“Fruit flies do like fruit. We should all be named after the things we are attracted to,” writes Anna Gurton-Wachter in her debut poetry collection, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory. And so it is with this book in which the author makes much of her indebtedness to community—that body prerequisite to utopia—at once lived and dreamed, real and invented. The book is peopled with the voices and presence of friends, mentors, and idols; yet Gurton-Wachter cuts a pattern of language to her own distinctive measure, and it is remarkable that the “I” is never lost among the crowd. Instead, she swaggers in a Whitmanesque manner, declaiming at the very outset of the book: “I crowned myself / earthquake shatterer poetics king / origin earth admixture / yes, you get it, I had to crown myself open / so open the listener’s whole attention seeps back” (“Poem from Hypnosis”). Or, elsewhere, addressing her audience as if from a soapbox, she holds forth in “Mother of All,” the first of two central long poems in the book: “Leaders, ladies, I say to you all, who will value my choice to be dysfunctional in today’s world? Fuck up forever the stray parts of my brain I thought I long ago gave up on.”
This is a partial affinity with a Whitmanian poetics—one that borrows from the public voice, queer sociality, and gender fluidity—but with a decidedly contemporary, radical feminist appropriation of these aspects of Whitman’s writing. Affinities can be spotted, too, in the speaker’s radical identification with others—in the I’s porousness, its solubility within a collective social body. For example, she asserts: “If I prioritize the cascade, it is because I want to revalue my agency, make a declaration and so speak the story of a collective mind thrown together in the flourishing presence of others.” However, unlike the Whitmanian mode of projected identification of the self onto another, the “I” in Utopia Pipe Dream Memory rather acknowledges herself as the product of social bricolage: she is possessed rather than possessing.
Utopia Pipe Dream Memory is shot through with a sense of embeddedness in poetic, artistic, and everyday communities. Gurton-Wachter explicitly frames the book with expressions of indebtedness to her “real lived community” and with gratitude for the privilege of “shar[ing] time on earth with so many great thinkers and the traces they have left behind.” Throughout, the poems are laden with the presence of others: in the long poem, “Mother of All,” as well as in shorter poems such as “Maya Deren Lives Forever in the Speedboat at Night” and “A Development Proposal for the Center of the Earth,” Gurton-Wachter pens surreal and absurdist cameos for figures belonging to a pantheon of experimental women writers and artists—including Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Bhanu Kapil, Maya Deren, Clarice Lispector, Rosmarie Waldrop, Yvonne Rainer, Alice Notley, Caroline Bergvall, Hannah Weiner, and Valerie Solanas. Members of this pantheon slip in and through the poems, at once spectral and visceral, meeting the speaker in what she calls “[an] entanglement pose.” Their presence fills and partly displaces the speaker’s own presence (defined, as that is, by her capacity for speech) as when she remarks, “Hannah Wiener’s tit is in my mouth,” or, elsewhere, when she declares that Maya Deren’s “dismembered tongue will take over writing from here.”
As with Hannah Weiner’s nursing the poetic speaker, motherhood appears as a complex model for a nurturing female sociality—one that is potentially fraught with possessiveness and with the threat of dispossession that subtends pliant boundaries. This is a theme echoed in the long poem, “Mother of All,” the title of which unsettlingly marries Gertrude Stein’s 1947 libretto, “Mother of Us All,” whose subject is Susan B. Anthony and the US women’s suffrage movement, to the colloquial name for the US military’s GBU-43/B Massive Ordinance Air Blast, or the “Mother of All Bombs” (so named by news outlets when the United States first detonated one in Afghanistan in April 2017). As the title’s dual reference pulls Stein’ s libretto into conversation with the history of US expansionist warfare, this gesture poses an implicit question about the role of art, which may simultaneously launch a critique of power while contributing to nationalist mythmaking. Against this backdrop, a ghostly Stein appears as a central character alongside the poem’s mercurial speaker. Death threads through the writing, from an opening encounter with Stein’s deathbed, which brings about a pedantic remark by a disembodied voice, “Deathbeds are a leisure product”; to the dramatic killing of a lion and its grotesque decomposition throughout the poem; to the speaker’s self-interment at the poem’s ending: “The burial of my computer that I write with. The burial of my finger. How much of my body has to get buried before I am dead?” (Also, the final line: “I keep watching my body sink into the ground and thrust like a diver into the form of a worm.”) And yet, as clearly as death and, more pointedly, human violence form a deep current of the poem, this subject is complicated by both the speaker’s own ambivalent and self-implicating relationship to violence and the poem’s vigorous counterpoint of joy and affirmation of sociality, both human and nonhuman.
In the first vein, for example, the speaker identifies “[i]n the news today, a man who everyone hates… who has killed a lion outside of the boundaries of lion-killing acceptability,” and she then goes on to recount her mutilation of the corpse: “I had to cut the lion open from inside the lion stomach. To pass out or emerge.” The speaker relates the event of the lion-killing and its aftermath with characteristic deadpan that prompts us to ask what, precisely, are the “boundaries of lion-killing acceptability”? And, furthermore, is it reasonable to hate someone for committing an act that would otherwise go unremarked but for a technicality? Refusing to condemn the man or to elegize the lion, the speaker’s exit through the belly of the beast points to her rejection of the discourse and its terms; it is an absurd situation calling for an absurdist escape. The speaker does not situate herself outside of the violence that subtends the poem; instead, her position is clearly compromised, as when she states, “the hunter’s pose overlaps with my own.” Similarly, in another section of the poem, with a nod to MOAB and perhaps to the notion of a “mother” country, she seems simultaneously to confess and disavow a “Mother, not mine, [who] laughs in all directions as bombs are falling from my fighter jet face.” Gurton-Wachter renders palpable a deeply ambivalent position through such surreal and absurdist images. This self-conflicted stance appears, perhaps, as the discordant double of the impossible “no-place” place of “utopia.”
“An imaginary and indefinitely remote place” and “an impractical scheme for social improvement”—I can’t decide whether this Merriam-Webster definition applies better to utopia or to poetry. And maybe one needn’t make the determination, since utopia is, after all, a literary creation—beginning with Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia (or much earlier if we apply the term anachronistically to works such as Plato’s Republic), growing in popularity through the eighteenth century, and culminating in the social-realist utopian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The antecedent of Utopia Pipe Dream Memory is, however, not More’s, but the poet Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia—an eclectic book of prose miscellany and mock essays first published by United Artists Books in 1984.
Mayer’s Utopia is a nearly unclassifiable book that enfolds the presence of the author’s community, with appearances and contributed writings by Grace Murphy, Hannah Weiner, Joe Brainard, Rosemary Mayer, Charles Bernstein, and others. In homage to Mayer’s Utopia, the titular long poem “Utopia Pipe Dream Memory” not only features Mayer as a character within the poem (“Bernadette Mayer is combing my hair… I do not have the language for the violence of personhood, she said as she unknotted me”), but the poem is also largely composed of the fragmented and remixed voices of Gurton-Wachter’s peers. Growing out of the author’s notebooks from the “Bernadette Mayer Feminist Reading Group,” which convened at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project during August 2017, “Utopia Pipe Dream Memory” incorporates the “chopped, scattered, [and] compressed” remarks of the seminar’s nineteen other participants, as well as notes from a talk Mayer gave at Canada Gallery during the re-exhibition of her multimedia project, Memory (1971–75), and transcriptions of recorded interviews with sound artist Maryanne Amacher.
In this weave of voices structured as a sequence of disjointed verse paragraphs, the majority of which consist of declarative statements delivered in the first person, the “I” becomes plural, dispersed. It also becomes increasingly self-reflexive, meditating on the conceit of singularity, as when the speaker reflects: “what would you think about someone who is in a cage? you see, I had claimed the individual was a thing that exists.” Further on, individual existence is provisionally granted, rendered in these modest terms: “I own that / I am a recurrence.” By and large, however, the “I” in this poem appears as a plurality, “truly and gloriously indebted.” It is doubled and split, as when Gurton-Wachter writes, recalling Stein’s dictum that “the essence of genius… is being one who is at the same time talking and listening”: “Off-screen I am singing from the shared mouth of the fruit fly… Now it is finally time for me to say out loud, ‘To know something is to look down one’s throat as one speaks.’”
Is this being plural a kind of utopia? It may be as close as we can get since, more importantly, utopia is a resolutely unrealizable place, a limit concept, an exercise in dreaming. As the “Epilogue” to Mayer’s Utopia reads:
utopias are no place
as ours will ever be
[…]
add all you would to
what is already here
together we will put
things on paper that
’ve never been there
To which Gurton-Wachter adds, justifying the exercise: “If I allow myself to believe one fantastical thing once, I break the boundary between myself and all possibilities.” Or even more emphatically: “not from utopia chunk challenges anything foreclosed why it would be impossible it’s a joke pipe dream beautiful world I’m not going to stop what draws me to it.” To be drawn to something doesn’t guarantee arrival, but to acknowledge the orientation, to name the attraction—that may be the essential work of poetry.