Some Beheadings
Nightboat Press, 2017
Reviewed by Jason Myers
“When I speak,” Aditi Machado declares in the first lines of “Prospekt,” “the fascist in me speaks.” Such boldness is characteristic of Machado’s first collection, Some Beheadings (Nightboat Press), and signals a poet willing to implicate herself in the disturbances that surround her. If she is going to make the reader uncomfortable, Machado shows admirable solidarity by joining in the discomfort. She makes us attentive to the ways we participate in systems and styles we claim to despise. “Discomfort moves in the body,” she writes in “Speeches, Minor,” “like discourse / between sea & moor: // the bad weather turns terminal.” The title of this section—the book feels like a single long poem in discrete sections rather than a collection of individual poems—recalls “Short Talks” in Anne Carson’s Plainwater (1995). Like Carson, Machado’s work is informed by the modernist sensibility of Gertrude Stein as well as by the classical discipline of rhetoric.
She has both a penchant and a gift for aphorism, for the phrase or pronouncement whittled down to a sharp blade. This quality gives each word, each line break, an edge of meaning, as in the above lines where “moor” conveys the sense of a physical place, the term applied to Shakespeare’s Othello, and also its homophone, “more.” Likewise, “terminal” indicates both a state of fatality and a point of departure. “Prospekt” is followed later in the book by “Prospect,” demonstrating the importance of the word in Machado’s lexicon, as well as her interest in translation, both from one language to another (she has translated Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia), and from raw experience into speech.
In “Prospect”—which consists of only one page, versus the twenty-one of “Prospekt”—she confesses, ‘“I’m not human, I’m grammarian.” This suggests that the fierce attention to the laws of language that marks most poets prohibits full humanity, makes us a species apart: “who pays any attention/to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you,” cummings wrote. “[L]overs everywhere,” Machado observes, “& upon the knee, no clauses.” A clause being both part of a sentence and a legal stipulation, Machado imagines that the presence of such impedes intimacy, the erotics of touch. Elsewhere, though, she insists, “Prep / work, like eros, is / in the minutiae.” Throughout this book Machado wrestles with the perceived conflict between thinking and being, between paying attention to the syntax of things and wholly kissing you.
“One day there was no organization or I could organize nothing,” she writes, “& there was radiance, a rare radiance from within.” These lines recall Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which she explicitly invokes later in Some Beheadings with the sections “Torso” and “Archaic.” Rilke describes Apollo’s headless torso as “suffused with brilliance from inside.” The eyes that are missing from the sculpture have attained a transcendent, pervasive nature: “there is no place / that does not see you.” These lines evoke both the—kind of creepy—omniscience of the divine (see Psalm 139 where the Psalmist celebrates and laments that there is nowhere he can go to escape God’s attention) and foreshadow the—very creepy—modern surveillance state. Machado compresses all this into these lines from “Torso”:
I have been lying
next to some burials & I think what I have been
asked to do is to say where the future is
as if it were hidden like calculus from everyone
but the elect.
All poets are asked to be prospectors of the past, prophets of the present, predictors of the future. Machado’s poetry, for all its angst over what she calls the “lexical…astringent for everything,” for all its convolutions and involutions, maintains a certain lightness and charm that makes Some Beheadings a delight. She keeps company with “[t]he dead ones” who “because I believe them lie / for me & the grass that grows above them / billows & the weeds are weeds I would / bind myself in.” These beheadings are her leaves of grass, and announce the arrival of a poet of great originality and depth.