The Charm and the Dread

What might politically engaged poems unconstrained by conventional politics look like? This is the overriding question that animates Rodrigo Toscano’s The Charm and the Dread, which searches for a politics “Not having to take a publicly recognizable position / Not having to, you know, massage an affiliation. / But instead, riffing on what’s elementally human.” Such lucid mission statements contextualize more language-driven performance pieces that enact “contradiction, not punditry” with highly energized sonics: 

seek a huddle
spot a huddle
slink in
stick out
seek gaps
shoot them
spot walls
crash them
step back
make space 

The effect of these two styles, which are frequently juxtaposed, is of experimental breakthrough followed by sober reflection. But these are only two examples of Toscano’s diverse strategies, which also include incantations, conversations, and imagistic catalogs: “Girls with brown eyes rolling boulders into pyramids of gold / Girls with blue eyes casting steel hooks onto silver grates.” 

Toscano’s terrain is our political economy, and he offers a multifaceted view on topics such as NAFTA/USMCA, water rights, technology platforms, news dissemination, as well as on the COVID-19 pandemic and systemic racism. But the poet resists polarized stances, by, for example, co-opting far-right ideas such as “Anarcho-Tyranny” into leftist-seeming manifestos. In doing so, he opens up a politically indeterminate void where new possibilities can germinate: “A vantage point of no point of vantage / Grand fluidity as yet without name / Containing all words everywhere at once.” No doubt our world needs answers, but the poems in The Charm and the Dread underscore poetry’s value as a place where questions can live unanswered, where the openness of our quandary isn’t a problem, but an affirmation: “Let’s have that conversation: what is life?”