What will we do? How?
Édouard Glissant[i]
In 2021 Urayoán Noel delivered his seventh poetry collection, Transversal. It pairs the formal inventiveness he established in earlier books with a virtuosic intellectual vocabulary that subjects contemporary, cross-cultural landscapes to incisive scrutiny. One key location is Puerto Rico, named directly in the opening poems and reappearing throughout the book. But as “Uptown Villanelle” and other poems soon show, Transversal is also a book of and for the metropolis, taking readers through greater New York and beyond.
What could a transversal poetics be or do? Noel thinks this question in dialogue with Édouard Glissant’s concept of transversal relation, which valorizes a mutable relation to diversity and otherness in the wake of colonialism and ongoing capitalist exploitation. Noel’s poetics chart unexpected diagonal courses across various organizing structures: nation-states, languages, histories, the personal and the collective. Like the poems in Transversal, this essay recurs to its sites of interest, refracting concepts and concerns toward a networked and relational understanding of the book.
As the juxtaposition of landscapes suggests, this collection cuts across conventional maps to engage with the “Americanness” of the Caribbean’s multiple diasporas. Transversal lines—those that intersect, that cut across systems—link the mainland US to Noel’s birthplace of Puerto Rico and to other Caribbean islands. The poet walks us through disparate yet interconnected cities, streets, and intersections, contemplating counternarratives as he moves between them. While he has long explored such geographical crossroads, Transversal also incorporates a wide range of emotions. Attention to its play of intersecting structures and sociopolitical critiques would remain tone-deaf were this essay to pass over significant moments of pause, occasioned by a death in the family. In this respect, the collection synthesizes forceful observation with moments of delicacy, announcing a newly mature phase of Noel’s writing.
Noel previously developed a signature maximalism through formal pyrotechnics, an increasingly creative commitment to self-translation, and a performative bravado at once weird and welcoming. In Transversal he places his maximalist tendencies into tension with moments of minimalism, an expressive reserve. Meditating on specific instances of loss, he grapples with a question of survival: How does one create a necessary endurance while admitting very real forms of exhaustion? Through these contrasts, Transversal stages contemporary dramas of survival that continue to loom over populations throughout the Caribbean and otherwise connected to it.
Noel advances this quest for endurance and energy early on, situating nuanced notions of intersectional politics within two companion poems in Spanish and English. Manifestos in miniature, they invoke distinct cultural traditions from the Americas and hold aesthetic acuity together with activism. The poem “Double Consciousness Dactyls” charts the first of these two quick readerly journeys (18). This English-language poem moves from Booker T. Washington to W. E. B. Du Bois, then highlights a legacy of double consciousness continuing in “the radical / Postreconstructionist / Writings of Morrison, / Sanchez, and Lorde” (lines 9–12).[ii] Noel instructs the reader to “Use them to dynamite / Nonintersectional / Liberal pieties / Few can afford” (lines 13–16). “Nuestra métrica,” placed as its Spanish-language companion piece on the lower right of the page, shows Noel visualizing the intersectionality he previously referenced. Diagonal motion points readers toward the crossroads among cultural traditions, languages, various dimensions of diversity, and aesthetic decision making.
Whereas the poem in English meditates on a cluster of African American thinkers, the Spanish poem begins, “¡Óyeme! ¡Óyeme!” This command to listen is directed at the reader, but also at Ralph Waldo Emerson (line 1). The poem situates Emerson as the illegitimate father of José Martí and gives us an image of him (and/or the reader) smoking “mi crónica / antihegemónica” (my anti-hegemonic chronicle, lines 5–6), the flower of “archipiélagos / sin pedigrí” (archipelagos without a pedigree, lines 7–8). One of the nineteenth-century architects of the very concept of Latin America, Martí formulated his mature thoughts on this community in the essay “Nuestra América” (“Our America”), synthesized during his lengthy exile in New York City. Noel repurposes Martí’s title within his own, while also following Martí’s argument to claim, “Soy otra América” (“I am another America,” line 9). A key image paints the speaker with intense energy compatible with Noel’s maximalism, when he names himself the “sangre colérica / del colibrí” (“furious blood / of the hummingbird,” lines 11–12). Moving at high speed, “Nuestra métrica” travels along boundaries among American identities to reveal a disidentification from a massive, expansionist United States and an affinity for the small.
Both Martí and Noel write Caribbean counternarratives to US expansionism from locations within the New York urban environment. The placement of “Double Consciousness Dactyls” and “Nuestra métrica” on the same page gives a preliminary sense of what a transversal poetics could be. It is messy: Noel immerses himself in counterhegemonic languages that have manifested in more than one cultural tradition. He does so while showing the simultaneous impossibility of pulling cultural and geographical strands apart according to national boundaries. It is impressive that Noel delivers so many intersecting concepts within these tiny poem packages—at once purposeful and furiously energized, Transversal draws the reader’s attention to too many topics to summarize easily. Because Noel’s twin manifestos suggest that we must center diversity and push toward more active ways of perceiving an array of potential intersections, I will briefly return to the thinker whose own contributions to the ideas of diversity and aesthetics Noel highlights at the start of his collection: Édouard Glissant (1928–2011).
Glissant: “A Firsthand, Basic Reality”
Glissant’s fundamental questions what will we do? how? appear in a meditation on how the “passion of intellectuals can become a passion of transformation.”[iii] It is a process that Glissant sees as requiring intellectuals to draw their ideas from a wide range of people, tapping diverse cultural literacies rather than relying on an elite sphere. Transversal’s paratexts suggest that this passion and its enactment operate in Noel’s poems.
Its first blurb comes from the Puerto Rican musician Residente, internationally popular for his urban fusions. Because of Residente’s reputation for infusing popular music with social critique, we might take the mere inclusion of a note above his name as a symbolic echo of Glissant’s desire to connect with broader community. Residente contends, “Urayoán understands the importance of his poetry being accessible. He understands that art is for everyone and so he communicates with everyone” (n.p.). He then extends this idea to claim that Noel does not use words “in a professorial way,” which in my view goes too far in claiming a disidentification with intellectualism. Residente’s distancing becomes what Glissant termed “diversionary tactics” in the performance of Quebecois poets, used “solely in order to maintain a distance from the man of letters, fearing to be seen as such.”[iv] Noel may deliver poetic streetscapes, but he does so by seeking a more equal and varied field of expression, not by performing the expulsion of the intellectual or the fear of being identified as such. His is a generous poetics.
In opening notes, Noel addresses his book title in language consistent with that generosity while throwing political status into question. In his first definition, “The title Transversal refers to the search for a less hierarchical approach to translation as a stateless practice” (xiii). Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States instead of a state, a status bearing legal and political difference. Both its Spanish and its English arrived in the Americas as languages of empire. In Noel’s stateless practice, both languages will be “disrupted and queered,” and he claims that he will foreground the lack of exact equivalence between them—a proposal which he performs with the placement of “Double-Consciousness Dactyls” alongside “Nuestra métrica” (xiii). Translations are companionable rather than perfectly equivalent. Noel gives a second definition of transversal poetics cueing readers to watch for “Caribbean practices of creolization” (xiii). He invokes a specific intellectual legacy from Glissant: his notion of transversal relation.
Noel foregrounds two sentences from Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, as translated by J. Michael Dash: “So the peoples of the world were prey to Western rapacity, before finding themselves the object of the affective or sublimating projections of the west. The Diverse, which is neither chaos nor sterility, signifies the human spirit’s struggle towards a transversal relation, without universalist transcendence.”[v] Following this quotation, but preceding his poems, Noel includes a note acknowledging that a seminar with Glissant helped him to “rethink what decolonial form could be” (xiv).
Glissant brought French Caribbean traditions into New York, and his body of work is wide and deep. Dash described Caribbean Discourse as “an infinitely varied, dauntingly inexhaustible text.”[vi] He elsewhere summarized Glissant’s larger project from the 1950s forward as an effort to establish a relational space wherein modernity is conceived in relation to a local everyday: “Writing in the sixties in the shadow of Césairean negritude and Fanonian nationalism, which both attempted to fix postcolonial space in terms of ideological planes of intelligibility, Glissant developed the idea of relational space which would allow for both the palpable materiality of unchanging ground as well as the transformations that occur through the accretions of time.”[vii] The contours of this space can never be fully predicted or named due to their openness.
Glissant describes a mission for a new kind of “explorer” moving through this open space, one no longer created by or for those who arrive in the Caribbean as European colonizers. The new mission is to situate self as traveler within the complex landscapes of the region, becoming insider and outsider at once. In so doing, Glissant envisions possibilities that lay a foundation for Noel’s intersectional poems: his Caribbean common has no stable center; the writer in motion does not craft an “exemplary” identity. Instead, Dash summarizes, even in earlier works that precede and foreshadow Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, a core concept had already emerged: “The Caribbean importance is that it represents a violently modernizing process of relationality.”[viii]
Out of this violent process, more open relations may emerge. In the essay, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas,” Glissant advanced a vision for beauty that I find useful for reading Noel’s body of work, particularly where order is present yet still meets (welcome) energies of excess. Glissant revisits the usefulness of chaos as concept: “let us say that chaos is beautiful; not chaos born from hate and wars, but from the extraordinary complexity of the exchange between cultures.”[ix] As the refusal of hate and wars suggests, his “extraordinary” complexity is not only descriptive, but the basis for social hope. And what aesthetic choices might best express an “extraordinary” degree of complexity? One is an exuberant maximalism, a quality that Noel has often embodied in his poetry. This aesthetic strategy to be extraordinary, inexhaustible, infinite can be part of an inherently optimistic quest to support new forms of expression and understanding in everyday life. Glissant envisions “future Americas that are at last and for the first time both deeply unified and truly diversified.”[x]
In tandem with Noel’s chosen epigraph, the remarks from Dash and Glissant frame Transversal well. Noel’s poems document struggles to alter, or at least endure, violent processes that have shaped a greater Caribbean scene, even as the poems reference violence that continues to shape the regional landscape today. His first poem, “No Longer Ode / Oda indebida,” begins: “A hurricane destroyed your sense of home / El huracán arrasa lo que amas” (7, lines 1–2). Lest we attribute contemporary violence to a casual hurricane-as-fate, Noel rapidly names private equity and speculators, politicians and their austerity policies as systematic contributors to destruction.[xi]
The very quickness of Noel’s references to a variety of destructive forces undermining justice in the region seems important to the overall workings of Transversal. He avoids lengthy exposition or policy advice, instead dedicating space to details that I would associate more with the emotional and intellectual navigation of trauma. Taking into consideration that Noel is also the author of scholarly works, someone at home in classrooms and therefore capable of working in more explanatory forms, I believe that his choice of speed should call our attention, for the results have aesthetic and possibly strategic implications.
Transversal will cause many readers to feel the discomfort that accompanies a lack of knowledge, because Noel pauses just long enough to reveal hints about patterns and impacts with which only some people are familiar. Others will pick up references to different phenomena, generating other possible moments of recognition. Noel prompts readers to feel not only the rewards of recognition, but the emotions that surface in moments of unfamiliarity as well. If a landscape is truly to be perceived as intersectional—if, following Glissant, it does not revolve around one authoritative center, exemplary identity, or elite form of knowledge—then it will always contain knowledge beyond any individual’s experiential scope. Aesthetically, then, it is meaningful to perceive ignorance as a possible first step toward seeking ways of knowing outside one’s own. That perception, in turn, allows for recognition of geographic, ethnic, and racial differences caused by practices and laws. Could intersectional awareness be achieved, let alone made into a proactive condition, without recognizing the partial nature of our own sight?
This is the value of Transversal’s durational qualities, which play out in the incremental structuring of an experience of recognition/non-recognition, the encounter between knowledge that is ours and knowledge that is not. Noel’s poems articulate scenes, yet their main purpose is not to cater to transparency by meeting the need for education with explanations.[xii] Transversal is a contracanto, a suggestive countermelody. Noel’s embrace of counternarratives seems to argue that resistance to the ugliness of history is necessary for survival. In a collection exploring decolonization and aesthetics, this might or might not be the same as saying: resistance can lead toward beauty, can be itself as beauty.
The end of his first poem is telling. His self-translation splits two ways, playing the English word “ache” against the Caribbean “ashé” (9). This second term derives from a Yoruba concept for the power to make change, at once sacred and potentially attached to the secular spaces of social life. [xiii] Noel repeats this word, using it to contain his recognition of “quebranto,” or devastation. How does one survive the loss of one’s home, let alone within the greater, nearly unbearable scale of devastation caused by Hurricane María? The repetition of “ashé” feels incantatory: “Your ache song booms ashore. Ashé, María. / quebranto y contracanto. Ashé, María.”
Noel’s contracanto sketches the possibility of centering differences as such, placing Glissant’s extraordinary diversity in the foreground. Differences themselves define an aesthetic, because they comprise the heart of a contemporary self, a contemporary region, a one and a chorus. The Caribbean, an archipelago, embodies this difference within its contradictory geography of separation and interconnection.
Glissant once more: “The concept of diversity, which expressed itself as one of the poetic dreams of the expanding Occident, and simultaneously as an antidote to the universal empire that this expansion subsumed, is an immediate, real-life experience of the people in the area I mention here –no longer a dream nor an aspiration, but for them, a firsthand, basic reality.”[xiv] Glissant distills the extraordinary nature of Caribbean diversity into one sentence containing a grand imperial dream, its own antidote, and a third thing: a reality exceeding the limits of the dream state. This reality emerges out of contradictory forces yet is actually lived by people, without whom the labors of the artist and the intellectual fail.
The Energy of Form
Noel has demonstrated a joy in proliferating poetic forms, characteristic of his full body of work. Transversal offers a villanelle, anagrams, dactyls, “Batsonnets” (inspired by the bats of Austin, Texas), and more. But it is the cinquain that appears in each of Transversal’s three subsections, particularly at its center, and leads toward a significant alteration in that energy.
A five-line form with a 2-4-6-8-2 pattern of syllables or accents, the cinquain was established in the early twentieth century by Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914). Like Noel, Crapsey lived in both the New York metro area and upstate locations.[xv] Noel’s “Dream Cinquains” introduces the form, now transcreated via the translational imperative Noel gives to the book as a whole. In other words, here the cinquain’s traditional syllables appear in side-by-side languages, doubling the traditional structure into a 2/2-4/4-6/6-8/8-2/2 pattern:
In dreams
Sueño
I’m twenty times
que soy veinte
stronger than the high tide
veces más fuerte que
and the sun hits my face for once.
la marea. Sol que dora.
Statues
Hora
(12, lines 1–10)
This is the same poem that envisions the self and its relative strength within an oceanside landscape and carries us into another bilingual juxtaposition, with the phrase “My only flag” placed alongside “Ser tormenta” (lines 23–24). If we read directly from the English into the Spanish (rather than segregating the languages), this moment suggests that the self is storm. It is a remarkable progression of images for a self already “stronger than the high tide” to be seen first through sun, then through “storm light,” then as the storm itself (lines 5, 21). The storm-self revolves within its own difference, a difference consisting of the English poised against the Spanish and textured by the atmospheric motion of matter against absence.
“Cinquains for Past Love” also opens with Crapsey’s 2-4-6-8-2 syllabic pattern but does not transcreate or double it. Instead, it transforms the cinquain’s vertical path of line breaks into a horizontal progression separated by tabs. This use of white space will repeat through much of the book, bending the caesura to the ordinary practice of using the Tab function on a keyboard.[xvi] The cinquain, in other words, adapts to the horizontality that characterizes the egalitarian qualities of the transversal:
The sound an island boy makes in empire’s airspace becomes dark flight,
the hum of sky- scraped nights.
(43, lines 1–2)
“Cinquains in Transit” maintains the horizontal inscription of the form, telling us that the poem has “no lines / only the hum of / air through / the lungs” (49, lines 15–17). In this poem Noel gently marks an insular geography:
There are islands, and there are mainlands, and of course there are homelands
lost and found in language
(lines 1–2)
Ultimately, community appears as mutual recognition amongst those passing through a city on the bus. Noel speaks to a listener who seems to be anonymous, yet knows the feeling of riding through the city on a bus. “You” sit by
someone who doesn’t speak your dark tongues or know
your homelands or know
the course but was also born in transit, and soon figuring out you both live in
terri-
torios you can’t translate, on mainlands whose contours you can’t trace
(lines 7–11)
“Cinquains in Transit” is their shared song:
waves crashing
into you, your inlet, your inbox, your insides, the storm you carry with you to
the light.
(lines 18–20)
If we incorporate an imagined Transversal reader into the potential for Glissant’s “extraordinary diversity,” then “you” may be many people at once, and each may travel through the scene as both insider and outsider. “Cinquains in Transit” offers a spectrum of possibilities ranging from specific to general: Noel’s references to “territories” that “you can’t translate,” alongside a mention of “mainlands,” can be read as a literal reference to Puerto Rico; and/or as a more general reference to the contrasting experiences generated by diasporic life; and/or as a metaphor for other experiential domains. Why might all of these possibilities not, in fact, coexist?
Confrontation: Exhaustion
“Cinquains from Texts Never Sent” appears right at the halfway point of Transversal and introduces the death of fathers. Around this subject of death, Noel’s language slows and falters: that is, the hummingbird’s furious vitality recedes for a time. The energy shift should factor into a reading of the whole.
In this cinquain, Noel continues to employ the form’s traditional syllabic math, in his horizontal adaptation. But any jaunty attachment to formal play recedes in the face of the great sadness the poem will express:
Because fathers die and pages fade or maybe because islands are
bought, erased from maps,
(54, lines 1–2)
As Noel continues from these lines, the self may have become “either a ploy or else a duplicity machine,” putting out nothing hopeful or vibrant at all (line 23). By contrast to the hummingbird, this self is “always / shutting itself off” (lines 24–25). In other words, the self that so far has been committed to transcreating Glissant’s struggle in “dauntingly inexhaustible text” reveals itself to be exhausted.
Danger flashes up, rupturing the prevailing aesthetic maximalism and presenting the central threat to a transversal optimism. If Transversal does ultimately explore wellsprings for hope that people need for survival and the betterment of their sociopolitical landscape, modeling an energy that will not be contained despite the depredations of history, Noel is not providing an easy or romantic portrait. He incorporates moments where hope feels like it’s fading. The reader must experience a shared truth that endurance is not to be taken for granted. Survival is difficult and exhausting work.
Reactivation: The Many Legacies of the Dead
The artist acquires a capacity to reactivate…. Art for us has no sense of the division of genres. This conscious research creates the possibility of a collective effervescence. If he more or less succeeds, he makes critical thought possible; if he succeeds completely, he can inspire.
Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 236.
After expressing exhaustion, Noel writes an elegy for Pedro Pietri (1944–2004), one of his omnipresent and most respected literary precursors in the New York area. “In Praise of Neverendo” continues the elegiac mood, but Noel portrays a spirit slowly reviving with Glissant’s optimistic view for art. Revival begins with tapping into the colibrí’s undeniable playfulness of form. Noel’s title tweaks the word “reverendo” or “reverend,” a title and performance identity that Pietri famously adopted, and each letter of the title gets its own muttering paragraph. Noel calls Pietri’s name to conjure him as “the urban nightmare’s outfitter of hope” (57).
“In Praise of Neverendo” is the first of three elegies that Noel includes for Puerto Rican poets. Their publication history connects to the island and its small-press cultural sphere. All three poems were previously printed for sale in a little bag entitled Tróptico, a triptych issued by the island-based tiny press La Impresora PR.[xvii] The three elegies had a kind of circulation which, while limited, is also distinct from what Transversal as a whole gains from publication by a university press (neither site being associated today with lucrative for-profit publishing).
The elegy “Juliécimas,” a sonorous play on the form of the décima dedicated to the legendary Julia de Burgos (1914–1953), appears in the book’s third and final section (88). Its lines alternate English with an indented Spanish, doubling structures as if in a conventional translation where the poems were jammed together instead of politely separated into facing pages. However, Noel’s insistence on examining the creative options of transcreation stand out beautifully. Projecting a voice of “desgloses” (breakdowns) inspired by de Burgos, his English follows its own set of rhymes, rhythms, and echoes, while his Spanish moves within its own structures. Because the two texts have been merged, I am reminded of how Noel elsewhere conjures self as storm. For all the many varieties of order out of which this short poem is composed, the total effect is of two strands spinning into each other, a spiral of complexities. The moment embodies the diversities Glissant described, at once systematic and chaotic, an aesthetics marshalling the “firsthand, basic, reality” of diversity in elegy and life.
The third elegy consists of a visually striking page: “Catorce Astros / Fourteen Stars.” It is a tribute to a “sonnet” designed by Mexican-born artist and writer Esteban Valdés (1947–2020), the author of the first book of concrete poetry to be published in Puerto Rico (Fuera de trabajo, 1977).[xviii] There are no alphabetic letters in Valdés’s “Soneto de las estrellas,” which is an arrangement of star shapes. Noel is one of several contemporary writers and visual artists who have retaken this concrete poem in recent tributes. The link is still personal for Noel: he knew Valdés through family connections and visited him at his home when he was terminally ill.[xix] There is more white space than text (or asterisks) arranged on Noel’s own page, a fine contrast from a writer who has also produced many very wordy pieces. Through that contrast of text against blankness, he calls forth the presence of Valdés.
The final poem in Transversal, “Missing,” also appears in a clean, graphic form cutting through white space. Its diagonals evoke the mission Noel set out with his book title: their crossings evoke the larger, transversal vision of social relations in the Caribbean and its diasporas. This poem’s form on the page is doubly relevant, though. He briefly describes a more specific way to read the diagonal geometry at the end of his opening notes: “Missing” is a response to a postcard from his mother, who wrote to him from her home in September 2017 (she had previously lived on the island, but by that time she had moved to Florida). She wrote the card while Hurricane Irma was hitting the island of Puerto Rico. Strangely, though, the postcard did not arrive until 2019. Whatever the postcard’s path was, it made the card a dead letter until its mysterious arrival (XV). The poem that Noel wrote in response to the postcard’s unexplained delay, “Missing,” is laid out in a jagged figure eight. A few words enclosed within the halves of the figure state, “no end / sin final,” and “this sand knows / este arenal,” apparent affirmations of timelessness (112).[xx]
“Missing” is followed immediately by a recognition of human mortality, the end of one trajectory. Its placement in the facing-page makes the endpoint it documents prominent to the eye: it is a brief dedication to the poet’s father, reading “in memoriam Thomas L. Noel (1940–2017)” (n.p.; bold in original). I have been caught up in hesitations about how, exactly, to write about this page, where the biographical and the aesthetic converge in a moment of visible reserve. Noel has spoken publicly at various events about his father, who moved to Puerto Rico during his lifetime and experienced a host of changes as a result. That is, his father’s displacements add another layer to the thematic of multiplicity: Californian Thomas Noel “self-translated” himself from an English-dominant life in the mainland United States into a bilingual home life on the Spanish-dominant island of Puerto Rico, thus moving into the dynamic complexities of the Caribbean. By moving from mainland to the island, he would have altered his own legal and political status, setting the stage for his son to describe himself as a “stateless” poet committed to writing a stateless poetry.[xxi] Yet a silence speaks too: Urayoán Noel doesn’t present that biographical context, or its everyday implications, directly in Transversal.
The memorial text is as minimal as possible, surrounded by blankness, a statement at once final and enacting finality. Its echoing brevity completes a formal opposition and caps this book, which the University of Arizona Press markets in terms of its maximalist poetics.[xxii] Is it even possible to return to the start of the book and not take its closing testimonial to loss as a signal about how to read the poems?
Walking down State Street in Albany, Noel recorded this statement: “The point is that speaking is always an absence” (60). For all the pyrotechnics of form and richness of language in his earlier books, Noel has often held his emotions close. In Transversal, the poet’s grief remains private yet surfaces openly within his aesthetic choices. The moments of exhaustion make his energetic qualities more perceptible and significant. It is against grief that the matter defining Noel’s transversal storms becomes visible, in all its life and movement.
Notes:
[i] Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, translated by J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 223.
[ii] In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant also lays out lines connecting the Caribbean to African-American culture. For example, he describes a moment of discovering “the rhetorical power of black American speech” (140).
[iii] Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 223.
[iv] Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 152. The diversionary performances by two Quebecois poets that Glissant describes here still interest him – they have value. But their strategy of self-distancing from intellectual identity is not the same as the project of shifting the location, identity, and value of the intellectual in society.
[v] Glissant, as cited by Noel in the opening of Transversal, n.p. Originally from Caribbean Discourse.
[vi] Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, xi.
[vii] J. Michael Dash, “Relating Islands: The South of the South in the Americas,” Southern Quarterly 55, no. 4 (July 1, 2018): 130–142, 131–2.
[viii] Dash, “Relating Islands,” 133.
[ix] Édouard Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas,” Caribbean Quarterly 55, no. 1–2 (March–June 2008): 81–89, 89.
[x] Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas.”
[xi] In this moment Noel does not highlight climate change directly as a mode of human-caused damage, but he acknowledges ecological issues elsewhere in the book. Intersectionality remains the relevant mode of delivery: for example, his quick reference to “ecocide” intersects with a history of slavery in the epic poem, “Bronx Crown” (67). The “we” of this epic are “still haunted by the ships that brought us here / Where ecocide and Middle Passage meet” (line 128).
[xii] In the bigger picture, reflection on speed and non-education within Transversal should be paired with recognition of Noel’s immense patience and efforts at public education in other dimensions of his overall career—for example, his important scholarly contributions. Glissant’s redrawing of the intellectual figure seems more apropos, particularly his cautions not to draw knowledge only from a “learned elite” but from “collective affirmation” in Caribbean Discourse (222).
[xiii] My remarks are predicated on observations from specialists. Robert Farris Thompson defined ashé as “the power-to-make-things-happen” in Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, Inc., 1984), xv. Harris’s definition and “seminal study” are cited by Vanessa K. Valdés in her much more recent book about Caribbean variants on traditional Yoruba religions, Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 27.
[xiv] Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas,” 81–89, 82.
[xv] Prior to taking a position at New York University, Noel worked at the University at Albany, SUNY.
[xvi] I highlight the deliberate awareness of using computer keyboards as everyday practice because in his scholarship, Noel has pursued computing-related modes of identity formation and interaction (such as the use of social media).
[xvii] LaImpresoraPR, “Troptic, by Urayoan Noel,” Etsy, Inc., listed on June 25, 2022, https://www.etsy.com/es/listing/734689416/troptico-de-urayoan-noel.
[xviii] For commentary on his emergence as a concrete poet, as well as the discovery and recuperation of his work by a younger generation, and sample images of his artwork, see “‘Fuera de trabajo’ de Esteban Valdés y su influencia,” by Marina Reyes Franco, at the digital Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative (Latin America, Perspectives, 21 May 2014), https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/map/fuera-de-trabajo-de-esteban-valdes-y-su-influencia. In English, a short commentary on Valdés with an image repurposing his “Soneto de las estrellas” appears here: https://janguarte.posthaven.com/artista-en-perfil-esteban-valdes-arzate
[xix] Personal conversation with the author, April 2021.
[xx] The use of shifting sands in a visual poem with strong diagonals seems to perform a slant reference to Noel’s translations of visual poems by Amanda Berenguer, published in Materia Prima (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019).
[xxi] Biographical context about Thomas Noel comes from past conversations with the author. Regarding the legal and political differences I evoke, Puerto Rican citizenship rights differ by geography, among other complications. As with other topics in this book, Noel does not include thick explanations of the materials with which he is working. However, context recognizing the ongoing impact of history would seem to have a profound impact on the logic of Transversal. Hiram Marcos Arnaud gives the following summary, noting that a body of scholarship explores the historical creation of a Puerto Rican “difference” in citizenship. Arnaud also shows why an easy identification between those living on the island and the mainland (or more generally, in “diaspora”) cannot be taken for granted: it requires effort, and a focus on commonalities over structural divisions. He writes, “The policy of denying both presidential and congressional voting rights to Puerto Ricans residing on the island of Puerto Rico (islanders) while granting those living on the United States mainland (mainlanders) full voting rights creates two groups of Puerto Ricans with distinct political interests and experiences. Although the 4.6 million mainlanders are able to fully participate in the United States electoral and democratic systems, the United States Government denies the nearly 3.7 million islanders the right to vote and participate in the democratic system that governs their daily lives even though they share United States citizenship with Puerto Ricans residing on the United States mainland.” Hiram Marcos Arnaud, “Are the Courts Dividing Puerto Ricans? How the Lack of Voting Rights and Judicial Interpretation of the Constitution Distorts Puerto Rican Identity and Creates Two Classes of Puerto Rican American Citizens,” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 22, no. 3 (Spring 2013), https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cjlpp/vol22/iss3/7.
[xxii] The exact phrasing around the term “maximalist” is actually taken from Noel’s own notes (see xiii), but here I wish to invoke paratexts as well as the interior of the text, continuing the logic of the Residente blurb. The material packaged around the poetry impacts our reception of it. “Maximalist” appears at the University of Arizona page dedicated to Transversal: “The collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics” (https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/transversal, accessed 19 Feb 2022).