Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s ambitious, far-ranging, and captivating first book of poetry, Place-Discipline, ends with a beginning: the beginning of Chicago, city of pork, mud, and segregation. The penultimate poem in the collection, “Homage À Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable” offers an equivocal tribute to the city’s true founder, a Haitian Jesuit and fur trader, who settled on the marshy banks of the Chicago River in the 1780s. Du Sable is a complex figure. He initiated the permanent settlement of Chicago — unlocking the “machines of civilizing schemery” that would, within 50 years of his arrival, conspire to dispossess and expel the Potawatomi peoples who lived in the area and who gave the city its name — Eschecagou, “rotting garlic” or “rotting onion,” depending on the translation. As Moctezuma comments, the colonial machine that du Sable unwittingly unleashed …
makes objects of people & spreads its cancer
across contiguous ecologies the sundering of organs &
the scalping of skins
at some instance of advent a father of nationtime
For Moctezuma, colonialism is a kind of cancer, violent and rapacious, always moving, metastasizing, spreading. But he also describes colonialism as a temporality, nationtime. The colonists themselves, he writes, are “time-filled men.” Such nationtime, Moctezuma argues, “enslave[s] the thought,” reduces all to “capital fervor.” And it limits time itself, discarding anything excessive, illogical, transgressive, anachronistic—anything that “resists equation.” Nationtime is time domesticated: reduced to homogeneous units, the steady, unshakeable forward movement of capitalist life.
Yet, at the same time, it hardly seems fair to blame du Sable personally for the bloody city built on top of his homestead. The structural forces of American capitalism would’ve led someone, sooner or later, to build Chicago. (The city is located on a key artery in the circulation of American capital: just a few miles west lies the shortest, easiest portage between the Mississippi River system and the Great Lakes). Further, du Sable himself has been a victim of the colonial machine he inadvertently set in motion: his contributions to the city’s history have been all but forgotten, in favor of other — whiter — founding fathers, like John Kinzie. He is thus a symbol of the suppressed, but indissoluble blackness of Chicago—“the all black core of a historically black metropole,” as Moctezuma writes. That blackness is not secondary or derivative, something added to the city as a result of the Great Migration. Rather, as Moctezuma insists, Chicago is “a city defined by its blackness / founded by blackness the alpha & / omega.” Finally — though the details of his life are scant — it is not unreasonable to imagine that du Sable sought out Chicago as a refuge from whiteness and its colonial imperatives. He was an acolyte of Toussaint Louverture; he was fluent in Potawatomi and lived among the Potawatomi for many years, marrying a woman named Kitiwaha from the local tribe. He is thus “part indigene part afrofuturist part creole part francophone / dereliction,” as Moctezuma writes — a man whose rebellious life, whose cultivation of cross-racial alliances on the very borders of American colonialism supplies a “spectral promise of mestizaje lurking at the margins.”. That “spectral promise” haunts the city still — a promise that it might escape from the rigid logics of colonialism and capitalism. “bring us a future we deserve bring us / an ark,” Moctuzema implores, addressing du Sable directly. In Moctezuma’s treatment, du Sable’s example, his life, becomes a reservoir of possibility in the midst of “the corrosive kleptocracy of fresh liberalism.” He presents a “the future that never became future” — and yet still might become. He offers “a past that unswerved the past.”
By the end of this poem — this poem which returns to the founding of the city to understand its contemporary “malaise marshmellowing in green wounds” — history itself has become plural and porous. The founding has lost its foundation. Past and present collapse: demolished 20th century public housing projects like “Atgeld Gardens … Cabrini Green … Robert Taylor” stand alongside du Sable’s “lake cabin in the wood / bordered / in the black sand at nightbreak.” In writing an “Homage” to the founder of Chicago, inadvertent father of the colonial city, Moctezuma makes it possible to see around, outside, nationtime, into alternate pasts — and with them, alternate futures.
I have dwelled on this poem at length because it embodies one of signal ambitions — and achievements — of Moctezuma’s poetry. For Moctezuma, it is the task of poetry to widen historical vision—and, in the process, to indict the narrowness and rigidity of capitalist time. This may seem like a perversely theoretical project for a poet to take on. But Moctezuma writes poetry as its own kind of theoretical performance. He does not produce texts to be decoded by theory (or by literary critics, for that matter). Rather, he produces poems that are themselves theories, that perform their arguments in the way stage reference, history, and space. Poetry allows him to slip outside the boundaries of the reasonable and the empirical: to make arguments that soar past epistemic and methodological limits. One can see this adventurous disregard for the usual standards of academic argumentation in the way Moctezuma marshals and deploys references. Place-Discipline is a book dizzy with reference — from Chase Bank to the Egyptian God Osiris; from the Toltecs to the Robert Taylor Homes. Characteristically, Moctezuma refuses to order and organize these references, to place them in a historical hierarchy. Rather, on his pages, references collide with each other, producing sparks of possibility. For example, in the long poem “Megapolisomancy” (about which, more shortly), the colonial history of Manhattan Island collapses into the present:
citicorp decomposes
into citigroup ((a traveler’s group
or the highway men, the quarry
discharged
/ euro-ameri-bank / banamex((
chase mannahata for 60 guilders
((what a deal
The poem cascades down the page — and through history. It starts with the corporate history of Citibank and its own colonial escapades (it purchased Banamex, a Mexican bank, in 2001). But it swerves to the initial purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch. Moctezuma’s point is clear: they’re all “highwaymen,” all the way back. But his method — juxtaposition, fragmentation, reference — helps the reader rencounter this history. Instead of a lockstep teleology, the continuing history of American colonialism acquires fractures and splits. The caesuras and sharp enjambments that split the page thus become eloquent in their own right: a reminder that one can see past and through nationtime into spaces that have yet to be inscribed; an invitation to see the “spectral promise of mestizaje lurking at the margins.”
For the reader, the result is an experience both dizzying and exhilarating. It’s easy to get lost in the overwhelming surge of reference, in the broken syntax that Moctezuma uses to index a fractured history. This is a book that demands to be read again and again, that asks you to read actively — and with an encyclopedia on your lap. And it is an ambitious book — astonishingly so, for a first book. It places Moctezuma in the company of some of the 20th century’s most ambitious and adventurous poets — Robert Duncan, with his mythic imagination, Aimé Césaire, with his anti-colonial densities, and Nathaniel Mackey, with his mobile, diasporic syntax. Such a poetics is not without its dangers. There is always the possibility that a poet like Moctezuma will be carried away on the wind of his own eloquence, lifted into clouds of reference — and past the reach of the reader. Certainly some of Moctezuma’s models are guilty of such a sin. (One thinks of Robert Duncan here, who sometimes drifts into an impenetrable hermetic fog). Moctezuma mostly avoids this danger, though. He anchors the flights of his eloquence and reference in a specific place, with a specific history: Chicago. The city magnetizes his imagination, drawing to it the ferric fragments of a much broader past. Moctezuma may be said to make a wager with his readers: that he can map the history — and the present — of capitalism from and through Chicago. (In making this wager, Moctezuma joins with another Chicago poet with a distinguished avant-garde pedigree, Daniel Borzutzky. Between Place-Discipline and Borzutzky’s recent books, The Performance of Becoming Human (2016) and Lake Michigan (2018), an ambitious reader can find a comprehensive poetic map of neoliberal Chicago — segregated and over-policed, a city of black-sites and financial machinery).
In other words, the theoretical performance that stretches through Place-Discipline is not simply or exclusively engaged with nationtime, not simply dedicated to pluralizing the history and temporality of colonial capitalism. Moctezuma is as much interested in nationspace as nationtime. And he is dedicated to the idea that poetry can map the present, can make the present knowable, intelligible — even as its flows of goods, money, and information recede into obscurity. Nowhere is this ambition more fully realized than in the long poem “Megapolisomancy” — which serves as the heart of the book (and, for that matter, in its scope and accomplishment, justifies the comparison to Mackey and Duncan). The poem opens with an epigraph from Fritz Lieber’s Our Lady of Darkness, which lays out its cartographic ambitions:
… we live in the Megapolitan … Age, when … disastrous blights are manifold and threaten to conjoin and enshroud the world with funebral yet multipotent city-stuff. We need a Black Pythagoras to spy out the evil lay of our monstrous cities and their foul shrieking songs, even as the White Pythogras spied out the lay of the heavenly spheres and their crystalline symphonies two and a half millenia ago.
The poem that follows is as expansive as the Megapolitan cities Lieber describes. It is a Dantean journey into the multiple, networked hells of the present; it supplies a map of “a city webbed in its warfares & state / craft, art of inter- / jections.” In a sense, the poem takes on the characteristics of the megapolis it describes. Its mastery lies in the way it marshals “inter- / jections,” the way that it builds what Moctezuma calls elsewhere, a “blueblack delineament of a megapolis / panopticized by police.”
In delineating the lineaments of the megapolis, Moctezuma’s poem expands vertiginously. Its reach is not just global; it spans many globes to describe “the increasingly crowded clouded electromagnetic spectrum spools / in which we traffic our personae on interstellar / spaceways.” But, as in “Homage À Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable,” Moctezuma grounds the poem in Chicago itself — which becomes, as it were, the navel of the megapolis, its anchor and its inauguration. One should not be misled by the “mega” in “megapolis.” The Megapolis is both “rather small and infinite” [emphasis added]. As Moctezuma reminds us (referencing a suburb of Chicago) “the global [is] only / a decimal point away / in Oak Park in Santiago / de Chile / in Jakarta …”
Moving through the infinite decimals of the Megapolis, their microscopic magnitudes, Moctezuma makes himself into a modern-day Virgil. “:: and through me / the gnashing of teeth / nella città dolente,” he writes in the poem’s opening section, quoting the words inscribed on the gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Better, perhaps, he makes himself into the “black Pythagoras” Leider calls for in the poem’s epigraph — crying out against the “evil lay” of the Megapolis even as he maps it in scrupulous detail. At the heart of Megapolis — which not so much as a physical place as an episteme, an imprisoned and imprisoning way of thinking and being —Moctezuma encounters whiteness itself, trapped in ice. It is, of course, inaccurate to speak of the megapolis as having a heart, a center: it is a dispersed and networked phenomenon; its heart is everywhere and nowhere at once. In this sense, whiteness is always at the center of Moctezuma’s critique. His poetic performance works to slip beyond the boundaries established by “the We of our supremacy [ ] whiteness un- / principled in the imagination(s) / we know of…” “We resist this scarcity of spectrum,” Moctezuma write. In taking on Virgil’s mantle, in becoming a “black Pythagoras,” Moctezuma does much to expand the “scarcity of spectrum” —inaugurating new imaginations, new ways of seeing history and space; reviving the “spectral promise of mestizaje lurking at the margins” and offering it to his readers. In the margins and spectrums where he works, it is not only possible to name the wounds of colonialism, capitalism, and whiteness — wounds that have hardened into the Megapolis we live in. It is also possible to see beyond them: to different spaces, cities, and histories.
[Published by Omnidawn Publishing on October 30, 2018, 120 rages, $17.95 paperback]