The Social Forms of Speculative Poetics

From popular dystopian narratives to steampunk, zombie and horror tales to Afrosurrealist texts and alternate histories, speculative modes proliferate across our contemporary cultural landscape. Speculative aesthetics play on the tense, shifting, unstable relationship between what was, is, and could be, offering other imaginative possibilities that recast present historical tendencies in new light. Samuel Delany terms this quality of speculative writing "subjunctivity," as it explores what "has not happened yet," what "might happen," and other permutations of potentiality and counterfactual conjecture.1 While speculative work tends to be approached as a predominantly narrative modality, we can turn to poetry, with its capacities for paratactic leap and temporal play, its nonlinear logics and modes of expansion and condensation, as a particularly exciting site for creative speculation.2 Rather than developing elaborate plot structures or portraying the complex technics of alternative worlds, poetic speculations often convey distilled, defamiliarizing logics of subjunctivity that imaginatively alter, decelerate, or sidestep sequential or progressive logics (narrative and historical).

In this brief essay, I highlight some contemporary works of North American poetry that offer keen speculative engagements with our current historical conjuncture, placing imaginative pressure on the rationalizing directionality of capitalist realism and the reiterative practices of structural racism. I lay out five key formal logics that characterize contemporary speculative poetics: world-building, negation, wish-fulfillment, temporal discontinuity, and future-thinking. In highlighting these poetic modes of speculation, I am following Robin D.G. Kelley's insistence, in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, that poetry is in fact a central location, past and present, for such imaginative conjuring. He points in particular to black surrealist practices that imagine, as poet Jayne Cortez puts it, "somewhere in advance of nowhere."3 The speculative techniques of various poets today evoke such alterities: they glimpse other zones within an integrated capitalist world-system, or they emphasize the gaps, rifts, and discontinuities in this system's workings, or they imagine other horizons to come. They develop vocabularies and forms that generate, as Kelley writes, "cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born."4 At the same time, the works I explore here are not necessarily recuperative in their representations, let alone utopian. They often evoke dominant or emergent logics of unfree futurity such as extractivist and expansionist geographical mappings or genocidal white-nationalist imaginaries. And they call forth reckonings with the complex realities of our time — the politics of direct action, the persistence of racialized violence and carceral capitalism, the dynamics of surplus life. They immanently engage these historical tendencies in ways that denaturalize them or reveal their inner contradictions. In her recent book, Cruel Fiction, Wendy Trevino calls this process "a constant refashioning of the on-hand."5 In this way, the estrangement-effects of these works reframe the present as subject to renegotiations and unexpected turns.6

Such imaginative reshapings of the real, in turn, generate complex forms of historical thinking about our present. As Carl Freedman argues in Critical Theory and Science Fiction, speculative texts might be understood not as imaginative departures from real historical conditions but instead as a means of "keep[ing] alive critical historical consciousness" through processes of defamiliarization, displacement, and cognitive estrangement.7 Focusing particularly on works of science fiction, Freedman argues that they undertake the dialectical work that was once primarily the purview of the realist novel, "establishing the historicity of the present . . . by showing it to be neither arbitrary nor inevitable but the conjunctural result of complex, knowable material processes."8 The five modalities of poetic speculation I delineate here not only highlight the present's social and material historicity but also underscore the urgent need to contest its determinations. Their principles of estrangement, then, function in an oppositional way, often through dialectical negation or momentary breaks. Through their charged and refractory forms, they attune their readers not only to the chance and contingency of the present's social forms but to the necessary activity of envisioning others.

1. World-building

A first key characteristic of poetic speculation is the imaginative shaping of worlds. Mark Jerng points out in Racial World-Making: The Power of Popular Fiction that speculative fictions deploy particular genre dimensions in order to create "imaginary or fictive worlds as an effect of the work of art as a whole."9 Two contemporary poets who undertake sustained practices of world-building in this sense are Nathaniel Mackey and Will Alexander. Across their long poems and multi-book projects, these poets generate distinctive sonic patterns, fabular vocabularies, and choral registers that excavate presences and sites "outside the warrens of the visible," in Alexander's phrase.10 Their poems depict journeys of nomads, exiles, orphans, asylum seekers, and other terrestrial beings, offering counter-epics that imagine the improvisatory and adrift worlds these migrants build in transit. Mackey writes in "Song of the Andoumboulou: 91":

Moving was moving
on, not moving somewhere, the ostensible
                                                                         where
   we'd arrive at forever beyond the bend,
bend we took pressed against windows
   and walls and would walk, when we
                                                                       dis-
  embarked, with a bentlegged hop . . . No
such when arrived, pilgrim's transit some-
   thing else than we expected, latter-day
                                                                         drift

The "where" of fixed place becomes "drift" itself in these lines, which chart the perpetual and recursive motions, the stops and starts of this collective "pilgrim's transit" through dense clusters and repetitions, ellipses and caesuras. Mackey and Alexander's diasporic visions develop continuities with the decolonizing imaginaries of Aime Cesaire and Kamau Brathwaite, but with a particular attunement to the unfolding refugee and migration crises of the 21^st century alongside the long histories of black diasporic life. Across these works, Mackey and Alexander develop a fabular planetary lexicon that finds affiliation with surplus populations without property or territory, worlds on the move. These poetic portrayals draw forth distinctive cosmologies, musics, and social arrangements of these worlds-in-motion. To read them is to be immersed in total visions that are, in Mackey's words, "social as well as cosmic, political and metaphysical as well."12

2. Negation

A second characteristic mode of poetic speculative thinking is negation, or the exploration of forms of negative thinking that highlight gaps or aporias in the present. What is obscured by liberal frameworks of democratic recognition and social belonging or other dominant forms of political discourse? What might be unthinkable in the aesthetic languages and logics associated with individualism or empiricism (lyric, documentary, testimonial)? The poetic technique of erasures might be approached as a form of speculative thinking in this sense, whether in M. Nourbese Philip's Zong, Srikanth Reddy's Voyager, Yedda Morrison's Darkness, or Hugo García Manríquez's Anti-Humboldt. All of these draw attention to the gaps or unspeakable truths embedded in historical and aesthetic documents that serve as their source texts: a 1781 legal document concerning the massacre of slaves, the memoir of Kurt Waldheim (U.N. Secretary General and Nazi intelligence officer), Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the NAFTA trade agreement. Manriquez asserts that his use of erasures works to create "hollows" and "pauses" in this document that can highlight the divergence between "politics (pre-established practices and discourses) and the political (the potentially present, though unarticulated)."13 Fred Moten's explorations of the "fugitive poetics" of black social life might offer another sustained example of speculation-by-negation: he writes that his poetry involves "stopping and saying not here, not here, and of that being, in the end, pretty much all I have to say."14 Moten's sonic play with break, dissonance, and silence throughout his poetic work embodies this ethos of radical refusal. Negation, in all these cases, offers a momentary imaginative halt to the inevitable forward-march of normalized catastrophe — thinking as a necessary form of "arrest" rather than "transmission," in Walter Benjamin's key formulation.15

3. Wish-fulfillment

A third modality of speculative thinking involves forms of wish-fulfillment, where the text offers imaginative resolutions that solve or work around seemingly intractable social realities. We might see in Eve Ewing's Electric Arches, a recent book of poems on black girlhood, an embodiment of this logic. Several poems in this text share the bracketed title "[a re-telling]," and they begin with everyday racial confrontations portrayed in realist terms — black boys interrogated by the police, racial slurs hurled at a young black girl — which then break off, midway through, into a handwritten alternative ending involving magical acts of recovery and relief. Such acts shift the representational terrain from more straightforward documentations of microaggressions to a fantastical, liberatory mode. The boys soar into the air, smiling and singing; the racist woman turns into a ghost-spirit; the girl gains a magical net and a flying bike. The handwritten endings refuse the certainties of the typebound page, offering a formal expression of an improvisational break and a recoding of real dynamics of racial unfreedom. Wish-fulfillment logics stage their own reality principles, conjuring other endings and openings within the determinations of the present. Here, the longing for flight, for unfettered mobility, for ecstatic forms of freedom is framed against the systemic forces waged against black lives on the ground.16

4. Temporal discontinuity

A further speculative dynamic can be found in recent books by Tongo Eisen-Martin (Heaven is All Goodbyes) and Wendy Trevino (Cruel Fiction), which offer sustained attention to the non-identical workings of historical time in a given present. These works ask: What happens inside the abstract, fixed form of the hour, the workday? How might we chart both "what is inevitable" and "what feels different" (to borrow phrases from Trevino's text) within the antagonisms of our historical present? In particular, these works can be distinguished by the way they give form to the dialectical and nonlinear workings of time within capitalism, exploring the social constitution and content of time as at once alienated and also potentially transformative. Through their speculative attention to the time of the present as abstract, nonlinear, at once fluid and determined, accelerating and contracting, these poets produce ways of comprehending time as a social form.

Eisen-Martin explores the nonlinear time of urban deindustrialization through poetic fragments that condense and drift across the page. "I'm down on my luck / making snow angels / on the abandoned factory loading dock," Eisen-Martin writes.17 The slowed-down time of dispossession — the time of the "ex-worker," measured in fragmented images of waiting at bus stops, passing cigarettes, getting high, asking for change, making tattoos all afternoon on bus station windows — emerges within time organized in capital's rhythms, the days ordered by its brutal rationalizations, its "downtown decisions": "Somewhere in America, the prison bus is running on time." Eisen-Martin attunes the reader to times set within and against these dominant rhythms, whether in the form of the casual work slowdown, the picket line, or the tempos of music and dream, the choral meditations of the "black commons." And he points toward the revolutionary potential latent in these motions, emerging out of the brute impossibilities of present conditions. "'I've given up on counterrevolution,' I said / Well then here is your weapon, Little Bank." What might emerge through the intensification of these antagonisms? Eisen-Martin's poems hold space for alternative prospects, often within the space of one or two lines: "A masterpiece is coming / (It just has to beat a million bullets to the spot)."

Trevino's poetry tells the uneven time of a present marked by insurrectionary activity and reactionary violence, pointing to the contradictory futures, fascist and revolutionary, that this present bears. In one poem, "Summer 2016," Trevino offers a cascading litany of the turbulent events of that summer (white nationalist rallies, vigils, anti-police riots, the Flint water crisis); yet the poem unfolds not through a chronological catalog, but instead through a disorienting backward and forward movement in time: "This is the same month," "This is weeks before," "I'm writing from the future." The effect of such formal maneuvers is to produce a feeling of intensification and increasing pressure within time's inexorable march, replacing linear inevitability with more uncanny measurements. On one hand, these temporal overlays and repetitions attune the reader to the reiterative nature of these conflicts, revealing the ways ongoing and seemingly intractable racial and economic antagonisms find particular expression in the incidents Trevino charts. Yet on the other hand, the poem's disorienting and accelerating motions register "what feels different" about this moment. Underwriting Trevino's catalog of scenes and situations is the urgent question of whether this present, with its new conflagrations and communal actions, bears new openings for broader transformation. Speculating on such questions through closing images of highways blocked in protest and riots springing up, the last line offers an address to a reader or comrade of the future: "Maybe we'll see each other."

5. Future-thinking

As with these closing lines of Trevino's poem, a final mode of contemporary poetic speculation turns to the future as site of fierce struggle, but also as a kairotic opening that belies the permanence of the present conjuncture. Cathy Park Hong, Lo Kwa Mei-en, Sesshu Foster, Danielle Pafunda, and Chris Nealon have all recently written speculative works set in imagined futures or exploring worlds to come.18 Hong's poetry has developed varied portraits of future worlds, from the dystopian global city of the Desert in Dance Dance Revolution to the virtualized "world cloud" in Engine Empire, inventing new linguistic and formal modalities to illuminate the broader social dynamics and structures of power that govern these envisioned worlds. The long title poem of Foster's most recent book, City of the Future, moves between past, present, and future, dream-vision and nightmarish real, to compose a portrait of Los Angeles as it is and might be. And in a recent long poem, "The Victorious Ones," Nealon unfolds a vision of a not-too-distant future, even one generation away, where ecological and economic crises reach new tipping points: "Then came fire / It wasn't yet a new world, or the end of the old one / But water, money, feeling overspilled their banks."19 Nealon charts various dystopian, and sometimes wryly comical, images of this future: "protective gear," "awkward alternative currencies," "those giant worms from Dune." And he evokes his fears for his own child: "and yes like any other poet with a child I have dreamed of mine along some empty road in camouflage and tatters." But Nealon counters apocalyptic imagery with elusive signs of resistance and mutual aid, envisioning this child — and the poets of the 22^nd century — "with comrades." Turning from this speculative vantage back to our own present, Nealon asks us to look around "now," to remember anew the non-inevitability of what is and what is to come. Nealon's title re-engages Benjamin's sixth thesis for our current moment of social instability and intensifying crisis: "Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. [ . . . ] And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious."20 Rewriting the determinations of the present as a terrain of ongoing struggle, Nealon closes his poem with this open-ended question:

Look around you now and ask yourself
Which of these—
the innovators, profit-makers, the ones behind high walls,
the ones who are planning for the great catastrophes—
or the ones with no ability to plan,
who live from hour to hour, year to year,
in whom terror waits to be uncurdled,
who live in the great wide world—
which of these will be the victorious ones?
Nobody knows.

To explore these varied modes of poetic speculation, in turn, is to approach the question of poetry's political stakes from another vantage beyond more dominant poetic approaches such the social lyric and documentary form. Jerng argues in Racial Worldmaking that speculative genre fictions "give weight to the relationship to the world over the psychological organization of the individual"; similarly, the speculative works I have discussed shift attention from psychological or empirical terrains toward more impersonal and totalizing visions.21 In their varied emphases on subjunctivity rather than subjectivity, these visions are defined less by their explorations of affective dynamics and social responses to the historical givens of the present than by their imaginative nonalignments with these conditions. In so doing, these speculative texts draw attention to the social forms of the logics and systems that structure our lives, opening up their workings to scrutiny by way of the text's immanent formal maneuvers. These maneuvers direct poetry's capacities for compression, silence, repetition, reversal, and extension toward modes of historical thinking, putting sustained pressure on what W.E.B. Du Bois described as the "limitations of allowable thought."22

Margaret Ronda is an associate professor of English at the University of California-Davis. She is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (2018) and two books of poetry.

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