Commonplace by Hugo García Manríquez Review by Brent Ameneyro

Commonplace
By Hugo García Manríquez

Translated by NAFTA (Whitney Celeste DeVos, Zane Koss, and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz)
Review by Brent Ameneyro

Publisher: Cardboard House Press
ISBN: 978-1-945720-29-1
Published: 10/18/2022
Pages: 106

Many poets have said all poetry is political. Hugo García Manríquez takes this idea literally, and to a level unlike any other poetry book I’ve encountered. Manríquez’s Commonplace is an anti-art, anti-subjective, book-length poem that has more weapon specifications and military statistics than poetic utterances. Although this book takes a less conventional approach to poetry, throughout the collection, Manríquez leaves the reader with brief moments of guidance on how to engage the collection: “A poem is part documentary / part inferno.”

The first and last pages of the collection are collage texts with very few legible words. The visual pieces spread across two pages with a kind of scattered displacement of language that, after reading the book, I can’t help but think of an explosion. These images look like how a community might appear fragmented after a war. The community, in this case, is language or poetry. The functionality of poetry is put to full use in this book, leaving little room for misinterpretation.

Manríquez uses clarity as a poetic device in several different ways. On the last page of the seventh section, a single couplet sits at the top of the page:

………………The collapse of abstraction
………………as another form of freedom

This is another one of Manríquez’s guiding moments. The mysterious, enigmatic qualities of many lyric poems one might be accustomed to rarely appear in this book. Here, in the midst of endless war, seemingly limitless military budgets, and growing lists of endangered species, Manríquez evokes emotion through the absence of abstraction. Manríquez might be suggesting that when the world is collapsing from neglect and there is no sign of change in sight, what place does subjective, abstract art play? Art, in this world, must serve the cause, must not be misinterpreted, and must contribute to a necessary change in collective consciousness.

Earlier in the book, there are these moments that feel like declarations of intent or guides on how to read the book:

………………When we read literature
………………we read the budget
………………of the Mexican army

………………When we perceive artworks
………………we perceive the budget
………………of the Mexican army

This moment is held so clearly on its own, floating freely on the otherwise white page. This could be a declaration for this poetry book, but it could also be alluding to the way the Mexican government purchases art and funds artists for political objectives. The Mexican government has a well-documented history of using art as political propaganda, most notably with muralists such as Diego Rivera in the early 20^th century. In other parts of the book, Manríquez mentions the Palacio de Bellas Artes—where many government funded politically charged murals reside—which further supports this connection between art and politics within the collection.

Although there might be a literal interpretation of the connections Manríquez makes between art and war, there is also the philosophical interpretation. Here, Manríquez contemplates poetry and his approach to the artform:

………………When writing, we do not
………………romantically confront the blank page

………………Rather, the confrontation
………………is historical:

Again, Manríquez uses this opportunity to guide his readers. Manríquez seems to be returning to the argument that all poetry is political. In the poem, Sigüenza y Góngora (known as the “Mexican da Vinci”) is mentioned. Sigüenza y Góngora was friends with famous Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and he had a strong interest in the indigenous past of Mexico. Manríquez commands his readers to “take the side of Sigüenza y Góngora” and then in the following stanza to “take the side of lifeforms / the side of the forms of language that / sprout from the riot.” Although I’m not a historian, it is my understanding that Sigüenza y Góngora fought to preserve indigenous histories and languages amidst the rapid erasure from Spanish colonization. With this understanding of history, this poem is a call to the present audience to learn from the past, to not let culture, language, and endangered species get erased.

On the absence of punctuation in his own work, W.S. Merwin said, “I think punctuation is prose. We don’t punctuate our speech, and we don’t punctuate when we sing,” Using this statement as a guide, Manríquez, who also doesn’t use punctuation, writes with an awareness of Merwin’s “speech” in this collection. Speech as a poetic device is one of the strongest tools implemented in this work; not just the accessibility and straightforwardness of his writing (speech as in how one speaks naturally), but in the performative and declarative sense (speech as in a formal address). Imagining this book read cover to cover at a poetry reading, I would hear it as part art performance and part political speech. As much as it stands as a work of art, it would equally—if not more so—carry itself as a speech at a political rally.

I think the form of the book is saying something about the universal human problem of war. There are no titles for the individual pieces, so the collection is perceived as a single book-length poem. There is one moment in the book where the speaker’s mother is mentioned, which appears to be the only subjective experience shared. The rest of the book is grounded in objectivity—military data, facts about the extinction of certain animal species, and art pieces featured in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. All these artistic choices mirror the absence of individuality in the political lens. The way the reader moves from one page to the next with no distinct individual identity is representative of the way this collection uses a single country (Mexico) to speak on global issues, problems that impact all living things. Featuring Spanish on one side and English on the other, these poems move out of the confines of countries, of language, and into a space that unites us all.

Born in Mexico in 1978, Hugo García Manríquez is a poet and translator. His most recent full-length collections are Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement (2015), and Lo común (2018). He has translated William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (2009); George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous (2019); a collection of essays and poems by Sean Bonney, El lenguaje de las barricadas (2021); After Lorca y otros poemas, an anthology of Jack Spicer’s work (2022), among others. He lives in Oakland, California.

The North American Free Translation Agreement/No America Fraught Translation Argument (NAFTA), ratified in 2019, currently consists of three poets writing from the occupied territories of Canada, Mexico, and the United States: Whitney Celeste DeVos, Zane Koss, and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz. Their translations of Jesús Arellano Meléndrez have appeared in Denver Quarterly, and additional translations of Karen Villeda have appeared in Folder. Selections of this manuscript can be found in tripwire: a journal of poetics.

Brent Ameneyro earned his MFA at San Diego State University where he was awarded the 2021 SRS Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice. He is the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, The Journal, and elsewhere.

19 January 2023