Rodrigo Toscano is an environmental and labor activist, and his poetry reflects his politics. His mode, though, isn’t directly didactic. Instead he spews dadaist satire; his 2012 volume Deck of Deeds takes Ashbery’s off-kilter garbled collages and files them down to a serrated edge in order to create limping one-to-three-page prose-poems that sound like earnest corporate brochures designed to sell aphasiac philosophy to humble strivers.
The first paragraph of the poem El Psicologo (“The Psychologist”), for example, sets up a scam built on un-parsable lies for an uncertain, possibly sexual, possibly financial purpose.
El Psicologo
Ditching a whole week of classes in the middle of his first semester at Oberlin to spend it in Belarus with his dorm building’s maintenance man is a dicey proposition to be sure. Telling his new girlfriend he’s going to his grandmother’s funeral in “nowhere Pennsylvania” while at the same time asking his parents for $1,000 for a “social activism retreat in the state of Washington”—is even more dicey.
Oberlin is a leftist institution, and Toscano is riffing on that reputation by mocking trust fund kids and social activism retreats—and by pointing out that even at these lefty colleges there’s something scandalous about running off to talk about the maintenance men who keep the place running. In the rest of the “story,” the hero transports explosives in his intestines, buys sharkskin pants, gets pounded by the maintenance man’s arguments, and decides to specialize in multiple personality disorder for his psychology major. Academia see-saws back and forth between a rhetoric of revolution and a rhetoric of satisfying bourgeois achievement, between counterculture cool and utter nonsense.
Toscano’s narratives have some precedents in the surreal prose poems of Russell Edson or James Tate, with their wounded breakfasts and aliens watching the Magnificent Seven. But Deck of Deeds is deliberately more banal, and therefore often feels weirder—like the landscape of dream has been colonized by HR execs and their terrible prose. “In hindsight, many in his large extended family might have guessed he would grow up to be a CEO of a night vision equipment developing company in Las Cruces, New Mexico.” “I want to collect as much of the extracted epinephrine into my wholesale stock as I can.” “Some consider my work to be strongly chawola-yamola, while others call me a sell-out of chawola-yamola.”
It all sounds as if it’s (presciently) generated by an LLM which has experienced some subtle but catastrophic processing collapse. Founder biographies, corporate mission announcements, artist statements, are all melted down and re-emitted as a fine cloud of toxic gunk. Which forcibly reminds you that all of that was a fine cloud of toxic gunk in the first place.
Each of Toscano’s poems is titled in Spanish. That fits in with the poem’s cascading juxtaposition of voices and dialects. It’s also meant as a reminder that the gibberish that sluices through America’s business schools and artist colonies occurs within, and is meant to swamp and overwrite, a broader hemisphere and a broader world to which the meaningless mouth noises are meaningless.
That subtext becomes text when Toscano muses, “Sometimes you’re a ‘global leader in the embroidery industry’ or a ‘local enforcer of dangerous workplace practices…’” That poem is titled “Imagen” (“Image”), and it’s referencing a global textile industry in which exploited laborers provide the garments and prestige for a northern global elite. The image of the powerful is woven into the language that clothes them—a language which Toscano unravels in numerous ways, including by pointing out that the laborers often have their own words which are studiously erased by the monoglot argot of global leaders and local enforcers alike.
One of the epigraphs of Toscano’s book is from Jaques Lacan: “What could be more convincing than the gesture of laying one’s cards face up on the table?” Lacan’s notoriously slippery, and while he might be saying that honesty is convincing, he could also be saying that the symbolic display of hidden truths is a tactic—a way to strategically shuffle certain meanings into and out of view. Turning the cards over doesn’t mean you’ve jettisoned subterfuge and tactics; it’s a tactic itself.
Toscano, in spreading language out, is revealing not truth, but the endless streaming bilge of untruth—like the exec in one poem whose “purse zipper opening” releases “executive wisdom” which makes “the nanny’s inspired belly quiver even more” or like the rapture of the Titans in another which unleashes a “stopped-up hose of liquid nitrogen.” Toscano’s book is full of unsavory liquids and semi-solids splorching out obscurely, a mess of verbiage that can’t be contained or assimilated, but Toscano intimates, can only be reshuffled and redealt. In the Deck of Deeds no one can get the high card. The best you can hope is to dump so much epinephrine, night vision equipment, and maintenance professionals on the table that the game can’t go on.