The Cut Point by Rodrigo Toscano Review by Eric Larsh
The Cut Point by Rodrigo Toscano
Review by Eric Larsh
Publisher: Counterpath Books
Publication Date: May 1, 2023
ISBN: 1933996838
Pages: 100
The Cut Point by Rodrigo Toscano explores the crucial dynamic between labor and art, how poetry in relation to the job is crucial to how one another functions, how each creates meaning in either. Without one, the other isn’t necessarily meaningless, but it is made much less so when ignoring the material connections between both. A “cut-point,” in topology, is a critical point for connected spaces that when removed disconnects them. In the context of Toscano’s latest collection, this means that every single piece of a line is a cut-point, something crucial to the life of it. I feel as though, when I talk about poems with my fellow writers, the point that I am trying to make about the importance of precision in poetry is crafted around this exact idea, each point of each line should be a crucial piece of the poem–each word, every piece of punctuation, and each space that populates it. These critical moments are an existential concern for the book, one that comes up repeatedly throughout it. Toscano describes himself–in addition to a poet–as a dialogist, a writer of or one who participates in a dialogue. In The Cut Point, Toscano is not only a participant in many dialogues but a critic of them as well, and the book itself reads as a natural follow-up to his 2022 collection of poetry The Charm & The Dread. His work, often an exploration of form and voice, appears to be at all times spoken through him as a collection of many voices and in turn presents poems that are a simultaneity as well as a singularity–though I doubt Toscano would describe his poems existing as singular or a singularity; that description of his work–and him–would run counter to what readers experience when reading his poetry. His job outside the world of academia as a labor organizer is reliant on his ability to challenge, converse with, and question not only the acts of overlords but the desires of the working-class people he works to empower as well. He couldn’t be more mired in the machinations and politics of the American economic current, and this is entirely evident in his new book with its deep exploration and outright interrogation of the “Zoon Politikon,” Aristotle’s political animal.
There are myriad forms the poems in this book take. Toscano moves seamlessly between experimental forms, tercets, quintets, and sonnets. This book is strikingly similar to his 2022 effort, and it is hard to imagine that these poems were drafted separately from the poems in The Charm & The Dread. However, it feels as though Toscano has both embedded some of those themes into The Cut Point but has also moved on from others. The progression from one to the next is clear and exciting. Toscano’s formal play is always relevant, often a subversion of expectations for the form. The sonnets in the book placed so near to poems like “Frisky-Frightened”, all spaced out and riddled with dates, feel like a return to normalcy, and only when you see their construction remains playfully outside of tradition, are you made to look closer, to see the language at work–the quoting and multivocality shining but discombobulating.
For readers new to Toscano’s poems, his quickly moving and sometimes contextually absent poems can be disorienting and present a challenge. They can be mordant, acerbic, laugh-out-loud-funny, and deeply concerning all at once. However, Toscano never loses his thread of class awareness, even with all the intellectual-isms and his high-minded philosophical approaches to his work. He dances with linemen and skates across “populated beaches.” His concern for the rise and development of what we might call “American culture” is turned into pointed, sometimes delightfully didactic, criticism as evidenced in the poem “Entertainers”:
……………..There’s a sub-culture here says
……………..Go ahead, shoot folks
……………..How that culture developed
……………..Is a multivariant problematic
……………..But that it’s a culture—in place
……………..Saying OK—shoot! is a brute fact
……………..Beyond question and denial
……………..It’s an operative code—on a grid
……………..The code is inside the mind
……………..Networked to other minds
……………..The code is floating poltergeist
……………..Weapon nearest at hand
There is no mincing of words or ideas here. Toscano is nearly as straightforward as he gets–relative to The Cut Point–in this poem. This “operative code” he mentions in the poem is something that runs throughout the collection, not referenced outright but nevertheless omnipresent. An idea–or all communication for that matter–holds the potential for becoming the “operative code—on a grid”, and that potential, and I think Toscano might agree, can be both liberating and terrifying.
As always, “working folks” he calls them, working-class America is injected into Toscano’s poetry without condescension but rather with deep consideration for their representation in writing; the poet is never let off the hook, never allowed to sit comfortably in their own ideas about the collective body their art contributes to–its construction, its upholding or nurturing. In the book’s title poem, that poet isn’t afforded a higher contribution to the miracle that is “The trashmen do come,” lyric poetry being only one form that “The Great Rebellion” takes seems to deliberately cheapen the self-importance that poetry often lives in. Toscano also remarks on the failure of these revolutions, so even if poetry has a part, it isn’t leading to any sort of success:
……………..These failed rebellions
…………………………….deepen the myths
……………..we tell ourselves
…………………………….about ourselves
……………..in kooky ways
Not only does poetry fail in its contributions to successful rebellion, it deepens the problematic myths we’re telling ourselves. He expresses a dissatisfaction and exhaustion with the ways in which the attempts are made as well, ironically using his own wit to criticize it:
……………..Why’s everything become
…………………………….rejoinders
……………..rejoinder on rejoinder
…………………………….this ceaseless
……………..chatty inflation
The trashmen and AC repair crews know that cut point, the crucial connector that Toscano is dancing around, something only very astute poets are privy to. These cut points are the flowing water, the pipes that hold it, all the dams and the dials, but we, as poets, are concerned with the clouds in the creation of understanding, “wily whisperings,” looking up for answers; he asks “are clouds merely / constructivisms,” the tools of the poet’s attempts at meaning making. Toscano is probing the existential with the juxtaposition of the material, allowing for the importance of both to be held alongside one another–without hierarchy–reliant on each other. This dialectical relationship is a permeation and a constant in his work. That isn’t to say that, depending on the poem, more weight isn’t given to the importance of the worker or the poet; it’s situational, and these poems’ relationships to language and meaning aren’t as simplistic as a binary would call for.
Unsurprisingly, this book is concerned with many of the same themes and ideas that are always present in Toscano’s poetry. However, what appears here in this book is exceptionally refreshing. He has somehow found out how to not only explore the relationship between the material and the existential in new ways, he has expanded the relationship that poets have to the making of meaning for readers while further complicating it. Without a doubt, Rodrigo Toscano is at the forefront of what might be considered experimental poetry even when he relies sometimes on traditional forms. The Cut Point, though not necessarily his most experimental collection of work, allows readers to make connections–in a deeply meaningful way–to their own material conditions, sings the praises of the working class, and holds a magnifying glass to the American culture of conversation, not just examining it closer but burning holes in it.
Roridgo Toscano is an award-winning poet based in New Orleans and the author of eleven books of poetry, including his most recent book, The Cut Point (2023). His work has been translated into multiple languages. Toscano currently works for the Labor Institute, working on educational training projects that involve environmental and labor justice, health and safety culture transformation. More information about his work can be found at his website rodrigotoscano.com.
Eric Larsh is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon where he is currently working toward his MFA in poetry at Portland State University. He is currently serving as Editor in Chief for Portland Review. Eric’s writing can be found at Thin Air, The Daily Drunk, Maudlin House, and elsewhere online, and his music can be found at universalhealthcare.bandcamp.com.
1 November 2023
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