“The Mayor Is a Tough Act to Follow”: Some Social Poetry in the Theaters of the Rahm Regime

One Chicago evening in spring 2013, I sat behind Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a small black box theater. We had gathered to see the experimental troupe Theater Oobleck as they remounted Mickle Maher's play There Is a Happiness That Morning Is (2011). A comedy in rhymed verse, There Is a Happiness comes in the form of two lectures by two disheveled scholars of William Blake at a small New England liberal arts college (Probably Bennington? I thought to myself). The professors, played by Oobleck regulars Colm O'Reilly and Diana Slickman, deliver these lectures with a syncopated rhythm of clear-eyed passion and extreme distress. These unruly emotions linger from the previous evening, when students and administrators catch the professors copulating in public on the campus lawn.1) Like the apocryphal story of William and Catherine Blake sunbathing nude in their Lambeth garden while reading Paradise Lost in character as Adam and Eve (or like Dante's Paolo and Francesca before them), these professors have been overcome by their passion for reading, only to be chastened. The play unfolds on the following day, as they conduct what they assume will be their last classes, he on "Songs of Innocence" in the morning, she on "Songs of Experience" in the afternoon.

Several other Theater Oobleck plays have theatricalized the idioms of post-romantic and modern lyric poetry, usually to elicit Brechtian crises of social being. In Barrie Cole's Reality Is An Activity (2018), O'Reilly plays a skeptical grant officer from "The Foundation," who shows up to check on two of his grantees. In a remote house, these screwball women zanily labor to knead the raw material of their experience into loaves of Stevensian imagination. And then there is Maher's Song about Himself (2015), which is "set" inside a social network of the future, when the Internet has become overwhelmed by malware and is now known to its alienated denizens only as a space called The Weed. Maher represents this dystopic future through a virtuosic Whitmanian idiom that vies with a viral new kind of speech consisting primarily of unintelligible mumbles. Maher projects Whitman's poetics of connectivity and presence into a future when only the phatic maintenance of the communicative channel remains in the space where speech had once been a guarantor of social being. In There Is a Happiness, something analogous happens: the soaring affectations of the rhymed verse open a zone where modes of poetic feeling, seeing, and interpretation can rule over the canons of ordinary experience, usually in open conflict with workplace norms. For Maher, poetry exceeds and rearranges the professional habitus.

I was not entirely surprised to see Rahm Emanuel at the theater for the performance of There Is a Happiness. A former ballet dancer, he is a noted patron of the performing arts. Yet, for two hours, my peripheral vision included a glare from the spotlight bouncing off his bald spot, bringing home the general political truth that his administration had become the mote in many an eye. A week earlier, Rahm had returned from a ski vacation to inadequately address a media firestorm over his decision to close fifty Chicago public schools.2 Now, he seemed to vaunt a surprising capacity for compartmentalization. Even as he administered the squeeze on the Chicago Public Schools and steamrolled the theater of anger expressed by students, parents, and teachers, he absorbed an erotic spectacle of the liberal arts like a blood transfusion.3

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 The remnants and re-inhabitants of the organized left have long decried Rahm Emanuel. Reminded of Rahm's plan for then-President Bill Clinton to "claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens,"4 the scholar Frances Aparicio once remarked to me "Rahm was to Clinton what Stephen Miller is to Trump." Yet, if, when I moved to Chicago in 2011, his affront to the municipality struck me as what I glibly called the "Rahm Com," by 2013 his administration had produced new and heightened dimensions of public revulsion. Writing in Harper's that December, Thomas Frank put it succinctly:

Emanuel has had a hand in every betrayal of the Democratic Party's working-class base since the Clinton years, from NAFTA to the Wall Street bailout to Obamacare. The goal of his brawling is never to preserve the status quo: it is to hustle the nation into a market-based, big-bank Arcadia that differs from the Republican utopia only in that it has bike lanes and gay marriage. Chicago, then, must be turned into what its mayor endlessly calls a "global city." In pursuit of this fanciful designation, he has privatized and outsourced, closed traditional public schools and celebrated dubious charter undertakings, warred on unions, and subsidized private business. In Chicago's strangely tidy streets, the rest of the nation can get a glimpse of the future: a city that works — for a few.5

Frank's emphases — on Emanuel's callow vision of cosmopolitanism, and on his relentless privatization schemes — capture several prominent contours of his mayoralty. To them we must also add his preference for cops over people of color.

Together, this constellation of issues would structure some of the currents of social feeling with which the Chicago poets of the last decade have often contended. Among the best of these poets is Daniel Borzutzky, whose latest book Lake Michigan (2018) also places the mayor in a theater, this one the ritual theater of anguish and protest that has been at a rolling boil throughout the administration.

The book unfolds across two "Acts" in nineteen numbered poems each titled "Scene." "Lake Michigan, Scene 0" opens in the wake of Laquan McDonald's murder at the hands of police officer Jason Van Dyke, although some facts have been thinly veiled. 16 shots become 22. The mayor has no name.

There are 7 of us in front of the mayor's house asking questions about the boy they shot 22 times

There are 7 of us in front of the mayor's house screaming about how the videotape of the shooting was covered up so the mayor could get reelected6

Borzutzky's anaphora and repetitions next overflow the mayor's discreet Ravenswood Manor home and canvas the Magnificent Mile, where protestors block the entrances to Banana Republic, the Disney Store, and Topman (in Borzutzky's deadpan corporate diction, I'm reminded of the appearances of relatively new words like "bikini" in the poems of W. H. Auden). The protestors spar verbally with police and out-of-towners, until in Borzutzky's dream vision the public forgets about "the boy they shot 22 times and the mayor closed 50 public schools and replaced them with private charters" and then goes about privatizing bodies themselves and depositing them in "prisons on the beach on the northern end of the city." We are invited to imagine a brutal detention facility along the gentle, family-oriented beaches of Chicago's most effectively integrated neighborhood.

Over the next hundred pages, in long-breathed lines strung together with a single insistent conjunction ("and"), "Lake Michigan" comes to signify several abyssal conditions at the edge of Chicago and in speculative dimensions of its future: it is a Homan Square police torture site, an ICE detention center, a Shoah death camp, and a Chilean political prison or torture center of the kind that the Pinochet dictatorship installed (and of the kind, before that, in Chile's Pisagua, where Gabriel González Videla sent Communist political enemies in the late 1940s, and which Pablo Neruda decried in "La tierra se llama Juan," a sequence of poems written in the voices of Pisagua prisoners). In other words, the "Lake Michigan" figure intertwines multigenerational histories of incarceration and the uneven terms of municipal and federal enfranchisement signified by "citizenship."

Migration and transnational citizenship have predominated in Borzutzky's work at least since The Performance of Becoming Human, which won the National Book Award for poetry one week after the 2016 election. In these points of emphasis, he announces his debts to an international canon of poets distinguished by their "social commitment." He intersperses sections of the book with epigraphs from the mainstreams of social poetry, and spells out his genealogy at the end: "This book would not exist without the writing of James Baldwin, Bertolt Brecht, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aimé Césaire, Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Raúl Zurita, among others." To speak of poetry's social commitment is to speak of how idioms, figures, and schemes are heard and felt, whether by the asocial self of apostrophe, in closed channels of lyric intimacy, or in poetry's insistences in wider arenas of public discourse. Theodor Adorno famously believed that a lyric poem was never not social. For him, even the lyric's moments of hermetic retreat paradoxically signaled its social form. But the often-maligned kind of poem that seeks to pleat the problems of social difference into its textures has been having one of its better moments since the 1930s. The tests of poetry in our day can be understood to involve a feeling for the "poetics of social engagement," to take the subtitle of a new anthology coedited by Michael Dowdy and Claudia Rankine, which includes selections of Borzutzky's poetry and an excellent critical survey of it by Kristin Dykstra.7 Engagement revives the spirit of old debates about aesthetic politics in arenas of commitment and compromise.

Several poems in Lake Michigan enact their relation to the long legacies of social commitment through formal strategies that borrow, allude to, and explode the techniques of poesía comprometida. At a time when some critics are surprised to discover or rediscover the international legacies of socially engaged poetry, Borzutzky sounds the tradition with fluency.8 Scene 10 dilates a famous line in Neruda's Spanish Civil War protest poem "Explico algunas cosas" (I explain a few things). In that poem, Neruda deflates the licit forms of pure poetry—its diction, its favored metaphors, its strategies of lineation—in favor of a messier theory of reality that seeks to train formal aspects of the poem on the catastrophe of aerial bombardments on civilians and the unfeeling slaughter of children. Among the famous lines which perform this commitment is "y por las calles la sangre de los niños / corría simplemente, como sangre de niños" (and through the streets, the blood of the children / ran, simply, like blood of children).9 Neruda's deflationary simile refuses to allow the flow of suffering to become conscripted by the operations of discourse or rhetoric, and instead to insist on the phenomenology of that suffering as a scene of estrangement. Borzutzky amplifies this device:

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

And the rule of law being suspended is like the rule of law being suspended10

Even as Borzutzky hyperbolizes Neruda's anti-simile device in his efforts to train the poem on social reality, he implies that a set of historical agents (police, nazis, psychologists, mayors) are analogous to the forms of violence in which they participate (police shootings, Nazi death camps, torture victims, and the carceral state). Some readers might deny that an entangled relation between these phases of historical violence exists, except through the symmetries advanced by Borzutzky's analogy. But as a multiply-diasporic Jewish-Chilean-Chicagoan, Borzutzky sets out across Lake Michigan to establish the fact of that systemic entanglement.

I call Borzutzky "Jewish-Chilean-Chicagoan" at my peril, for in his widely circulated essay "Are We Latino: Memories of My Overdevelopment," he pointedly opposes those "with the power to assign an ethnicity."11 These include a college dean who did not think he was a "real latino" and "hung a figurative sign around [his] neck that said FALSO LATINO," and the Poetry Foundation, whose web bio notes that Borzutzky "grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of Chilean heritage." Borzutzky ironically claims these contradictory and illusory monikers, describing himself by turns as "the only member of the Western Pennsylvanian School for Chilean-Jewish Poetics," and as a "falso-Chileno living in Chicago." These tactics ally Borzutzky with other complex poets sometimes grouped together under the label "avant-Latinx" (among them Rosa Alcalá, Mónica de la Torre, Urayoán Noel, Roberto Tejada, and Rodrigo Toscano) who shift the ground of subjective experience in order to understand identity categories in terms of a hemispheric sociopolitical being and linguistic materialism that is often defined by conditions of transnational media, state violence, and diaspora.

For Borzutzky, this shift hinges on the observation that the U.S. at large — and Chicago in particular — not only exports "privatization shock treatments" such as the famous Friedman-trained "Chicago Boys" that implemented the economic policy of Augusto Pinochet, but also re-imports the same experiments:

I live in Chicago, a Chilean city in the United States, which is a Chilean nation. George Bush, when he sought to privatize Social Security, turned to Chile's disastrous policies as a model. Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's mayor, dreams of converting Chicago's public school system to the Chilean model, where public education has been radically depleted and replaced with a voucher system, a former love-child of the so-called school reformists in the US. In Chile, these school privatizations have had the greatest effect on those who can afford it the least.12

Borzutzky shares this critique with other U.S.-Chilean poets. For example, the poet and multidisciplinary artist Cecilia Vicuña, who was a young student abroad when Pinochet came to power, has lived in exile in England, Colombia, and, since the 1980s, in the U.S., and has lately field tested the moniker "falsa Chilena" with a nod to Borzutzky. In 2018 she exhibited PALABRARmas, her seldom-seen visual poems, at the Neubauer Collegium Gallery at the University of Chicago. There, in one of the extemporaneous performances for which she is known, she offered an extraordinary hex on Milton Friedman, suggesting that "the disempowerment of the people of the world as an idea, an ideology, began here, under the guise of economic theory."

Cecilia Vicuña, "PALABRARmas," Pearl Adelson Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading and Lecture at the Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago (April 5, 2018). In association with the exhibition PALABRARmas, curated by Dieter Roelstraete. Video by Jennifer Scappettone. Used with the permission of Cecilia Vicuña.

Of course, Vicuña has been a pointed critic of Chilean policies since her own exile in the 1970s, yet it is alongside Borzutzky's articulations of Chicago as a "Chilean" city that her critique comes home to roost at the University of Chicago. An important inter-generational reciprocity shines here (reminiscent, perhaps, of George Oppen's belated prominence among the New American poets of the 1960s). Vicuña has become one of the foremothers of the of "avant-Latinx" poets with which Borzutzky has been associated (most recently, he wrote the introduction to her major New and Selected Poems (2018), edited by Rosa Alcalá.)

While Lake Michigan regards the embodied violence of contemporary privatization shocks as reiterations of Chilean experiments, it also place these forms of violence in the longer, convulsive histories of racist urban policy in Chicago itself. The cover of the book features a photograph of the artistic collaborators Balas and Wax (Susannah Bielak and Fred Schmalz), who wade out into the shallows in front of one of Lake Michigan's rocky berms, wearing druidic garb and holding aloft tree branches in the positions of a monstrance or processional cross. Over the last several years, Balas and Wax have exhibited a roving, multimedia art project entitled Settlement, documenting the lake fill in the North Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater, much of it formed from West Side demolition projects in the era that saw the expansion of the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways and the construction of Walter Netsch's brutalist campus for the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Borzutzky is currently employed (Figure 3). Thus, in Lake Michigan, the figure of the city's eastern littoral is also a figure of its western demolition.

These demolition meditations belong to a strong current of Chicago poetry. Previously, Borzutzky taught at Wilbur Wright College, part of the City Colleges of Chicago system. There, his office was in one of the architect Bertrand Goldberg's last buildings, the Learning Resource Center (LRC), described by the poet Toby Altman as "a ziggurat that explodes from the soft prairie landscape of the campus."13 Altman has, since 2015, been writing a volume of poems, entitled Discipline Park, about Goldberg's architectural imprint on Chicago and beyond. It was occasioned by Northwestern University's demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital, where Altman was born, while he was employed as a PhD candidate. Ghost Proposal recently published a chapbook from the project, Every Hospital by Bertrand Goldberg (Except One) (2019). Altman's project, like Borzutzky's, thus belongs to a genealogy of Chicago poems on the city's urban palimpsests, most famously Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca, about the huge African-American apartment complex that stood where we now find Mies Van Der Rohe's campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology.

In Lake Michigan, this convulsive process of demolition and development appears as a meditation on the rocky shore. The mayor's pabulum speaks only to the latest of several chapters: "We have only scratched the surface of our full potential and we are ready to cement this chapter in the city of Chicago's history."14 (In the word cement, a double-entendre erupts despite the book's tendency toward poetic literalism or flatness, flaunting figuration's capacity to re-fang a simple euphemism). The poem goes on:

I look forward to the beach becoming a new beach said the mayor    
to the lake becoming a new lake

God is a tough act to follow   
the mayor said to the functionaries

The mayor is a tough act to follow     
the nazis said to the nationalist

The nazis are a tough act to follow     
the nationalists said to the economists

The burning lake is a tough act to follow15

Here and elsewhere, Lake Michigan is not only a work of political denunciation in the spirit of Neruda's "La arena traicionada" (The Sand Betrayed) or Zurita's INRI. It is also an envoi or theatrical send-off poem to the departing Rahm.

In an April 2, 2019 run-off election between two accomplished black women, Lori Lightfoot trounced Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle to become the next mayor of Chicago. Lightfoot is a former prosecutor, a corporate litigator, a recent President of the Chicago Police Board for civilian oversight, and the Chair of a 2015-16 Police Accountability Task Force appointed by Emanuel and charged with reviewing the Laquan McDonald case. She thus walked a campaign tightrope as an "outsider" and "progressive" whose ties to law enforcement and to the Emanuel administration merited scrutiny. At a mayoral forum with Preckwinkle on March 13, amid lingering protests by groups such as #NoCopAcademy and Black Youth Project 100 over Rahm's outgoing plan to award a $95 million, state of the art police academy contract to the multinational engineering firm AECOM, Lightfoot floated the idea that some of the CPS school properties shuttered by Rahm might instead be turned into miniature police academies: "We have 38 schools that are vacant from school closings, some of which can be repurposed to help us with our training needs."16 As these little shocks continue to redound upon us, channeled through the figure of the "mayor" that Lake Michigan wisely anonymizes, it is clear that Borzutzky's dark mirror has already shown Chicago all it ought to need to know to know better.

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Harris Feinsod lives in Chicago, where he is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford, 2017) and the co-translator (with Rachel Galvin) of Oliverio Girondo's Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018). He is now at work on a study of modernist world literature as viewed from the seaways. His recent essays appear in American Literary History, English Language Notes, Modernism/modernity, and n+1.

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