LITMIR.BIZ

      (Philip 2008a, p. 172)

      Wale dictates his heartbreaking letter to the sailor; the sailor writes it down and presents it to Wale; Wale eats the letter and throws himself overboard, to his death; and immediately thereafter the sailor commits suicide himself.

      The letter to Wale’s family precipitates the European sailor’s epiphanic recognition of Wale’s humanity, a consequent reckoning with the full extent of his own crimes, and finally his suicide. The imaginative climax of Zong! thus centers on a melodramatic, emphatically artificial revelatory moment that Philip tacitly marks in the sailor’s revised description of Wale, who was formerly “a/ most un/ common negro,” as “an un/common man.” Philip, in explaining her symbolic destruction of the literate sailor in the text, explains:

for us—African people—and for the world as a whole, to survive, that person, not to mention the impulse and action he represents, has to die. …It’s akin to the idea that Columbus must die—for the world to live, that spirit of conquest, destruction, and domination that Columbus represents has to die….And it is in that death that we have an opening to some possibility of a more just kind of existence.

      (quoted in Philip 2008b, p. 75)

      In her allegory, the route to the death of the white supremacist subject is revelation; Philip presents her staging of the sailor’s lethal epiphany as a necessary response to the ongoing precarities of Black life, responses in which, as Philip frames it, nothing less than “survival” is at stake. Philip deploys the epiphany not as an escape from history but as an attempt to intervene upon it in a counterfactual mode, a choice that implies profound frustration at an expansive history of failed remediation in the historical world. The scale of Zong! befits this vast historical scope; Philip positions her epiphany far outside the lyric frame, as part of an epic quest to imagine “some possibility of a more just kind of existence.”

      Like Philip, CAConrad presents epiphany as a representational and psychic response to conditions of existential vulnerability. Writing at the convergence of activist, occult, and performance poetics, Conrad positions their anti-authoritarian “(soma)tic poetry rituals” as queer practices grounded in ideals of tolerance, community, and “absolute permission” (166), a kind of freedom they sharply differentiate from retreat or escapism: “because I was shunned, forced outside the acceptable, respectable world,” they write, “writing was an actual place I could go to where I was free. Not an escape by the way! I really HATE when writers say they write to ESCAPE! I escape nothing, ever, nor do I want to escape!” (Conrad 2012, p. 162). Coursing through Conrad’s rituals and the poems that emerge from them is a palpable history of trauma: sexual abuse in their childhood home, loss of loved ones to AIDS, and most brutally, the loss of their boyfriend, Earth, to an unprosecuted hate crime in 1998. In Conrad’s work, Earth’s horrific murder, in which he was “hogtied, gagged, tortured, covered in gasoline and burned to death” (Conrad 2014, p. 109), is framed within larger patterns of cultural violence that find expression in American economic imperialism and ecological devastation alike. In the face of these personal and civilizational horrors, the epiphanies Conrad sets out to orchestrate in their rituals are not ones of mastery but of healing; in their ritual “Radiant Elvis MRI,” for example, Conrad prescribes listening to music by Elvis Presley and visualizing a safe, familiar place during an MRI exam: “Don’t be afraid of the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine,” they write, “it’s an amazing opportunity for a poem. I created this exercise after my knee was injured by a homophobic bus driver in Philadelphia. Astral travel is possible with some dedicated preparation” (Conrad 2012, p. 79). Throughout their poetry rituals, which are in fact coextensive with the poems that derive from them, Conrad implies the talismanic significance of poetry to queer people in a hostile, homophobic culture and presents the ritual production of poems as analogous to new-age spiritual practices (numerology and the use of healing crystals, for example) that seek to conjure protective and curative magic.

Conrad designs their rituals to induce states of defamiliarization and sudden discovery that they associate with queer structures of awareness—with “the ways experience outside norms force disequilibrium” (Conrad 2012, p. 167). Their ecstasies flaunt their Romantic affiliations: they are euphoric, Blakean revelations of infinity in minute particulars (“THE MOLECULES! THE MOLECULES!” [Conrad 2012, p. 165]) and Whitmanian ecstasies (“I get it—I GET IT—we are one!” (Conrad 2014, p. 4), fleeting apprehensions of “the engine in everything” (Conrad 2012, p. 163) in instances of “SUDDEN recognition” and “TOTAL awareness!” (Conrad 2012, p. 170).

      Emily Dickinson is the presiding spirit in their “(Soma)tic 1: Annoint Thyself,” a ritual in which they visited Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst after a reading event with a friend:

      I scraped the dirt from the foot of huge trees in the backyard into a little pot. We then drove into the woods where we found miniature pears, apples, and cherries to eat. I meditated in the arms of an oak tree with the pot of Emily’s dirt, waking to the flutter of a red cardinal on a branch a foot or so from my face, staring, showing me his little tongue.

      When I returned to Philadelphia I didn’t shower for three days, then rubbed Emily’s dirt all over my body, kneaded her rich Massachusetts soil deeply into my flesh, then put on my clothes and went out into the world. Every once in a while I stuck my nose inside the neck of my shirt to inhale her delicious, sweet earth covering me. I felt revirginized through the ceremony of my senses, I could feel her power tell me these are the ways to walk and speak and shift each glance into total concentration for maximum usage of our little allotment of time on a planet. LOSE AND WASTE NO MORE TIME POET! Lose and waste no more time she said to me as I took note after note on the world around me for the poem.

      (Conrad 2012, p. 3)

      The connection Conrad’s ritual forges with a spiritually charged environment recalls both the great Romantic odes and the comparatively shriveled backyard epiphanies of the postwar era; literally anointing themself with “Emily’s dirt,” Conrad’s meditations on the landscape endow them with transformative insights that deliver them back to the scene with “an altered mood and deepened understanding” (Abrams 1965, p. 528), as M.H. Abrams puts it. Here Dickinson’s annunciation-as-cardinal “showing me his little tongue” embraces the visionary, ritual, and expressive associations of

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