Maybe Toby Altman internalized Fred Moten’s letter to his students against completing assignments (“Let your relation; let your relation change; let your relation fade into an entanglement that lets difference run even faster”) or de Chirico’s idea on arcs (“The arc of the circle can be beautiful…In the arc there is still an element of incompletion that needs to be and is capable of being fulfilled”). Discipline Park is a deconstructed salad of a book: jottings, photographs, questions, inchoate lamentations, and quotations intersperse its lyric paragraphs, and also themselves together make poems. I love this book for its incompleteness. Poets should be determined to fail. Wholeness isn’t a lie, but…
On page 25 of Discipline Park, Altman includes Mark Fisher’s report on a “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.” This isn’t Fisher giving a greenlight to neoliberalism, but diagnosing the problem in the hope that “the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism.” While Altman seems to share this hope, he’s not interested in reducing himself to—by arguing against—the level of cynicism that Fisher describes. Instead he addresses the cynics: “Let’s say you agree. Doesn’t that mean that utopia is the task of poetry, that the poet is called to freshness and conjecture, to adventurous song that soars beyond the limits of the world?” The answer, to Altman, is yes. The poem is the event. And how does the poet enact this idealistic, emotional “yes” / event?
By a sort of Quixote-like project that centers around the Prentice Women’s Hospital and Maternity Center, where Toby Altman was born. In 2014, despite an extensive campaign by preservationists to save the building, Prentice Women’s was demolished by Northwestern University—which, at the time, employed Altman—to make way for a “state-of-the-art biomedical research facility.” (That phrase rings especially hollow in this book, which is so careful to sidestep soul-crushing diction in its depiction of our soul-crushing conditions, and which longs for “a language that does not damage.”) And so we have the poet haunting the site of the hospital, and the Youtube video stills of its demolition, and especially haunting its architect, Bertrand Goldberg, and Goldberg’s architectural style, Brutalism, and then haunting sites of other Goldberg structures, and the Goldberg archives, the poet aware always of his own starry eyes, and yet persisting (“This book is about love”) and pragmatic (“Say that you want this world and it is yours. It hides inside of money”).
Wait, though. This book is not only a diagnosis. We’ve had enough of those, I think. Altman continues, asking: “What do you see up there—I am asking you, almost in prayer—and what kind of language do you need to tell me about it?”
Who is he asking?! At first I thought it was Mark Fisher, who died by suicide in 2017. Or Bertrand Goldberg, the book’s lodestar. It could be either. Then again, maybe it’s us, Altman’s readers. We’re stuck on the 18th floor of some corporate office building, or the 3rd floor of an academic building, we’re looking out, and down, at a little poet on the ground, because “the poet’s task is to circle the megastructure”—we’re seeing a poet, a rather young white man, probably with a messenger bag, he is “wandering around strange cities, looking for a place to shit,” he is “strangled by grief”—guys, is this our poet? This isn’t what I thought our poet would look like. But he is ours. He is our poet and he is asking us—imagine, us!!—what kind of language can provoke a coherent alternative to capitalism.
Well, I don't think it can be “coherent,” and especially not after reading this structurally compelling book. Altman’s poem purposefully and repeatedly undoes its import. It’s awesomely daffy—for instance, he gives the Sun Chips slogan (“Being different is our thing!”) a mind-boggling pride of place—and relentlessly humble. Altman says in an interview, “Our task is to surrender to the archive,” and this book enacts that surrender. It doesn’t process its research. It lets the archive, perhaps as it should, win—which isn’t to say that it stays in the realm of history, paper, photographs, thoughts. No, we’re always brought back to the body in a way that Svetlana Boym describes in her essay “Ruinophilia”: “Since antiquity, there has been an isomorphism between nature, architecture, and the human body. In decaying columns one can see tree trunks, while phantom Atalantas and caryatids haunt porticos all over the globe.” In Discipline Park, inside the Brutalist structures, one sees the reflection of the poet’s keen eyes, sagging shoulders. Inside the 20th century ruins is the decaying and comic 21st century human, for whom it is “impossible to eat without making the carcass fruitful!” Or, my favorite: “‘Well I don’t have any more nachos in my belly,’ someone’s dad announces in the archive’s bathroom as he washes his hands.”
I started writing this review in Rome, of all places, in my head, walking around the ruins of the Roman Forum, having to pee, trying to concentrate on “the bitter texture of history” but failing, and as usual thinking about love. In the final section, Altman says, “If one is to resist the production of objects—in literature as much as architecture—one must produce a writing that fails.” The primary way that he hews to failure is by wanting the book to do everything, say everything. So many good books show the poet’s magpie tendencies, resist synthesis, and ask us to read spatially—but do they do it with Toby Altman’s heart? This whole book is a wound: poetry is bleeding, the avant-garde is bleeding, the environment is bleeding, institutions are bloodying the landscape, idealism is bleeding and capitalism is licking the blood off its sword/words/wards, and the hospital where Toby Altman was born, along with the utopian vision of its architect, has been bulldozed.
The poet on the streets scene reminded me of Danny Hayward’s “Wound Building” where he talks about a particular kind of intimacy: “I hate big ideas; lyric poetry continues to be one of the ways in which we talk about how we’re sick-n-tired of them. We write lyrics to say ‘fuck you’ to our thoughts, to their vagueness and powerlessness and fixity, and to the way that we see them repeat themselves unchangingly throughout our lives and all of their reverses.” Altman’s lyrics take on his own ideas and powerlessness so achingly:
I ate alone at Potbelly and I was not nourished. I watched the institution demolish the hospital where I was born, unfolding as it goes into the raw open, unfathomed wound, and I was not nourished. I watched it again, and I was not nourished. At the time, I drew a small monthly stipend from the institution, and yet I was not nourished. I fell on the ice and my shoulder caught me. In fact, the wound advanced through the house until it became hard abundance of leaf. Still, I was not nourished.
Discipline Park’s lyrics on neoliberalism, whiteness, and utopianism help us recognize, as Hayward says (of a poem by Jayne Cortez), that actually our ideas almost never “arouse in us the feelings that ought to correspond to them, and that can correspond to them if we are willing to do the necessary work...” Altman writes that Goldberg “wanted to build a flexible city, compact, adaptable, contained in circular walls. He wanted to endow a space with nourishing. To leave a smear of honey on the counter at the bodega.” Then he undermines that by quoting another Brutalist architect who also aimed for humanist, socially-engaged work: “‘One always expects,’ Mendes da Rocha writes, ‘architecture to deliver extraordinary buildings which, however, change nothing whatsoever.’”
But this book isn’t like a building—it’s not so much a thing made as a thing manifesting. Is it going as far as Virginia Woolf’s claim that “there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself”? Nearly. I see Altman’s digressions and paste-ups as his way of making the scaffolding visible. He is telling us: I lived this poem as I built it. And he’s offering not just his lyrics as an ethic but his life. He is opening his whole self to judgment. Discipline Park is telling poets that it’s not just what we write that matters but also what we’re eating, where we’re shitting, who we’re asking for money and who’s asking us. It matters who we love and who we’re hurting. And how.