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Alina Stefanescu is a genre-blind writer who it only makes sense to call prolific. I’ll spare you the bibliography but it’s available on her website. Admittedly, my first brush with her work wasn’t a poem or even a review, but a few tweets about therapy from more than a half decade ago. At that time, most everyone was traumatized and dramatizing their attempts to heal (note: “Healing” in this case means holding down a media job). My first impression of Stefanescu was her skepticism in this very particular domain which, back then, was taken as universal and enforced far beyond the therapist’s couch. Enforced is a strong word — there is no bureau of pop psychology — but contrarianism can only be as strong as its opposition is exaggerated.
My Heresies is an exceptional collection. It contains only one explicitly anti-Trump poem and opposes itself to much more interesting things than Taylorist trauma remediation. Some of the heresies possessed in the title are, at least in contemporary poetry, matters of orthodoxy: multiplicity, anti-univocity, cyclical time, differance — fuck the diacritics — difference. There’s no better place to mention the book’s dimensions, about a hundred pages, 73 (seventy-three!) poems and a handful of epigraphs, no single tone other than intense lyricism and generous erudition that avoids making anyone feel less-literate, and more invention than many books several times its size. It would be foolish to write in generality or make a half-unified point with this book as its occasion, but that kind of foolishness is exactly what makes me half a critic. While the poems themselves are lacerated and aching, there’s no promise of a redeemed, acheless state and very little concern with progress or healing. Refusal of pat, liberatory narrative invigorates the confessional content, often focused on her and her parents’ expat experience between Ceaușescu’s Romania and Reagan/Trump’s Alabama. No matter where you end up, you won’t be free there, either.
The deal with contrarianism is constructing a prevailing headwind, then sailing against it. This goes for your own poetry as well as anything else. Lyric got you down? Work with concrete. Sick and tired of confessional? Take an Oulipo and call me if you don’t improve. Fashion is the only cultural law: everything old will be new again, but only relative to what comes in between, and usually with a shiny new label sewn over the old one. If you hate pop psych as much as me, you can run to analysis. If you hate pop historical progressivism, and especially if you have a Romanian defector father who expressly forbids it, run to Marx, then Benjamin’s Arcades. If you resent the lack of Marxism and psychoanalysis in the American academy, run to literature. For whatever it’s worth, Fredric Jameson survived Reagan and I reckon those of you reading this will survive Trump II, and I look forward to seeing you on the other side.
There’s no annex of easy solutions to the catalogue of personal or political problems. There is refreshingly little prescription in this book. When Heresies leaps out into the epic, speakers take care not to lapse into naive utopianism or nation-building. When speaking for herself, romania is not capitalized, but it remains a proper noun for her parents (I pray this is intentional and not a misprint). Nothing in this book is naive, it’s all refracted inside by visceral sense, abstract thought, profane life strained against the possibility of sacred feelings. As Neo-Theology, Stefanescu orders us:
To wonder why only unborn angels are spared from touching the tainted ground.
To understand what binds the pitch to the oar or sound.
…
To sight the demon in wanting to divine him.
To exist, as ruined by rapture, as buried in chords.1
So, even the recourse to “mystic tokens”2 is complicated. The rapture will have already ruined us. We’ll always find ourselves lost in the layers of other voices. We have “learned / [to speak] dividing words / … an apologetics to kin — / the notion of self, / indistinguishable from / its audience” and the alternative would have been for each of us to remain “a small mammal”3. While she follows the literary headwind against univocity, Stefanescu is still contrarian enough to admit this wind may be pushing us, lemming-like, off a cliff.
Of course, that’s a motivated misreading at best, and at worst putting words in the author’s mouth. Again, this is criticism you’re reading. If I weren’t being dishonest for the sake of argument, I would probably use words like tender or intimate, then hedge by saying Stefanescu displays equal ability with the feral and estranged. That small mammal isn’t a dead lemming, it’s the little bit of love that can get you from one day to the next, or drive you so insane with fear of loss that you really do throw yourself off a cliff. Again-again, this is multiplicity we’re talking about: the joke’s on you if you try to make anything into one thing. “We are born to be torn by ontology”4, and you can take that to the bank.
Contrarianism won’t save us from multiplicity. I can think of at least two directions for a poetics of identity. One is cynical but harmless liberalism, more poems and prose and NBC shows about trauma and recovery. The other is esoteric Hitlerism — not even poetry, only memes — still with a nougaty center of trauma porn, but more concerned with the redemptive violence thereby justified. These are both, obviously, not even hypothetical but currently extant poetical schools. Even with the labels ripped off or sewn over, no one could possibly believe either movement holds real countercultural heft. Poetics (poeticses?) of difference dominate in ways that would make Deleuze and Derrida’s lovechild blush and mumble a safeword. Our moment’s orthodoxy is infinitely coexisting heresies, counter- with the proper-nouned Culture lopped off. There are nothing but alternatives, and there is no alternative.
