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Rodrigo
Toscano
To Leveling Swerve
ISBN 1-928650-23-6
$13.00
77 pages
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Rodrigo
Toscano |
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Ideological intention meets ideological surprise in To Leveling Swerve, Rodrigo Toscano's fourth book of poetry. While continuing to develop his overriding concern with poem as radical social interface, To Leveling Swerve extends a notion of poetic diction that is neither exclusively a problematic of aesthetics, nor enjoined to any one (social or political) culture as interpretative key, that runs instead as a volatile commingling of the two. In this book, monumentalist high-modernist motivations are unveiled as discrete rhetorical moments in history. Those moments, in turn, approximate a delicate (coarse) national literature on the verge of becoming a stout (smooth) internationalist poetic. *** In times that
are too serious for solemnity, the question, ‘What’s new in poetry?,’ has
been echoing through the realms of innovative
writing as usefully as a car alarm. Rodrigo
Toscano seems to have heard this call as clearly
as anyone has of late. Sincere and sarcastic
historian, he contorts his poetic inheritance
from the pre-Socratics to recent innovators,
using rhythmic outreach, frontal and sly, to
produce a danceable inventory of the present’s
equivocations and aliases. To Leveling
Swerve is exciting, funny, encouraging, and perspicacious
without any hint of premature congratulation.
What Toscano does here will remain useful:
it hasn’t been done before and needs
to be done more. “Swivillization and its bearings grinding—listen.” This
is la cumbre, el culmen de los cruzares, the
heights of the crossing, not in borders, but
in tongues, English for now . . . inclinado,
torcido, bent in its desire to Level. “Into
a language I don’t speak alarms an attack” Who
thought of, who pushed the tongue like a finger
into the wound of this empire of fear, who? “QUICQUAM
WHICHEVER LOCKED INTO A PATH OF CALVINIST SUPERSTITION
LEADERS PRESSED FEARS ONTO FEARS” Feels
not like “poetry” in the usual
sense, but as thought form, moving across the
page, a living thing, a word animus. César
Vallejo said poetry did not change the world,
only the human “heart.” He probably
meant “heart” in the Andean sense:
sonqo, spirit and consciousness. Navigating the
globe’s uneven developments,
To Leveling Swerve transmits signs of life
from “da’ lean masheene amerika,” while
actively exploring our “historical interests” through
culture: “the point is / to transform
it / beyond recognition.” The depth of
Toscano’s social engagement is paralleled
only by the intelligence and play in his word
extensions; generously composing in a wide
range of mind states, these poems speak through
the contradictions facing culture workers and
community activists alike.
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