AGAINST BEING BLUDGEONED: Discovering Apotropaic Function in William Rowe’s Collected Poems

Abstract

William Rowe’s work as a poet in his own right led to the publication of Working the Signs in 1992—and then nothing until a flurry of six books, 2009 – 2016. The article proposes death, both personal and large-scale political, as a constant concern, but that the strategy changed between 1992 and 2009 from leftist witness of Latin American devastations to radical interventionist in search of protective measures against neoliberalism globally triumphant. The first four sections deal with the later books’ devisings of aesthetic strategies to ward off despair in the clear-eyed face of police violence, an everyday environment captured and neutralized for political spectacle and informal sacrifice, and sedimentings of gender enmities. Focus then shifts to Working the Signs, a product of Rowe’s fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, and its concern with the (non)-disappearance of the dead; brief accounts are included of precursor texts by Pablo Neruda and D.H. Lawrence. Finally, attention turns to the last book of his own poems Rowe has (so far) published, Death Purge, via a search for models of visionary poetic mimesis in César Vallejo, Raúl Zurita, and Rob Halpern. Rowe’s overall apotropaic strategy is given as comprising a) an insistence on articulating political realities his readers risk taking for granted; b) a constant readiness to turn to exploratory advantage possible Badiouian “events” (e.g. the multi-city riots in Britain, 2011); and c) the occasional shameless reaching for moments of delicate aesthetic delight.