The Thomas Salto – Timmy Straw

[Fonograf Editions; 2023]

Challenging the idea of a stable lyric I, broadly speaking, has been a common jumping off point for experimental poetry since the heyday of postmodernism in the latter half of the 20th century. Inspired by French theory and poststructuralist philosophy, poets such as members of the Language School treated the assumption that the speaker of a poem was a sincere representation of the poet’s internal state with great suspicion, fragmenting and decentering what for many was a core feature of the poetic utterance, oftentimes merging the previously separate genres of poetry and high theory. Timmy Straw’s approach to this instability in their debut collection The Thomas Salto is different. While their lyric I often does appear to be a trick of the light or an effect of language, there is something more physical and kinetic to their poetics. Whereas postmodern poets, including those of the Language School, often get called too abstract, too abstruse, too academic, Straw’s lyric instability is palpable and very much this-worldly. Take the opening poem of the collection, appropriately titled “Trompe l’oeil,” literally “deceives the eye,” which guides the reader into the ever-shifting world of these poems:

Touch the world in any place
and a pale sand shows through.

A recessed living room,
mallards trampling the lawn.

What new immanence pries at the mind.
Who has the smell of flood on their clothes.

As when robber baron wives
felt at their throats for the cameo,

touch the world now in any place
and a pale sand shows through.

A painting licks a thing to its beginning.
A poem grows outward to all edges like a self.

To come home a guest, face to face—
a propeller surfacing in the pond.

The opening couplet addresses the reader directly, guiding them into the collection. There is an immediate tension between generality and specificity: the reader can touch “any place” and reveal the “pale sand” beneath. The following stanza foreshadows the largely suburban/Americana setting of Straw’s text (when a specific setting is given, it is typically an evocation of 1980s America, especially in the poem “Looking west out of Wilson Elementary during a Friday D.A.R.E. presentation.”) However, this suburbia is haunted by some unmentioned prior disaster, “mallards tampling the lawn” in the aftermath. Towards its conclusion, the poem reflects on its own genesis: just as “a painting licks a thing to its beginning,” so does this text rewind history back from the seemingly eternal suburban sprawl through to late 19th-century industrial capitalism via a series of associative images. Notably, the “robber baron wives” appear only as a “cameo,” gesturing toward the reduction of the past to media imagery. Instead of proceeding as a coherent utterance from a unified self, the poem itself “grows outward […] like a self.” The final stanza presents a clash analogous to the opening stanza, one between domesticity and some specified tragedy shown only through the suggestion of a surfacing propeller. In Straw’s text, settling in a sense of “home” is a temporary conclusion, quickly unsettled and displaced.

The Thomas Salto, a poetry collection largely set in and informed by the Reagan Era, reflects on the supposed timelessness of the 1980s, the American “golden age” the contemporary moment often nostalgically returns to. Even when the poems take on an abstract or mythological subject, they often play out in seemingly familiar landscapes. Take “Entgötterung” (from Martin Heidegger’s coinage for “degodification” as an endnote helpfully explains), which opens:

In summer two kids carry a wading pool
across the grass, eyeing the water

as it wobbles, trying for no reason not
to get their bare feet wet. 

Similar to the opening “Trompe l’oeil,” this seemingly idyllic setting is destabilized through associative images, revealing the threat of violence lurking just around the corner: “A falcon looks with one/eye then the other/below, a vole listen with its life/spare, spare my trinket soul—”. Suburbia is not the stable “golden age” promised by the newly globalized market, the façade toppling in matter of lines.

The collection is named, as the foreword explains, after a particularly dangerous gymnastics move, banned decades after it was attempted by Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina in preparation for the 1980 Summer Olympics. Mukhina was left paralyzed for the rest of her life, and her body, as Straw notes, become a manifestation of the competitive logic of Cold War competition, ideology made horrifically visible: “This body, then, is made to bear and transmit message it can never fully read; it acts, outside of choice and in perverse relation to its basic human frailty, as carrier for an enormous freight of message — physical, psychic, ideological — whose interpretative stock is unstable and fungible.” The title and foreword to the collection not only ground these poems in a specific historical context, but also highlight the collection’s central focus on the body’s messages.

The collection’s most explicitly Cold War-themed poem is “Brezhnev,” a teetering poem with trilling enjambments that expresses an interest and yearning for “our enemy with whom we/danced a half century/and/could not see.” The poem opens with the image of a globe in a child’s bedroom: it is at once a metonym for the world as a whole and a product created by the forces of globalization. Straw returns to the 1980s as the beginning of neoliberalism, the contemporary form of capitalism in the era of globalization that prioritizes the freedom of markets over the rights of individual states. In recent years, as the cracks within the neoliberal world order have been showing with the rise of authoritarian nationalism, many have begun to reevaluate the dawn of this historical epoch and the now-faltering legacies of the 1980s. Straw’s poetics revolve around cultivating a sensitivity to “flows” that must be registered if not fully understood. In line with the expansion of market logic, these “flows” include the flows of finance, as in “Copernicus,” where the speaker digresses to remark, “Outside the poem/a little vein clicks in the forehead of a financier,” or the tragic chain of debt transactions in “The pinwheels of Goshen”:

Likewise a man
will strip copper for cash to pay

rent on the little house
and he will set the house on fire

and similarly a person will fold
up in his semblance and live

and touch another
person from this position.

Indeed, “registering” seems to be the very kind of action Straw is interested in as a writer. In an interview with Edy Guy for the Chicago Review, Straw describes their authorial position as emerging from thresholds, such as the role of the DJ in a club: “You’re not making the song, nor are you exactly dancing it, it’s passing through you into the room.” There is a similar musicality to the repetition of phrases and motifs across the collection (Straw, in addition to being a poet and translator, is also a musician); the poem title “This too is stealing” becomes the section title “STEALTH,” the two different poem titles instruct the reader to “Take the sonata form,” and there is even a “Little song in Locrian.” Music is not only a subject matter for these poems but a composition technique, a useful medium for messages carried in the body.

The connection between a specific temporality and a focus on flows, be they financial or poetic, is intentional. The first of the collection’s two epigraphs comes from theorist Brian Massumi’s essay “Autonomy of Affect,” linking the collection’s interest in questioning the lyric I to its historical basis in the 1980s and the rise of neoliberalism. Before the section quoted in the epigraph, Massumi defines affect as a pre-conscious intensity that circulates through bodies as a flow. Unlike emotions, which are subjective and conscious, affect works on the level of the body and exists prior to thought and language, much like the “messages” Straw observes on Mukhina’s body in their foreword. The theorist draws on Reagan as a politician uniquely skilled at mobilizing affect, being the “great communicator” without saying anything of actual substance. Straw reflects on this omnipresence of the image of Reagan in the opening to “Mummery (1988)”: “Our president in that decade was the decade, was the joke./We smelled it on him, smelled him on us.” Much like affect, Reagan’s image flows and circulates unconsciously, clinging to bodies without explicit meaning. As Massumi writes in the passage quoted by Straw:

Alone, [Reagan] was nothing approaching an ideologue… He was unqualified and without content. But the incipience that he was, was prolonged by technologies of image transmission, and then relayed by apparatuses, such as the family or the church or the school or the chamber of commerce, which in conjunction with the media acted as part of the nervous system of a new and frighteningly reactive body politic. It was on the receiving end that the Reagan incipience was qualified, given content.

The most explicit connection between Reagan and his vacuous speech and the reduction of the I in the lyric utterance comes in Straw’s sequence of poems based on the former president’s addresses to the nation after various national tragedies and scandals, including the Challenger explosion and the Iran-Contra affair. This play with Reagan’s speeches recalls Maxe Crandall’s reimagination of that administration’s silence on the AIDS crisis in The Nancy Reagan Collections (2020), a similar means of making the strategic omissions of the government’s public statements sound deafening. These speeches edited into poems make explicit the emptiness of the platitudes that generate the original texts:

The best-politics is no politics
in manmade depths
that this congress

will be remembered as that
body of men, of women
when the mask fell and the face closed.

Straw’s poetics sit with (or perhaps flow with?) these uneasy ambivalences around flow as both a product of the further expansion of market logic and of the freedom and fluidity of identity that emerges from a rejection of a stable lyric I. Their poetics clearly elucidate Fredric Jameson’s famous description of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” showing how both depend on the constant flow of affect, the muting of individual agency and identity in this stream. Though neoliberalism has been, until recently, thought of as the “end of history,” the only possible conclusion for all historical development, and the only political and economic system possible, Straw’s texts “historicize” the 1980s and their supposed timelessness. Furthermore, they show how the logics of these systems can be reproduced in poetic work, offering an uneasy and subtle critique of the overwhelming inevitability we associate with the contemporary moment.

Venya Gushchin is a poet, literary translator, and assistant professor of modern Russophone literature at the University of Southern California. His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova have received the Columbia University Slavic Department Pushkin Prize. Blockade Swallow, selected poems by Olga Berggolts translated by Gushchin, appeared from Smokestack Books in 2022. His translation of the Russian-language Kalmyk poet Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev is forthcoming from World Poetry Books in 2027. His writing has appeared or in The Rumpus; Exchanges; Ballast Journal; No, Dear; and elsewhere.