Metonymy, Poetics, Performance: World-Making and the Real

        "Do you think they are real?"        [               ]"These scratches were made by tourists."

—Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, "Human Metonymy: A Tour Guide through I and II"

The birds and beetles and moths, too, and all navigators; they take direction by the stars they see, not some stars behind the stars that cause them. And everything's like the stars: only the least part of us is ever inside us. What makes a thing Real, it runs like the finest spider silk through every other thing.

—Noah Wareness, Real Is the Word They Use to Contain Us

      I am interested in the gas chambers in your collapsible little fingers.… … … … … … … … … … . … .Come closer, you say, with your eyes.                  … … … … … … … … … … … … … .                              But seriously, friends:

      What do you make of this darkness that surrounds us?      … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . … .What does it say? What does it say? What do you want it to say?

—Daniel Borzutzky "The Performance of Becoming Human"

The Real World: Metonymy, Poetics, Performance

In the poem "Human Metonymy," Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach writes, on the left side of the page, of the flowers in the baskets of bicycles that "pass by / along the other side/of the barbed wire" of the Nazi concentration camp. The poem leaves unanswered or unanswerable (with a bracketed blank) the question of realness from the right side of the page—realness of the flowers or perhaps of the fact of an "other side" that genocide doesn't touch—before turning to the tourists' marks on the site of genocide. The poem is interested in the realness of the artefacts—"Here you can see real human ashes. / … / This is a real train car"—as they might be seen, touched, and marked by tourists. While the murdered appear metonymically through the artefacts (for example, as "our collection" of "more than 100,000 shoes"), the tourists of the real seem to be missing the point: it is not the artefact that connects them to the historical event; rather, we all really live in the world of this genocide. Its fact is part of our current shared reality: it marks us. The realness that interests this poem is in how the artefacts perform the tourists' connection to that past as it lives in the present. As Noah Wareness's speaker says, "only the least part of us is ever inside us." Like "all navigators" who use the light from dead stars, humans navigate our lives through causal structures that we mostly can't see, that we might have almost no awareness of (as the poet's pseudonym suggests). The force of reality "runs like the finest spider silk through every other thing"; it is contiguous. Reality is made of relationship. Or reality is the darkness that we "make of" with what we "want it to say" and, as Daniel Borzutzky's collection as a whole emphasizes, what we (whether "we" are individuals or the corrupt governments and exploitative systems Borzutzky targets) want when we "come closer" is sometimes to hurt one another. The performance of becoming human involves the violent potential in our "collapsible little fingers": these hands are susceptible to both sides of destruction, to destroy and be destroyed. But this performance also involves the capacity to "make of this darkness that surrounds us": to "make of" is conceptual but also suggests that those little fingers could make something new out of the difference between the question "What does it say" and the question "What do you want it to say." While these poems don't settle what "real" could mean, taken together they nevertheless seek in relational space what matters—what matters for navigating the world with remembrance of the past and desires for the present that could allow for Borzutzky's "friends" to be unsatirical.

This special issue is about structures of reality. One way to say this is to say that it is about world building: this issue is about how artists build worlds in their art, whether they are building a version of the real world or building new worlds. Another way to say this is to say that it is about convention: this issue is about the expectations we...