Carbon Neutral by Urayoán Noel

Artist Statement

Carbon Neutral consists of alternating anagrams in English and Spanish for the phrase “carbon neutral,” most of which were sourced from online anagram generators. The anagrams were then turned into GIF files using one of these generators and various GIF-making websites. The piece is largely concerned with how an eccentrically coded translingual poetics—sometimes intimate and sometimes foreign—emerges from the tension between an aleatory poetics of found text and the constraints of anagrammatic form. The code switching here thus assumes the digitality of code, attuned to the “Netlish” described by Emily Apter (2006) as a “postmedia form of expressionism” shaped by the tension between digital entropy and universal translatability. At the same time, Carbon Neutral questions the rhetoric of carbon neutrality as shaped by various media and corporate interests (greenwashing, etc.), while reflecting on the carbon footprint of ubiquitous GIF animations and of digital art itself. In the Spanish version, the piece takes advantage of the fact that several of the anagrams generated involve third person plural verbs in order to evoke the actions of those in power and of those that contest power. That the English version hints at the weaponization of carbon neutrality through a word like “con,” which means “with” in Spanish, is a reminder of how critiques of power must reckon with both language’s relationality and its untranslatability.

Bio

Urayoán Noel is the author or translator of over 10 books, including the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Prize and an MLA Honorable Mention; the poetry collection Transversal (University of Arizona Press), a New York Public Library Book of the Year and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award; and, most recently, as translator, Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s adjacent islands/islas adyacentes (Ugly Duckling Presse). Noel has been a finalist for the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and has been a fellow of the Ford Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Schomburg Center, and Letras Boricuas (Mellon/Flamboyán), as well as a fellow and faculty at CantoMundo and the Macondo Writers Workshop. Noel’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and has been published in Poetry, Google Arts & Culture, and the New York Times. International performances include Poesiefestival Berlin, Barcelona Poesia, and the Toronto Biennial of Art, and performance installations include Beta-Local and Casa de los Contrafuertes in Puerto Rico. A resident of the Bronx, Urayoán Noel teaches at New York University and Poetry in the Expanded Field at Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas.

This poem is part of The Los Angeles Review‘s electronic literature folio presented by Letras Latinas and The Poetry Foundation. Please read the introduction letter HERE for more information.

8 May 2023