Toward a Poetics of the Detainee

The detainee — dispossessed of a home and divested of the rights that would specify and guarantee a relationship to the state — absorbs a form of political violence whose resistance to definition complicates efforts to oppose it. The abstraction of "the figure of the detainee" is especially uncanny in an American political imaginary that constitutes itself by means of a denial of the prominent role detainees have continuously played in military strategy and practice since 2001. When the Trump administration announced in January 2025 that it planned to expand a Guantanamo facility to house immigrants it claimed were criminals, Americans' vague sense of dejá vu stood in for an undistorted understanding of the stakes of the Administration's resuscitation through political rhetoric of a site that never stopped functioning as an extra-judicial prison. To use Laura Ann Stoler's extension of Foucault's phrasing, Guantanamo detainees inhabit islands in an American "carceral archipelago of empire" that extends itself in the present through the network of penitentiaries repurposed as ICE detention centers across the South and lower Midwest and, most recently, the "Alligator Alcatraz" detention facility in the Florida Everglades.1 Nevertheless, the vastness of this ongoing biopolitical project manages to escape our attention. Detention withdraws itself just as effectively as it withdraws detainees from visibility and viability in the body politic.

Detention is a political tactic that shares a conceptual vocabulary with that least politically viable literary genre: lyric poetry. Traditionally, the lyric mode depends on an addressee who is absent but reachable, potentially responsive, and effectively recuperable as a social being, even in death. This is more complicated for the detainee. Even the revivifying address of elegy remains out of reach for someone subjected to unmitigated absence, total confinement, and complete social death, or so it would seem. To be the object of poetic address, the detainee would demand a different kind of poetry.

The American poet Rob Halpern's book Common Place (2015) develops a form of poetic address called "devotional kink" that concerns itself with the unaddressable. The book takes shape from the poet's ritual of transcribing military documents, a conceptual endeavor that politicizes and, as we will see, eroticizes, a traditionally monastic discipline. In the first place, generating the conditions for poetic writing through rituals, especially ones that engage the poet's body, links Halpern to the methods of poets CA Conrad and Bhanu Khapil, whom Halpern frequently references. Within this conceptual framework, however, Halpern's poetry distinguishes itself by staging the insistent interruption of the erotic body into somatic practice, especially in those rituals least likely to be considered sexual. The poems of Common Place, for their part, claim to foster and recover a "negated intimacy" with the body of a Guantanamo detainee whom Halpern encounters in the process of transcribing his autopsy report.2 Despite Halpern's explicit aim of re-establishing the social visibility of bodies harmed by American militarism, his poems both theorize their complicity with violence and persist in approaching their addressee as an object of illicit desire. Early critical appraisals of Halpern's work, however, tended to stay close to the provocative content at the expense of its poetic form, leaving the inextricability of its poetic and political stakes unacknowledged.3 I argue that Common Place's poetics of detention, and the controversial erotic mode of address in which it is developed, challenge the grounds on which contemporary literature bases its claims to political productivity at a moment when deportation, disappearance, and detention embody the destructive capacities of the American state.

Rob Halpern's poetry takes as its premise that militarization saturates the language of the present, poetic language included. Poems, then, are carriers of "militarized common sense" inasmuch as they cannot but further embed language in an aesthetic imagination complicit with endless war.4 Because militarization is the privileged political, industrial, and cultural phenomenon that has become the grounds upon which poetry's linguistic resources rest, Halpern's work experiments with strategies for salvaging a poetics that could nevertheless reach victims of extrajudicial, state-sanctioned violence.5 From this premise, Halpern unexpectedly turns to a poetry of sexual fantasy and theoretical abstraction that bears little resemblance to a political poetry that stakes out concrete positions or incites direct action. The following lines in a prose poem titled "House-Scrub, or After Porn" feature the poet's three central thematic concerns — poetics, queer sex, and Marxist politics — in quick succession:

See what I mean, in the absence of incident, structure eludes, the poem being but the gesture of a body groping its own withdrawn architecture. Whether bound or bundled, all my usable parts compress to the volume of a prosthetic device shoved inside a foreign orifice. This is how capital explodes in song, usurping the air you might be privately singing, the way the very idea of flood dries up after the deluge.6

Aside from its unmarked juxtaposition of the diverse registers that drive its content, the passage is remarkable for its irony. The poem lays claim to transparency in its opening phrase, "see what I mean," but proceeds to catalog nothing so much as opacity. The reader — assured that the passage simply restates a meaning she's already seen — then moves through the absent, elusive, groped, withdrawn, compressed, shoved, exploded, and dried up to reach a deluge whose absence as an idea precedes its very appearance in the poem. Like Marx's example of the table "when it begins to act as a commodity," the prose poem seems to "turn upside down and spin bizarre notions out of its blocky head."7 It rhetorically animates a spectral presence, "the gesture of a body," at the precise moment when a shadow cast by capital's obfuscation would otherwise detain it as an inanimate, absent thing.

Detainees did not figure prominently in Halpern's work before Common Place. As a result, their appearance in his work, which was previously devoted to the figure of the American soldier, illuminates the problem it goes on to address: the detainee cannot attain even the social recognition conferred upon him by lyric subjectivity if "detainee" is a placeholder category for what is politically condemned to be socially non-recognizable. Halpern's first books, Rumored Place (2004) and Music for Porn (2012), introduced sexual fantasy as a means to address the American soldier, but this mode has a clear precursor in Whitman's addresses to wounded and dead Civil War soldiers. Halpern amplifies the explicitness of what for Whitman were by turns fraternal, romantic, and allusively erotic poems, while also emphasizing the difficulty of addressing bodies in which the violence of war acts as subject and object.8 Poetry that is both entranced and alarmed by its discovery of intimacy by means of identification with war-torn bodies raises questions that necessitate a poetics of the detainee. Because if poetic language can illuminate, recognize, and somehow imperfectly recover the bodies of American soldiers otherwise discarded as the waste of nation-building, can its intimate poetic address recover the bodies those soldiers captured, tortured, and detained? In contrast to recent appraisals of Common Place, the critical response to Halpern's erotically charged work on soldiers was largely positive. Sam Ladkin and Sianne Ngai both called attention to the critically and theoretically productive sexual use of the soldier's body. Ladkin reads Halpern's work as an extension and elaboration of a "poetics of masturbation" recognizable in Whitman but applicable to poetry more broadly,9 and sees in Halpern a helpful dismissal of the traditional love lyric's demand for erotic reciprocity. Their indulgence of "improper feeling, feeling not bound by the efficacy expected of social relations" is the hallmark of a poetic "utopianism made possible by the impropriety of desire."10 Halpern's work might be situated as a counter to the supposedly empirical use of "masturbation as ethnographic research method," to use the phrase introduced by a controversial essay published (and later retracted) by Qualitative Research in 2022.11 Simply put, Halpern's work acknowledges that the psychic and poetic mechanisms by which masturbatory, erotic identification generates writing depend just as much on the specificity of their object as the ingenuity or impropriety of their method.

For Sianne Ngai, Halpern's "catachrestic poetics" helps to resolve a lingering question about value in Marx.12 In the opening pages of Capital, she explains, Marx risks contradiction and confusion by using a physical substance as a metaphor for the abstract concept of value-constituting labor. In an outrageous "congelation" that mirrors Marx's, Halpern's "soldier" is repeatedly abstracted into a figure of value yet nevertheless described as the cause of a "hardening" around a "hole," "void," or "nothing." Not only do both texts' hardenings — one alimentary, the other sexual — present shocking challenges as tenors to their respective metaphorical grounds, they each claim that these measures are theoretically necessary. Marx found that only the "abuse of logic" represented by his use of a bluntly physical metaphor to reveal a resolutely abstract concept could demonstrate the "apparitional quality" of value.13 Similarly, Halpern finds the "crude and elemental feelings" provoked by his sexual use of the abstract body of "The Soldier" necessary for making it clear that any recognition conferred by poetics is not offered to some "thingly substance" heroically recovered from invisibility simply by being addressed. Poems' abstractions and subsequently hardening arousals reveal instead the militarized "social relationship[s]" by which bodies are withdrawn from view in the first place, especially when their bodies become corpses. To extend Ngai's claim, at the precise moment that a poetics grounded in a naive liberal politics might claim to "have" the body of the soldier, Halpern identifies the problem as far more complex.14

While Common Place is similarly committed to rendering the determinate abstractions of capitalist militarization affectively potent, its method has led critics to call its sexual treatment of the detainee body "troubling" and "deeply disturbing" because the bodies in Common Place belong to detainees whose status as Muslims and as victims of sexual torture by American soldiers places them at greater risk from the poems' queer erotic address.15 My sense, however, is that the ethics of Halpern's masturbatory identification consists in its commitment to the designation of its erotic object as singular against even those classifications that would claim to confer protection. In contrast to this position, which mirrors conditions of detention by similarly withdrawing the individual into general categories, Halpern's addressor does not "masturbate to" a categorized or categorizable figure, whether he be a male, a corpse, a detainee, a Muslim, or the individual named in the autopsy documents. Instead, Common Place derives a method for the recognition of singularity that is doubly improper. It is not only the particular sexual register of masturbation that seems to offend; it's the work's refusal to recover recognizability by means of classification that marks it as illiberal.

Who, then, does a masturbatory poetics make addressable as, to use Halpern's repeated, possessive formulation, "my detainee"? Held at Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay and classified as "enemy combatants," the detainees addressed in Common Place are denied the protections of the Geneva Conventions afforded to soldiers like those Halpern addressed in his previous work. In these bodies, extraordinary rendition, exposure to torture, and deprivation of human rights display forms of violence that even the catachrestic poetics of Music for Porn cannot address. Working within an archive of documents released by WikiLeaks in 2011 and later also obtained by journalists in FOIA requests, Halpern focuses on the official autopsy report for Mohammed Salih al-Hanashi, a Yemeni detainee who committed suicide in 2009 after seven years of detention in the facility.16 Following in the footsteps of poets like CAConrad, Halpern takes on the transcription of the report as a somatic poetic exercise, and the verse and prose poems of Common Place depict and reflect upon sexual desire aroused during the exercise. Along with Whitman and Marx, Marquis de Sade also calls attention to the ways that arousal is not extinguished when the sex acts conclude. Instead, sex continually drives thought. In Judith Butler's gloss of Simone de Beauvoir's notorious defense of Sade, Sadean sex is "an occasion for reflexive insights into sexuality, in particular, whether an individual can attain an absolute and sovereign status in that domain, whether something like radical singularity can be achieved there."17 Adapted to Halpern, this line of argument would suggest that sexual experience generates language to outline and interrogate the political domain within which the desire that preceded it originated. This peculiar generativity of the ends of desire generates continuous discourse that concerns the means by which desire is satisfied, but whose value inheres in its ability to outline the contours of a world that only reveals itself post-coitally. Finally, any radical singularity achieved by the detainee would belong not to the sovereign but to his "enemy combatant."

In addition to Sade, a diverse poetic and political lineage that includes Baudelaire, Genet, New Narrative writing, somatic poetry, documentary poetics, Marxism, and queer theory informs Halpern's work. The churning interpenetration of these modes makes Common Place the site of a utopian sexual and a disorienting syntactic practice. This lineage distinguishes Common Place's "pornotopia" from pornography on the level of mimesis; the function of the latter is to represent sexual acts, while the function of the former is to represent a topos by sexual means.18

Halpern's work can be situated in an altogether different lineage of depictions of the terrorist body. Jasbir Puar has argued that the sexualization of the body of "the terrorist" is always already a core feature of the American political imaginary.19 But while nation-building and empire-consolidating rhetorics identify the terrorist with a maligned femininity and reproachable queerness to solidify the boundary between the "good" citizen and the "bad" terrorist, Halpern's work undoes such an assemblage by employing fantasy differently. In other words, Halpern idealizes rather than devalues the body of the detainee. In effect, sexualizing the body of the detainee is not prima facie demeaning, especially if sexualizing bodies can serve to make them vulnerable to further violence.

Addressing Guantanamo

Rob Halpern's selection of Guantanamo as a poetic site identifies detention as a problem to which poetry must respond but for which it has not yet found adequate resources. For a genre traditionally structured by stanzas' "little rooms," situating poetic fantasy in a prison cell defamiliarizes the metaphor it extends. Titling one section of Common Place, "A Square, A Cell, A Sentence," Halpern recognizes that in addition to the militarization of poetic language, poetic form may reinforce state violence in its reliance on the condensation, displacement, and confinement of language to the page. The poems appear on the page as a roughly square block of text followed by a one- or two-line phrase opened by an em-dash. This punctuation, along with the incomplete syntax of these closing lines, seems to acknowledge that despite their role as commentators on the preceding square, these lines have not escaped from the poem to which they are appended. This closing sentence turns the square of prose into a cell by means of a sentence. In the third poem of the series, hypotaxis facilitates the sublimation of each clause into the next. Under this sign, the poem becomes an intensifying series of dysraphic, yet absolute equivalences that submerge "everything" in an allegorical deluge:

everything takes revenge on time, like debt, this sur-

plus of dead, my living decor, I swear on his balls,

my very own sucking stones, or coins, a hardening of

war and sex, the work of human food, whatever skins

intelligence, rude, like fate, such rueful afterglow of

what demise, mourning the passing of system-wide

reference, this allegory from which no soldier's cock

can be redeemed, deluge in which we find and fade

-such blips, sublime oblivions lurk, my whole inte-

rior being at one with their optics20

Detention divests the body of its environment and all means of orientation by placement in a cell; in the case of the detainee addressed in Common Place, detention only ends in a suicide that divests the disoriented and deterritorialized body of language and life. Finally, in what becomes the pivotal stage for Halpern, autopsy delays the body's burial. In this final act of rendition, a military coroner extradites the detainee's corpse to a jurisdiction of incisions and data.

The "place" to which Common Place refers is both the abstract site of social recognition and the literal site that obstructs the first— the Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay prison facility itself. Since its opening in 2002, the prison's status as a site of geographic, military, humanitarian, and legal conflict has been contested. At Guantanamo, detainees are and are not in the United States; are and are not prisoners of war; are and are not under the jurisdiction of American law and international laws of conflict.21 A fundamental splitting with respect to the very placement of Guantanamo characterizes its presence and function in American life. An emphasis on keeping detainees outside of United States territory has reinforced a fantasy of American purity by reference to men who not only threaten Americans with actual violence but with an ideology held to be antithetical to "American values." The irony of relying on a denial of habeas corpus to prop up a fantasy of American democracy is, as Puar's analysis suggests, the more typically American aspect of the facility and its associated phenomena.22 Guantanamo is recognized here by its rhetorical footprints and created to preserve the unknowability of American military violence.

Most theoretical writing published about Guantanamo is concerned with the fact that the facility is governed by its own law; however, Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay also has given rise to its own poetics.23 Poems written by Guantanamo detainees were finally published in 2007 after a long legal battle against the Department of Defense that involved considerable censorship of thousands of poems deemed unpublishable by Department officials. Poets living in the province of Guantánamo, Cuba, such as José Ramon Sanchez Levya, address the strange violations of peace, privacy, and sovereignty to which the Naval base has exposed its geographic neighbor. And poets writing from the United States and the United Kingdom — including Jorie Graham and J.H. Prynne — insist on including Guantanamo as a site of American literature in direct response to the role the facility's location played in circumventing American and international law.

The Guantanamo facility opened as the material support for a political fantasy that "the worst of the worst" not only exist and can be identified as such, but that the threats they represent can be contained. Later, during the Obama presidency, the (unfulfilled promise of) closing Guantanamo stood for rehabilitating the nation's standing in the world as a defender of human rights. For Donald Trump, a campaign promise to keep the facility open to "load it up with a lot of bad dudes" amplified a familiar campaign appeal to law and order by recourse to a site whose status as "extraordinary" explains its staying power in the American imaginary.24 More recently, the second Trump administration executed a more robust turn to Guantanamo by enlarging its Guantanamo Migrants Operations Center and publicizing the detainment of suspected Venezuelan gang members there without filing charges or submitting evidence against them. Despite the complete functional separation of the Migrant Operations Center and GITMO, the administration applied the same tropes: in the words of "border tzar" Tom Homan, Guantanamo was (still, or once again) "the perfect place for the worst of the worst."25 In each case, any physical Guantanamo was supplanted by a myth of Guantanamo that served effectively as a fetish. Any American drive to establish a "general equality" could be disavowed in favor of a perverse substrate. Terrorized by nothing so much as the prospect of a democracy that would offer its protections to those euphemistically described as "enemy combatants," the United States calls on Guantanamo as a stay against castration.

Common Place asks how the corpse of a Guantanamo detainee can be made knowable beyond the corpus of documents produced by his captors. Can poetic address avoid reproducing the condition of placelessness and confinement that characterizes the life and death of a detainee? The desiring address of fantasized queer sex becomes a mode by which poetry makes something happen in a place whose split existence as place and non-place leaves the question of what has happened to Guantanamo's bodies unasked. The "question of Guantanamo," for all of the attention it brings to the facility's status as place, effectively bolsters the claim that Guantanamo not only remains outside the United States but that it only has an outside. As for the detainees themselves, there's nothing to see.26

Common Place directs its Guantanamo-addressed poem to the corpse of Mohammed Salih al-Hanashi, a Yemeni man who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2002. Al-Hanashi's JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment, which was leaked in 2011, reports that Al-Hanashi admitted fighting on the front lines for the Taliban in Afghanistan and served in an administrative capacity near the front lines with the 55^th Arab Brigade connected to Osama Bin Laden.27 His assessment argued that continued detention was justified on the basis of his threat to "the US, its interests, and allies," and his value as a source of intelligence about Taliban recruitment tactics, but he was never charged with a crime and he obtained legal representation only weeks before his death.28

Information surrounding al-Hanashi's death is far more copious but no less definitive. Not only were computer records of al-Hanashi's behavior on the day of his death deleted, but there were also errors in the storage of evidence from the scene of death and unexplained anomalies in the clothing he was reported to have been wearing. Interviews with prison officials who interacted with al-Hanashi in the days before his death revealed that he had become fixated on the date of June 10th, which officials recognized as the third anniversary of the suicides of three of al-Hanashi's fellow detainees. Commenting on these deaths, the then top military commander at the prison, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., claimed that "this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."29 Al-Hanashi's death occurred on the day he learned that the employee to whom he confided the importance of this date had disclosed this information to other officials. The Chief of Behavioral Services for Joint Task Force had informed al-Hanashi of the disclosure just hours before, as she reported in an interview with NCIS several days later.30 The body addressed in Common Place had, in being informed of a breach of confidentiality, suffered a particular kind of violent address, and perhaps one that contributed to the body's demise. Alongside the well-documented work of psychologists in creating "enhanced interrogation techniques," these ethical lapses identify the complicity of supposedly curative language with the aims of war.31 In the Guantanamo that Rob Halpern addresses, al-Hanashi had already been addressed by several weapons disguised as language. These include the discourses of the coroner, the psychologist, the counter-terrorism official, the prison guard, and government bureaucrats whose reading and rulings on the investigation into his death exercised posthumous control over a body thousands of miles away.

Halpern's work doesn't categorize the investigation into al-Hanashi's death in this way, but I regard these particular violences — which situate the detainee's body as a victim of knowledge in its signature post-enlightenment manifestations of science, criminology, psychology, discipline, and governmentality — as the indirect targets of his poems. Common Place's address to al-Hanashi's autopsied body in the register of what Halpern calls "devotional kink" takes place in the footprints of these militarized discourses' incursions into al-Hanashi's person. At the same time, casting poems in these molds makes it easy to mistake the relationship between the given form and the erotic methods driving Halpern's content as dangerously, because reductively, mimetic. As I hope to show, the fact that the poems take the shape of their targets is necessary for their intervention.The poems offer an oppositional discursive register that isn't immediately recognizable as reparative, opening the possibility that they can be construed as complicit with the violence they make visible. Without the erotic force, these poems would not fill the contours of the world they oppose nearly so sharply. The lengths to which they adjust their content away from erotic force and towards liberal recovery of the subject are equivalent to the lengths by which they fail to register the extent of violence to which the loved body has been subjected. They fail to "burn with love" if they burn instead with pre-authorized methods for reaching the addressee.

Devotional Kink 

The three poems discussed below flesh out the loop by which sex and politics encounter each other in an interpenetration that never claims to demonstrate the "political productivity of the sexual" that Leo Bersani prescribed as the necessary subject of queer writing.32 Halpern's "A Note on These Proceedings," offers a descriptive defense of his work. The poem's title equates the site of his poetry with the site of the official proceedings of the military autopsy it transcribes and defaces a place where detailed notes about each incision must be recorded to justify what could otherwise be construed as injury. Elsewhere, Halpern notes that military autopsy does harm in itself in its presentation of a body through the constraints of language given by the state rather than the individual to whom the body did or does still belong. The poem introduces a rhetorical question and becomes a set of statements about rhetoric as it applies to the peculiar situation Halpern has constructed:

What word isn't obscene under such conditions? This is how a detainee makes himself felt inside a sentence that will never contain him, an absence whose enormity is otherwise inconceivable beyond this rhetorical extravagance, acme of sentiment and kitsch.33

The realm of the obscene has expanded so much that this potential criticism of Halpern's erotic address runs up against a constraint, namely that any supposedly more ethical, legal, political, or humanitarian register is hardly innocent of obscenity. As Fred Halliday has shown, the "conditions" of post-9/11 American life have developed a vocabulary all their own. Therefore, references to legal procedures, human rights, and the "global war against terror (GWAT)" seem newly charged with the militarized context of their coinage, whether for the explicit purposes of propaganda or to satisfy the needs of the wartime bureaucratic apparatus.34 Perhaps even the most sympathetic account of the plight of an individual detainee or trenchant critique of the political conditions under which extraordinary rendition became possible still fails to detect and convey "an absence whose enormity is inconceivable" outside of the "rhetorical extravagance" of erotic poetry.35 To some extent, Halpern introduces a register of speech that marks the prolegomena to any future justice for detainees inasmuch as it makes clear how poetic language reveals the definitive absence of the detainee from American life. Even discourses that make the detainee present as a legal person or political subject risk doing further violence to these vulnerable bodies when they fail to acknowledge the extent of the prevailing absence. This is the risk to which Halpern's work addresses itself. In the book's epilogue, he records a friend asking what sanctions a poet "to sexualize the already violated body in [his] poems." To this, Halpern responds that "if his body has already been repressively sexualized in our militarized unconscious, is there any way to make that operation perceptible if only to myself except thru the sensual participation of my body?".36 In this way, it is not only that sexual address reveals the fundamental feature of the detainee to be his absence; it is also a way of insisting that the prior sexualization of the detainee contributes to this absence and eludes its recognition precisely because it is too obscene to recognize, much less confront.

A sequence of poems, each of which is individually titled "False Communiqué," binds the autopsy report to the speaker's experience of transcribing it to exemplify the work that "devotional kink" undertakes. One "False Communiqué" introduces Halpern's work in Common Place by opposing the poems' language with the language that surrounds the body of the detainee in his autopsy report:

And so I sing this body on a table

For since the war I've read reports i

-magined events studied pro

-cedures assisting incarceration

W/ coroners who must know

Something and whose language

Rushes like unfettered streams on

-ly half-knowing the work I mean

Check out this wonder of a guy

A spectacle withdrawn ...37

Halpern's call to Whitman's singing the body electric and to Eliot's patient etherized upon a table embeds Common Place in rapturous embodiment and alienated metaphor. The lyric potential of this meta-poetic act — a song that describes its singing — is explained as a call to singing that comes not from the muses but from documents. If song is appropriate for the body on a table, this is because the study of "reports" and "procedures" has led to this "improper ... object" of address.38 Because language for the body has already been given by "coroners" in an "unfettered" if "half-knowing" "stream," Halpern writes with and against the dually aligned documents. And yet, Halpern's language is hardly free from the charges he levels against "coroners" in their incomplete knowledge. In fact, Halpern's project proceeds on the basis that if language alone has liberatory potential — in a world where sense itself has been militarized — then that same language always confines. Halpern's singing must simultaneously give an account of itself (like a coroner who describes the autopsy as she performs it) and contest the language in which it does so, since language has "withdrawn" the detainee from view. Destroying as it describes, autopsy provides a model for poetic language, which must also remake the dead body as a "wonder." Running counter to an autopsy's impingements upon the integrity of the body, Halpern's poems find in the detainee corpse something "gorgeous." Libidinal investment in an erotic object idealizes it, making from its disintegrated parts a whole, even if the whole exists only in fantasy. Sex becomes the dangerous supplement of the coroner's knife as a tool for giving an account of the body. Given that the state has deprived the person of his body, poetic address in an erotic register restores the body by addressing it to address the state as well. Its reflexive and transitive insights into politics would give an account of the harms done in poetic procedures that inevitably "assist incarceration" inasmuch as exposing the mechanisms of violence risks making them easier to repeat.

Capital isn't the only obstacle to rehabilitating the body of the detainee. Access to the subject of Common Place is denied in several other registers. First, only a Freedom of Information request filed by the ACLU led to the release of the autopsy report whose transcription by hand began the book; other information made public about the detainee was only obtained by requests from attorneys and independent researchers. These documents of Guantánamo, for as little as they communicate about the detainee, are themselves objects of detention. Their release was famously extrajudicial, which led to further entanglements with the American legal system that amounted to counter-terrorism put to the test of democracy. As Halpern explains, access to the body is not given even with this document, since the bureaucratic and quantitative language used to describe it makes the autopsy another place of obscurity. As such, Halpern sets out to obtain access to a body that is off limits, one that is, once again, "resistant to social apparatuses that would harness it to ends not its own [but] nevertheless gets caught up in processes of militarization that often escape perception."39 In this situation, Halpern discovers that a compromised poetic "I" has a role to play. Where the autopsy is confined to "the rational zone of the coroner's report to which his body's destined," Halpern seeks a "visionary space" in which the erotic imagination's uncontainable irrationality and a priori extrajudicial nature promise a relation, albeit one with an unknown value.40

The Ligature

The prose poem "The Ligature," found near the center of Common Place, functions as a binding agent for the archival, actuarial, erotic, and poetic aspects of Halpern's project. The poem latches onto an ordinary object found to have served an extraordinary purpose: the elastic band of military issued briefs that al-Hanashi allegedly detached and used to asphyxiate himself. Seizing on the object as a source of arousal, the poem uncovers a condensation and displacement of desire and violence in the object's name, "the ligature," and its various possible functions such that it becomes the nodal point of the book's specimen dream. The physical and poetic elasticity of "the ligature" allow the poem to test the capacity of its various registers to reach and bind to each other at a site where the banality of carceral procedure, the flexibility of play, and the irreversibility of suicidal harm overlap. The ligature offers an enigmatic answer to the poem's, and the book's, most urgent question, here formulated as an address to the corpse: "Yr body, my devotional kink, what do I mean when I say, 'I burn with love for you'?"

The poems that precede "The Ligature" introduce the detainee's biography, the results of the official investigation into his death, and the autopsy report whose transcription grounds Common Place in a tradition of somatic poetry. "Hoc Est Corpus" reproduces the text of the autopsy report without modification from its original text until, some three hundred words later, the voice of the transcriber abruptly interrupts:

"The ligature fibers are elongated and distorted at the junction of the two cut edges c/w the history of cutting the ligature at the twisted part. There are no bloodstains on the ligature. Boredom distracts and numbness disorients, but arriving at that period I become acutely aware of my body as I write. The word 'ligature' excites me and my left hand begins caressing my thigh."41

Shuttling among the original document, the surface of transcription, and the speaker's body establishes the action of a scene that will drive many of the poems to follow. Transcribing by hand leads quickly to masturbation, and "Hoc Est Corpus" resembles pornography in its closure at the moment of climax. Referring to terms used to describe the corpse in the autopsy report, the poem ends, "So at the limit of my fantasy, I use that velvety mucosa and falsely measured fat like a lubricant as every word makes me sing for the world we've failed to make, and I sing like a lark to the sun."42 Despite making reference to "my fantasy," "Hoc Est Corpus" is primarily a record of the activities to which the fantasy leads the speaker. It is not until "The Ligature" that the corpse becomes part of a pornographic scene in the book's erotic register and an addressee of the poem in its aesthetic.

Despite emerging from a dense backdrop of prefatory material that introduces Halpern's archive and procedures, the first line of "The Ligature" is disorienting in its explicitness: "Looking sadly at my cock, I begin rereading the autopsy report. 'A civilian detainee was found unresponsive in his cell with a ligature.'"43 Opening under a constellation of affective and sensory signs including sadness, shame, and sight, as well as signs of the absence of affect and sense — obsessive re-reading, an unaroused penis — the first ligation of "The Ligature" is the dysraphic conjunction of the genital and bureaucratic registers. This liaison is further sealed by the assonance of "cock" and "autopsy." But the sentence also presents a conflict between fantasy and reality with which Halpern's work as a whole struggles. Even if the implication is that the speaker looks at himself and then rereads the autopsy report, the line also presents the impossible scene of reading while looking. In a second sense, then, the poem is disorienting because it relies on an impossible, dizzying double vision. The space of the poem makes this bind between reality and fantasy possible, just as it will claim that it is possible to bind bodies that bureaucratic language and militarized politics have artificially, violently, detached; however, it can only do this binding by making a cut in the fabric of sensory perception that echoes the undoing of "common" decency signaled by the tonal contrast between the "cock" of transcription and the "unremarkable genitalia" of the autopsied corpse.

The poem's opening, then, situates its address in a refracted symbolization of material that allows the poem to pivot on the conceptual possibilities for bonding or linking that "the ligature" offers. Halpern first strategically reimagines "ligature" by associating it with its more quotidian referent: "with no referent for what the word 'ligature' might denote, I imagine the metal clasp for securing a musical reed, like the dented one on my first clarinet, a thing with which I conducted my earliest experiments in masturbation."44 Here, Halpern demonstrates arousal through free association, or perhaps through an unintentional slippage from one denotation to another. From this linguistic transformation, the ligature changes in substance; it becomes a halo, "contracting aura, at once instrument and vehicle of our transport."45 The speaker imagines pulling at it with his teeth, and sees it both hovering high above him and embedded in the detainee's body as it is revealed by the process of "sectioning," or making incisions into a cadaver according to the autopsy protocol. In each position, the ligature "gives" the body whose life it took, making it newly visible to the report's reader and transcriber without becoming an instrument of violence like the coroner's knife. A ligature binds and restricts; it can be imagined as tracing the line of "an empty horizon, coding as paradise," as a "musical slur" or the "surgical thread bind[ing] my letters."46

The poem's movement shadows the ligature's by adopting the ligature's elasticity as a speculative possibility as well as a property of a specific material. Within Halpern's square, cell, and sentence, the sexual scene coheres briefly as a constrained tableau vivant whereby cords, alongside genitals, demonstrate linkages between bodies that are only temporary. The ligature is "tighten[ed] ... upon discharge" once the sex act is complete, and the poem ends when it loses its status as an erotically cathected object.47

For Maurice Blanchot, the corpse is also a site of otherworldly strangeness, holiness, and beauty as well as an exemplification of one of two versions of the imaginary.48 Without citing Blanchot's comments, Halpern's writing depends on a similar understanding of the corpse as that which cannot be understood, recognized, or even located. Despite its proximity to life, the corpse in the moments after death is attractive because it is unstable, a material substance that is no longer an object or person but inseparable from a referent that is not only presently absent but nonexistent. Given that Blanchot finds in this phenomenon a "splendid being who radiates beauty," there is a precedent for being drawn to a corpse grounded not in perversion but in the most direct contact possible with negativity.49 To be aroused by a corpse would be, perhaps, a less sublimated form of object-seeking stemming from a drive whose object of desire is withdrawn in advance.

"The Ligature" continues:

Yr body, my devotional kink, what do I mean when I say, 'I burn with love for you'? I'm still seeking a lyric structure that might allow me to ask this question, a sentence feeling for its own conditions but whose words continue to elude them, for example, 'On my knees, in the back of the cell, he holds my head to the rim of his latrine....50

The sequence of gestures in this passage loosely follows Barbara Johnson's reading of Gwendolyn Brooks' elegy or anti-elegy, "The Mother." Johnson's article "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" memorably opens with a comparison between the CIA manual on psychological operations in guerilla warfare and "the scholarly study of rhetoric" that her reading of "The Mother" will both produce and critique.51 Similarly, Halpern uses language explicitly sanctioned by the US military not primarily to exhibit or represent the linguistic context of his poems so much as to name the genre of writing perhaps most comparable to Halpern's own.52 If rhetoric is, in Johnson's phrase, "language that says one thing and means another," then both Johnson and Halpern know that any elaboration or elucidation of tropes creates a "manual" for the political, and thus potentially violent, manipulation of meaning.53

As in that poem, Halpern's opens with an apostrophe to the undead, proceeds to animate the addressee via theory, and closes with a fantasy of abortion that echoes the destructive maneuver (abortions for Brooks' speaker, detentions for Halpern's) to which the poem is a response. To take the analogy one step further, while Brooks's speaker aborts her fantasies about abortion to decide upon a reality in which abortion does not make her children unaddressable, Halpern's speaker aborts fantasies tasked with returning the dead to a condition of unaddressability. For Halpern, poetic language doesn't pre-exist the procedures that call it into being and thus into question. A "lyric structure" appropriate to the body can be posited, but it hasn't been found. The "example" sentence is not only a wild fantasy (thus not a real example) but is eluded by words (and thus not a sentence). As for the kink, it starts at the body's end, with fecal play coded as "the limit of our episteme and the whole taxonomy of signs that make our life world visible at the expense of what can not appear here."54

The poem then calls on the ligature as a talismanic object capable of changing the detainee from "a body on a table" under the military coroner's lights to a living person. It does so by strategically reinterpreting the body's posture:

I'm aroused by the suggestion of his body lying prone and feel myself getting hard, the way the structure of this sentence hardens around his figure, or the way a ligature disrupts the flow of oxygen to the dura mater, stimulating cell tissue due to a lack of endorphins, a deficit that has my pleasure centers craving.55

The consequences of this arousal are poetic before they are physical, and the body of the detainee has also become part of poetic language at its most radical limit. The sentence "hardens" as it seeks to surround the detainee body, suggesting that Halpern's syntax echoes the arousal of the sexual body, albeit through a "hardening around" that is both tumescence and asphyxiation. Halpern has reanimated the detainee's body to the moments before his death, and it discovers "pleasure centers craving" at the moment the detainee's brain begins to be damaged by his act.

If he is first brought to visibility and then to a kind of resurrected life, the poem then returns him to death. It closes with the description of a final fantasized procedure, a sort of ritual cremation:

Addressing the flesh with serial sectioning and still no evidence of trauma, I rub him down with alcohol and ignite the body, tightening the cord upon discharge, making further examination unnecessary.56

Cremation gives the dead a conclusive completion of life as opposed to the autopsy, which only takes place because completion is forestalled for the sake of what Halpern, quoting the report, calls "further examination." Once again, however, the act of love is an act of violence dangerously similar to the kinds it aims to oppose. The body is torn, bound, and burned, much like that of a detainee exposed to torture. What distinguishes flesh addressed with serial sectioning by Halpern's imagined knife and the flesh of the actual detainee, torn as it was by a bullet?

"The Ligature" registers as an erotic poem, but it also features what Jonathan Culler has described as the idiosyncratic apostrophe of elegy.57 The poem's speaker assumes the power to address a dead addressee as a living being but agrees implicitly that this power is viable only in the space of poetic address. Nevertheless, "The Ligature" can only be an anti-elegy since it recognizes that the dead whom it would address cannot be addressed directly. Poetic address is here supplemented by a ligature that is bureaucratically suicidal, erotically imaginary and poetically mobile in its reanimation of the detainee. "Further examination" of the detainee is "unnecessary" in the final words of the poem because arousal has made the body a different kind of object, and in the process of extinguishing its desire a speaker who burns with love has performed funeral rites. But it seems fully aware that it has desecrated a corpse in the process.

"The Ligature" is part of what Halpern calls a "pornotopia," a non-existent space whose coordinates are established by the sexual fantasy constituted by its search for an impossible grounding in reality. Eliding pornography's optical register, Halpern substitutes a utopian haptics by which instruments of death develop through discrete stages into objects of pleasure and of otherwise impossible social cohesion. The ligature is made of elastic, and as such it is not merely a highly mobile textile but one that must return to an original position following flexion, although it may be modified as a result of having been stretched. Perhaps all of elegy's dead return to their graves slightly changed. Perhaps the addressee of "The Ligature" is no longer "unimaginable from inside the frame" of militarized sense that withdraws his life and death from the commons.58 Nevertheless, it's the body that's been burned by torture or in ritual. The frame in all of its inelasticity remains. There is no better evidence of this than the fact that, as several of the first readers of al-Hanashi's autopsy report noted upon its release, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy never even saw the ligature.59

The poems of Common Place ask not only what harms they expose their addressees to but also what risks are borne by the poems' overhearers. Who is addressed by Halpern's writing when it is taken up by the procedures of criticism and the institutions of professional academic life? After such erotic knowledge, what forgiveness and what orientation? Must we burn Halpern? Or is there a writing that, in addressing Halpern, would be capable of performing the rituals necessary for "making further examination" possible? As for the research subjects most immediately implicated in the experiment of Common Place, his readers, when did we consent to forming such an intimate attachment to textual violence? In my experience, paying attention to these poems in my writing and teaching has only intensified a form of "illegitimate intimacy" that mirrors what Halpern discovers in his own work. Rather than only being complicit with the violence it condemns, but without offering absolution, Halpern's poetry invites readers to add style to the character of complicity by investigating rather than suppressing the arousals to which our readerly, scholarly, and pedagogical bodies are subject in the presence of this sexually textual act. "There are / still songs to sing beyond / mankind," Paul Celan wrote.60 Halpern's work suggests that in an environment saturated by militarization these songs may only be singable if obscene ligatures bind incommensurable bodies. The songs worthy of our historical moment's thousand darknesses risk asphyxiating their singers with the poetic equivalent of "the elastic band of his military issued underwear," but this is not a new problem in the poetic tradition. As Ovid tells it, Orpheus' body was dismembered, but the lyre that bound him to song kept singing.

As I have designated it so far, the "common place" referred to in Halpern's work would seem to be one defined by detention as enclosure, whether in a cell, a body, or a discourse devoted to preserving or challenging this condition. Nevertheless, an erotics that unsettles the propriety of sex objects and the sex acts undertaken alongside them returns us to a place that Freud describes in "The Uncanny" as the only opening that all humans hold in common: the womb.61 The irony that the explicitly and even defiantly non-reproductive sex — queer, necrophiliac, multiply proscribed — should call back to gestation signals that a poetics of detention must announce, of all things, a birth that would be an alternative to the reproduction of what already exists. In such a newly defined commons, the point isn't to address the world to possess and thereby reproduce it. If, instead, the point is to change it, poetry would need to become something besides the belly from which a beast slouches continually to be born. This poetry would have to conceive of a holding environment that delivers itself of the nothing it makes happen without severing a ligature that binds its productive capacity to the long night, the thousand darknesses, and even what an autopsy report calls the "unremarkable genitalia" about which poems have so much more to say.

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John Steen is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University. His book, Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry: This Feeling of Exaltation (Bloomsbury, 2018) argues that melancholy, anxiety, shame, and rage drive signature formal and conceptual innovations in 20th- and 21st-century American lyric. He has translated, with Stephen J. Ross, "Will to Construct," by Joaquin Torres-García, and his essays, reviews, and poems appear or are forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Textual Practice, The Kenyon Review Online, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and Full-Stop. He is a psychotherapist in private practice and a Senior Supervising Psychotherapist at Fifth Avenue Therapy in Manhattan. 

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Banner Image is A CIA map of the Guantánamo region, as of 1996, courtesy of WikiMedia.

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References