Schultz’s text is concerned above all with the adoption of a Cambodian child, but it also amplifies the concept of adoption, using it to test the grounds of genealogy, community, inheritance and, by extension, tradition. Language is not simply the means by which the report of an adoption is passed on to the reader, but the material means by which it is obstructed, withheld, negotiated. The anxiety of waiting for the outcome of an application to adopt is mediated through the language of government bulletins—of both the Cambodian government and the U.S. State Department. This language is most frequently experienced in the form of a series of commands and inhibitions, syntactically and semantically inflexible. The insensitivity, brutality even, of the attitudes revealed in these one-size-fits-all instructions inheres in an arbitrariness caricatured in the typographical error that converts 21 years into 210: ‘Parents wanting to adopt Cambodian children must be 210 years older that they are (U.S. State Department)’ (p.74). However, the crude peremptoriness of these official fiats is in some degree less cruelly unsettling than the wild opinionation of email, the ‘partial rumor mill’ (p.74). This is a poetry in which the concept of dialogism goes badly wrong; in which the tension between official and unofficial languages provides the introduction to a scenario of polyvocalism in which bad translateability, in which systematic errors of translation, have the effect of consolidating a deeply reactionary adherence to ethnic and cultural essentialism: ‘Does your baby speak with an accent? Will he when he starts to talk? … Seeing her Korean child in a stroller, the stranger said, but I’m sure she’ll want Chinese food when she’s older’ (p.87). The tragic potential of these ideological constructions is both displaced and exacerbated by habitual diversion into farce.

When used in certain ways, the semantic instability of poetic language can reflect this situation as much as anything else. The habitual wordplay of contemporary poetry, with its sonic glissandi, its sliding signifiers, its ambivalent referentiality, is especially prevalent in avant-garde practice, and it is precisely this kind of facility with puns, with bivalent syntax and with glibly associative consonance that Schultz’s writing is both prone to and especially wary of. Perhaps it does not matter much if we confuse ‘incense’ with ‘incense’(p.74), still less ‘peaks’ with ‘piques’ (p.85), and it does not seem particularly damaging if we collapse ‘Auckland’ into ‘Oakland’ (p.87). However, that last example, while it might feel trivial in scope, actually gets to the heart of the political issues involved in this poetic of transformations. What the connection of half-rhyme neglects is the disparity of material contexts, the difference that inheres in what we ‘stand on’, to quote the phrase that carries such weight in the two lines of George Oppen’s poem, ‘World, World’, quoted in the July 6 section: ‘The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on’ (p.85).

Schultz’s text alludes constantly to the influence of the web, to the operational scope of the net and of email, as perhaps the most homogenising factor in the experience of its users, although what this unifying process eliminates entirely is any necessity for gauging what we stand on, the ground beneath our feet, the specific geographical locations and historical moments that form the basis for a communality in groups of people from widely varying backgrounds, cultures, languages. The emotional register in Schulz’s language is linked noticeably to an earlier form of technology, the rolodex, whose filing system has been superseded by computer programming: ‘My meditation rolodex flips between compassion and anger and self-justification and pity’ (p.74). The global language of the web is given, is allowed, no weight here—it does not register the force of gravity pulling it down to the geographical and historical specificities of Schultz’s text.

Oppen’s poem is rooted in a Marxist tradition that gives priority to material conditions in the determination of identity. It is flanked by references to the work of two other American poets providing coordinates for Schultz’s project: Hart Crane and Walt Whitman. The reference to Crane is biographical, recalling his ‘dental chair epiphany’ (p.85). This was the moment when Crane is supposed to have realized his vocation, recorded in a letter to Gorham Munson: ‘As the bore went into my tooth I was able to follow its every revolution as detached as a spectator at a funeral.’ In some ways this is an announcement of purpose predicated on the transcendence of material conditions—it is the imagined birth of a poetic sensibility that depends on the death of the feeling self—but transcendence cannot take place without returning to those conditions: its foundation is the threshold of pain. [Interestingly, in an earlier section, the poem’s speaker observes, ‘When I was a child, I wanted to unite the two Germanies, the two Irelands, the two Americas. Then there were the two Hart Cranes’ (p.17).] Whitman provides the last literary quotation in the text: ‘Our hotel in Phnom Penh promises us information bellows and I think of that barbaric yawp’ (p.87). The phrase comes from Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’: ‘I too am not a bit tamed, I too am / untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.’ The poet is here comparing his own ‘untameability’ to that of a hawk supposedly complaining of his ‘gab’—the gabble of the barbarian, the cultural outsider defined by the incomprehensibility of his language. The previous reference to ‘roofs’ in Whitman’s poem is to the ‘roofs of mouths’ in a section dealing with relations with the dead and with the handing on of tradition through the medium of the leaves of grass, the material continuity of the grass growing on the graves of the dead: grass is defined as a ‘uniform hieroglyphic’, an embodied language of communality

What is clearly evident in the mutual jostling of these literary allusions is that they evoke a tradition of male writers as a context for Schultz’s project. Equally clearly, that maleness is less significant than the investments of all these writers in the physical occasions for language, suggesting that issues of gender are in danger of sliding into essentialism without constant attention to the provocation of the ‘something’ we ‘stand on’. Schultz’s text can be thought of as an intensely ‘languaged’ poetry; what makes its linguistic complexity so valuable is that it is most powerfully ‘languaged’ precisely when it responds to historical and geographical pressure. Borrowing is the principal method by which one language culture accommodates what it cannot translate from others: ‘Misunderstanding becomes our pas de deux’ (p.5). This kind of borrowing, grafting, adoption, is what fosters convergence between cultures, although it always involves both a collective and an individual history which the best contemporary writing, like Schultz’s, is careful to trace.

—Rod Mengham
Based on a paper given 7 October 2006 in Cambridge, UK