I don’t think there’s a more appropriate way to describe Rob Halpern’s Common Place than fucked up. And I mean that in the kindest way I can muster because it’s very much a comment on the subject matter the book tackles and critiques.
I saw Halpern read a selection some years ago, to a small crowd and in a relatively informal space. The setting made the material all the more intimate and shocking. It took me a few attempts to get through the book, however. The first couple of tries, I abandoned it for other, easier things because the accumulative way it was fucking up my comfort zones was too much for the place my head (and heart) was in at the time.
The opening pieces put you right in the deep end of shame and self-exposure. Beginning with an invocation that seems to imply more than declare its sexualisation of the bodies of victims of a warzone – ‘all of them killed by abstractions nobody made’ / ‘just say the word usufruct and levitate’ (‘A Square, a Cell, a Sentence’) – we’re then thrown into the first of the book’s backbone pieces.
‘Hoc Est Corpus’ refers to the ‘this is my body’ of the Catholic Eucharist, which decays in later titles into ‘Hocus Pocus’, a vanishing act of sorts. It presents the autopsy report for a civilian detainee in Guantanamo prison, who commits suicide using the elastic from his army-issued briefs.
One of the reasons I found it hard to get through the early sections of the book is timing. The poem unavoidably invoked Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘The Body of Michael Brown’, a piece that triggered outrage in 2015 for its appropriation of the autopsy report of the teenager shot by a police officer in Ferguson. Goldsmith barely handles his source material, seeing copying or reproducing as a creative act in itself. Yet, for this piece, Goldsmith slightly reorganised the material so as to end on a description of Brown’s genitalia, which is a horrific and insensitive decision given the context in which he shared his ‘work’.
Halpern’s approach is much more hands on. (As I write that, I recognise a potentially problematic pun, but there’s no point going in blind on this material: there’s a lot of masturbation in this book, a lot of graphic physicality.) He intersperses the autopsy report with descriptions of the speaker’s reactions:
The juxtaposition is designed to distress. What’s more, I found little justification for what was happening. My initial reactions were indeed outraged, shocked. I couldn’t process the intention and you get very little justification until a good halfway through the collection.
But I can’t say I disagree with the decision to put the reader face to face with this degree of exposure, shame and, for me at least, horror. Most citizens get little say in their government’s involvement in what can only be described as crimes against humanity. That became part of the point of the book. What Common Place tries to do is a kind of pseudoreligious transformation, on several levels, of the feeling of complicity forced upon people when a government’s crimes against humanity are exposed.
Little by little, Halpern begins to unpack and dismantle his reaction to the subject’s death and his own needs in relation to death. The sexualisation and necrophilia folds over to his understanding of a former lover’s death. The act of trying to love this victim of state power becomes a kind of begging for forgiveness.
Halpern exposes his own shame in so many ways, it hurts me to recall them. The more obvious is his confession of experiencing wet dreams, in ‘Late Night Emissions’, wherein the expectation of sordid, pornographic details gives way to something incredibly sad, or as he puts it: ‘paralyzed with pleasure and mourning’.
It’s impossible to separate out types of pain and types of love: psychological torment and physical illness mingle with sexual and sacred desires, inextricable, whole-human in that messy, uncontainable way. The idea of victimhood; I want to say that it explodes orgasmically and leaves a feeling not of being tainted (as Goldsmith’s attempt made me feel) but of trying to absolve, purge, or transmute the feeling of governmental taint into something not just bearable, but beautiful, anti-state.
The collection weaves this narrative layer of anti-state language into its whole, serving to reinforce the mechanisms by which these victims are murdered. I won’t quote from any of that because it felt a little Marxism-by-numbers to my particular reading background, despite how necessary it felt. I was much more taken by the moment the book begins to describe the author (author-persona? the book works so deliberately through self-exposure and honesty, it’s hard to take the use of first person as anyone but Halpern, which makes his descriptions of arousal while reading an autopsy report all the more distressing) reading extracts from Common Place on stage and being criticised by audience members.
‘Nocturnal Residua’ begins with the line, ‘Reading these poems in public makes me feel sick’ before coming to the crux of himself: ‘I hate this part. A sucker for the shame my poems outrun, though still prone to feeling sick with it, public events like this work as purest bait, and my Gitmo poems only amply the feeling’. Halpern exposes a character flaw in himself that’s almost too painful to live with.
And that, for me, is the reason this book is so powerful. I stepped outside of it, back into the world and asked myself what drove the prisoner – anyone – to suicide. Shame? How much shame? What kind of shame was the Guantanamo detainee experiencing? And what kind of shame do I experience, as a citizen of a country doing unspeakable things to other bodies, humans, animals, to the planet’s ecology?
Common Place raised some extraordinarily deep questions – provocations, challenges, dilemmas. It comes down, for me, to how we choose to live in this fleeting, impoverished world, where no one seems to have sufficient control to put a stop to events, actions, that are unconscionable. It’s one that will stay with me for a very long time.
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Incidentally, when I went checking some of the book’s details, I found Ugly Duckling Presse’s free PDF. They’re doing some incredible work that isn’t very visible outside of the US, so please do support them by buying a copy if you take a look.