prima materia, a chaos or a dark night for which the alchemists had countless names–many paradoxical and poetic, including (according to Ruland’s Alchemical Dictionary of 1612) Venom and Poison, Medicine and Heaven. Other names: Clouds, Dew, Shade, Moon, Permanent Water, Fiery and Burning Water, Bride, Spouse, Mother, Eve, Milk of Virgin, Dissolved Refuse, Chaos, Venus, The Serpent, Spittle of the Moon.
Poetry is a loss (naming what cannot be named) which results in an excess (the wor(l)d changed!) The gold is found in filth, the alchemists say. Holding fast to the tongue’s slippage and keeping with it, taking it over the edge and towards its eeriest limit. And the gold the alchemists sought was and was not literal gold. The matter of poetry? I don’t know. It’s a sweet-bitter lozenge knocking around inside a mouth. As hard to hold as it is to spit out. It’s a vehicle for teleporting us out of the body and material conditions and plunging us down into the shit.
While reciting George Herbert’s poem “Love (III)” Simone Weil had a mystical experience. In Oppression and Liberty, Weil wrote that the “mental juxtaposition of an idealism and a materialism, each equally superficial and vulgar” was the “spiritual character” of her time. However, she said, idealism and materialism must be combined “in a place above the skies, outside this world.” Where or what is this zone? Maybe it’s this zone: poetry’s lowliness and perishability shooting us skyward to trouble the word-forming element, overflowing our basins then emptying them again and again.
Emmalea Russo is a writer, astrologer, and teacher. Her first novel, Vivienne, was published by Arcade in September 2024. Her books of poetry are G (2018), Wave Archive (2019), Confetti (2022), and Magenta (2023). Recent poems and essays have appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Compact, Granta, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has been a writer in residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York and 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles and a visiting critic at Parsons School of Design and The Art Institute of Cincinnati. She has taught courses on poetry, philosophy, and art at various institutions including Saint Peters University, Northeastern University, The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, and GCAS. Her books have been reviewed in The Chicago Review, The Yale Review, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. She keeps a substack newsletter, Cosmic Edges, and teaches classes on literature, art, and the occult. She lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and at the Jersey shore.
